A lot more than just sharing
a smile or frown, the power of the selfie ranges from personal to politics to
economics to global.
Selfies have been defined by
Oxford Dictionaries as photograph(s) that
one has taken of oneself, typically one
taken with a smart phone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website (n.d.).
On the personal side, I’ve
been taking selfies for many years, mostly to capture myself in a particular
context and share it or remember it; but during my MACT studies I’ve come to
recognize that there are many layers of self-representation, identity and
production involved with even something that appears to be as simple as a
selfie. There is an implicit connection with the fact that selfies are often
generated to share – to invoke an outside perspective on ourselves (Horning,
2014).
Here’s a selfie I took
against the side of a building, playing with the concept of externalizing a
selfie:
A shadow of a selfie, curved
around a building in the sunrise, with the full moon setting in the distance.
Layering my static identity (Horning, 2014) on the brickwork, with sunlight and
moonlight coming from different directions.
Speaking of different
directions, the political use of selfies has certainly gone in different
directions in North America.
Justin Trudeau has been
called the ‘selfie king of Canada’ (Francis, 2015) and the last Canadian
election was described by some as the ‘selfie election’ (McDiarmid, 2015). Trudeaus capacity to engage with a seemingly endless
stream of selfie posing has brought him praise and criticism (McDiarmid, 2015; Maloney, 2015; ). Here is a CBC video where he repeatedly models with
charm:
One of the concepts that a
selfie evokes is a proximately and closeness to the subject, and many
politicians want to create the impression of closeness to their audience
especially during elections… During funerals is another story!
Photo Credit: Roberto
Schmidt, Agence France-Presse
This is the photo from Nelson
Mandela’s funeral ceremony in December 2013 that sparked the Selfiegate
scandal, from left to right: David Cameron, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Barack
Obama, Michelle Obama. It was a pivotal
moment for the evolving social discussion about when it is acceptable to take
selfies and where. “It was not just three world leaders taking a selfie; it was
three world leaders taking a selfie at a memorial service for an internationally
beloved human rights leader” (Miltner & Baym, p. 1705). As the scandal
about this photo unfolded, it became a conversation about whether or not
society was ready to accept this kind of behaviour at formal functions like
funerals. In the end, this particular event had many narratives and generated a
series of important questions about contextualizing power and identity and use
of mobile technology (Farci & Orefice, 2015; Miltner & Baym, 2015):
- Should political leaders be held to different standards in their use of mobile technology?
- How do we normalize having leaders of all genders interacting in public spheres?
- What are the interactive power dynamics between social media and main-stream media?
Interestingly, one of the
possible outcomes of this media scandal was Obama’s recent request not to have
selfies taken with him (Reilly, 2016). Publishing selfies is quite simple using
social media platforms, but they can quickly take on a life of their own and
overcome the initial representation that the producers intended. Perhaps Obama
tired of worrying how his engagement in selfies would affect the public’s
overall perception of him as a leader.
Dad-in-Chief Barack Obama is not a fan of taking selfies on the campaign trailhttps://t.co/uHbfPxucx8— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) February 11, 2016
So the use of selfies by the
leaders of Canada and the United States has gone in different directions –
taking a global
One project that examines
selfies at a macro-level is Lev Manovich’s selfie-city, which looked at the
selfies generated in 5 cities around the world. I found this very intriguing
for a number of reasons, including that they openly released their data and
methodology, essentially creating the capacity for future research building on this
project. The use of dynamic imagery, scrolling images, graphs and charts
related to the diverse set of findings helps explore and compare the use of
selfies in specific contexts.
Here is one of the selfies
from the dataset (http://selfiecity.net/selfiexploratory/):
Taking the question of selfies even more broadly, of the largest projects related to selfies must be by NASA who in 2014 combined over 36,000 selfies to create this image:
This project demonstrated a
number of different things for NASA including the sheer computing power that
they can wield. The total size of the photo is 3.2 giga-pixels, or 1000 times
more information than an average size photo, and to make things even more
complicated the thousands of selfies were mapped onto an image of the current
weather patterns. As a communicative device, this macro-photo also demonstrated
the appeal that NASA has to a global audience, there were submissions from over
100 countries. In terms of the roles of producer, creator, consumer; this image
also represents a deep blurring into the prosumer which selfies inspire, but on
a macro level (Murolo, 2015).
In some ways, to paraphrase
Rutledge, NASA has made something like the ultimate selfie, making a meaningful
pattern of thousands of images, contextualizing selfies as a global phenomena
(2013).
References:
Farci, M., &
Orefice, M. (2015). Hybrid Content Analysis of the Most Popular Politicians’
Selfies on Twitter. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA
Postgraduate Network, 8(6).
Fausing, B. (2013).
Selfie and the Search for Recognition. Academia.Edu.
Francis, A (2015).
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Is Also The Selfie King Of Canada. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/06/justin-trudeau-selfie_n_8482946.html
Japan Times (2015). Canada
to return to its ‘honest broker’ role under Trudeau. Retrieved from: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/10/21/world/politics-diplomacy-world/canada-return-honest-broker-role-trudeau/#.Vt5qXpMrIgp
Manovich, L
(2014). “Selfiecity,” http://selfiecity.net/#
Maloney, R. Trudeau
Says Accessibility, Selfies 'Not About Image, It's About Substance'. Huffington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/12/16/justin-trudeau-image-substance-selfie-charm_n_8822274.html
McDiarmid, M (2015).
It's The Selfie Election And Party Leaders Have To Grin And Bear It. Huffington Post. Retrieved from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/27/it-s-the-selfie-election-and-party-leaders-have-to-grin-and-bear-it_n_8202534.html
Miltner, K. M.,
& Baym, N. K. (2015). The selfie of the year of the selfie: Reflections on
a media scandal. International Journal of Communication, 9,
1701-1715.
Murolo, N. L. (2015). Del mito del Narciso a la
selfie: una arqueología de los cuerpos codificados. Palabra Clave, 18(3), 676-700. DOI: 10.5294/pacla.2015.18.3.3.
Translation retrieved from:
http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?pid=S0122-82852015000300003&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
NASA (2014). The
Making of NASA's Global Selfie: 100+ Countries, Thousands of Photos. Retrieved
from: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/2014-globalselfie-wrap-up/#.Vt41YPFBBWd
Reilly, K. President
Obama Is Tired of Taking Selfies. Time.
Retrieved from: http://time.com/4218764/barack-obama-selfie-ban/
Rutledge, P (2014).
“Making Sense of Selfies,” Psychology
Today,
Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positivelymedia/
201307/makingsenseselfies
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