A Method of Self-Centered Self-Expression: Selfie

The way of self-expression have profoundly transformed due to advancement of digital technology. In this media environment, to speak is to update a status, post pictures and tweet to social networking sites. These practices of self-expression offer new ways of communicating the self and connecting with others. One of these forms of self-representation is Selfie. Selfie is a photographic object that initiates the communication of human feeling in the form of a relationship between photographer and photographed, between picture and filtering software, between viewers and viewed, between individuals circulating images, between users and social software architectures (Senft and Baym, 2015). It is normally made by smartphones or webcams and shared on social networks, sending different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences. This practice has quickly increased and appears to inflect a culture obsessed with itself. While it seems more like considering self-importance, the selfie also invites a nature of networked society. At the moment of capture, a selfie connects different modes of existence into one simple act. It features the physical self, surrounding physical space, filtered through the digital device, and meant for social networks.

All of these features acts in relation to the others, appealing challenging judgments and languages of belonging and communicating into photograph. Or in other words, the selfie survives at the joint of numerous assemblages (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Wise, 2005) that attracts difficult and conflicting subjectivities together. Assemblage “refers to the active group or organization of mixed elements (structures, practices, materials, affects, and enunciations) that expresses a character or identity and stresses an area” (Slack, 2012). In this essay, I will critically analyze the four elements of selfie, evaluation of Selfies, selfie as a logic of human and non-human agent and selfies resemblance of moral panics. The selfie assemblage expresses four elements: the self, physical space, the device, and the network (Hess, 2015). Firstly, even though Selfies are acted performances, they are believed to be authentic. Secondly, snapping a picture in secluded or in an open places is a distinctive act of place expression, even though networked distribution of the photograph ignores space. Thirdly, selfies are about providing filtered considerations of the physical places and figures around which is called locative and networked media technology. Lastly, selfies invite digital expressions and user generated content as it assumes a networked viewers and its language of Web 2.0 content (van Dijck, 2009).

The concept of assemblage for Selfies provides a way of seeing the connection of device, its linked network systems, and the physical places it shows and the handler’s relationship with each of them. Slack (2012) states that with new media which can locate the users and are carried in pockets, selfies serve as an expressions of the assemblage within this technological setting. And he further says that the physical piece of digital media has progressed from stationary screens into pockets. De Souza e Silva (2006) called this media boundary shift as moving from “cyber” to “hybrid” as mobile devices build a more active connection with the Internet, driving it in outside, daily happenings, we can no longer create the disconnection between physical and digital spaces. Unlike desktop computers, portable media devices offer handlers active Internet networks even in inaccessible places.

Media device users nowadays live in an always-on and always-connected world that effortlessly moves in an online and offline hybridity, speaking the multiple languages and representing the various individuals between them. However, selfies are momentary, quickly spread, rejected, and disremembered. In brief, taking a selfie displays the unique position of the individual surviving within multiple collection of assemblages that describes the tough, fluctuating, and distinctive patterns of flexibility, social interaction, and communication that characterize a life” (Wiley, Becerra, & Sutko, 2012). This is not purely because of selfies’ networked feature, even though they basically are present as networked images; reasonably, it is because of the assumption of the selfie as present in various places. While selfies exist as motifs of a self-absorbed modern day culture, a deeper evaluation of selfies provides understanding of the relationships between networks, device, technology and the self. In human technological era, Selfies seeks attention of the various worlds that individuals dwell in and exists in a distinctive moment creating the bond of the friendly self, public spaces, locative technology and digital social networks (Hjorth & Pink, 2014).

The relation of self, device, space, and network can best be understood as a Deleuzian assemblage. They invoke a double sense of motion, of forms moving in physical and networked spaces, with each carrying its own particular understandings and enunciations. Thus, the selfie assemblage is an arrangement of several components of existence within modern technological culture that articulates and manages with the affecting pressures of networked personality, the desire for reality through digitally, the disputed necessity for brief linking with others, the impulse to perform in spaces and places, and the social closeness found with the devices. Yet, users could go from feeling connected by making or watching a certain selfie to feeling publicly, ethically, or financially disconnected by its distribution.

According to Senft (2015), such interruption might take place online in the form of being controlled for taking selfies wrong; as racist, misogynist, homophobic, racist, ageist, or ableist attacks; as online bullying; or under the guise of a malicious meme that “borrows” a photo generated for an entirely different audience. He further says that it could occur offline, too, as happens when someone finds himself fired at work after being targeted by a revenge porn episode; victimized by doxxing (where personal documentation is hacked and released online); or, worse still, becomes the target of stalking or physical violence. Though the selfie indicates a logic of human action, that is, it is a picture one knowingly snaps of oneself, often shown to other people, however, selfies are made, exposed, circulated, traced, and monetized through an assemblage of nonhuman agents.

At the most important level, selfies strongly symbolize and confirm self-photography, even though they are captured on digital devices with additional editing software and are designed for networked dissemination, they also signal a performative self (Goffman, 1959). Selfies are best understood through their artificial language of the self, which often features a sense of realistic truth. Even though selfies demonstrate a communication of self, they are also regarded by a relationship to space and place. Capturing a selfie is a method of place communication, in the sense that selfies are about the engagement of one’s self in a place at a time. Selfies personifies users routing through public spaces using technology in the locative media era. Likewise, the bodily performance of holding the device also gestures the connection of body and machine.

The movement of outspreading the arm with smartphone in hand characteristic to the selfie states of the adjusting nature of the technology to the space around us. Thus the device functions as a filter not only from side of its use of software to modify an image but also in the techniques that it structures and eliminates components of the physical backgrounds through the physical association of hand, device, body, and conditions. Wise (2012) claims that the networked feature of selfies alter the nature of responsiveness and distraction in relation to the network and to physical surroundings. The selfie’s arrangement depends on the physical environment but works in a judgment of appearance in the network and its appropriateness. The policy of this assemblage renders the selfie, generally considered just a daily gesture of imminence and presence, into a unceasing recap that once whatever move in digital space, it immediately turn out to be part of the arrangement of the digital super community, outliving the period and dwelling in which it was initially made, watched, or disseminated. Perhaps, it is for this reason that selfies function both as a training of everyday life and as the object to raise awareness of discourses about how people have to exemplify, produce and share their behavior.

On the other hand, Cohen (2002) claims that selfies tend to resemble “moral panic.” He goes on to say that, moral panic is likely to build up when this kind of media custom or practice is adopted by youth, females, or people of color due to the encouraging connection between media technology and human’s unusual behavior. Thompson (1998) argues that a moral panic is the social concern that effects when media, public attitude and experts come together around an issue that is considered to be of shared concern. In the course of such panics, media functions as an influential role in constructing and supporting moral panics through agenda-setting and creating of public opinion (Critcher, 2003). However, besides constructing moral panics, on the other hand, media themselves are the motivations of moral panic, establishing what refers to as “media panics” (Drotner,1992). At this point, mass media are both the source and the intermediate of public reactions. For that reason, a general research was done and has drawn exactly how moral panics have assisted to broadly normalize young people and the techniques they engage with selfies (Buckingham & Strandgaard Jensen, 2012; Ito et al., 2010). As a result these researchers offer detailed analyses that explore how young people’s “contexts for communication, friendship, play and self-expression are being set up again through their engagement with new media” (Meese et al., 2015).