In the name of the self, the ego, and the holy selfie— amen.
The selfie marks a democratized evolution in the long relationship between human existence and presentation; it is the modern and more accessible form of self-portraiture. A visual site where communication and performance collapse to embalm time, feelings, and history. But how did we get here? What really is a selfie and why do we take so many? And what does it say about us or contemporary digital culture overall?
I was reading this book titled How to See The World recently. It was written by one of the leading experts in visual studies, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and it is basically a theoretical guide to contemporary visual culture. In discussing how images are intrinsic to contemporary society, he writes about the selfie: “Each selfie is a performance of a person as they hope to be seen by others.”[1] He argues that “Some see the new digital performance culture as self-obsessed and tacky” but that “It is more important to recognize that it is new.” That “The selfie is a new form of predominantly visual digital conversation…”[2] Here, Mirzoeff points to two things regarding the selfie. One, that the selfie is a performance, much like any form of public expression or interpersonal communication. And two, that it is such a new technology, that we are still trying to figure out exactly what it means. On the surface, selfies are often read as an exercise of narcissism and self-obsession due to its innate capacity for highlighting individualism. However, Mirzoeff points out that this is a cop-out, a cheap reading. He reminds us that what really matters is the selfie’s capacity for a new form of communication.
In recent years, the discourse on representation gained great momentum. This discourse made us pay attention to the actual images and focus on their meaning as isolated objects at times. Such movement would quickly lead to reading selfies as commodification of the self or further objectification of the body, focusing on beauty and stereotypes. However, discussions of the images themselves will only take us so far if we do not observe the evolving cultural context around them. As digital culture matures, we can now more easily look back and piece a more solid cultural context to understand the deep meanings of digital artifacts. The selfie-image itself is not the focus of my inquiry here, but the culture around capturing such image.
Selfie culture took off with the addition of the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 back in 2010, but it really goes back to the early 2000s when Myspace was a hub for dramatically angled mirror-flash-selfies. We didn’t call them selfies back then, but they loosely fit our modern understanding of what a selfie is: “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.”[3] I think it's funny to look back at these photos with a critical approach because I now see the burst of flash-light that dominated these early selfies working as a visual metaphor for the boom that selfies would later create in culture.
Fast forward about twenty years and here we are, overwhelmed in consuming selfies everywhere: social media posts from close friends, celebrity books, real books, commercials, and even film and television. Check out this 2004-clip from The OC, where Paris Hilton makes a cameo (and pay attention to what she says about the camera phone):
This clip is interesting to me because it shows how TV was trying to process this new phenomenon as it was emerging, and they weren’t too far off from what we now know about the camera phone. “Camera-phone: it's the autograph of the twenty-first century.” What an iconic line. And to me, it bears double meaning: (1) the selfie is how information is exchanged or communicated in the twenty-first century; and (2) the selfie (or camera-phone) is the twenty-first century’s mark. Its autograph in the grand timeline of History. This line not only predicted the strong connection between selfies and celebrities (with the connotation around autograph), but it also points to the promise of the camera-phone as a prominent technological advancement. Much like the CD and the DVD, the emergence of the camera-phone promised a shift in cultural practices. This time, it promised a new form of communication, and even surveillance. The twenty-first century has continuously been shaped by the products of camera-phones. From recording an archive of modern lifestyle to capturing crimes and mobilizing protests, the camera-phone has democratically broadcast news and collectively re-written history.
Since 2004, the art of the selfie has evolved, matured into itself, and smoothly merged into the everyday culture of the globalized megalopolis. The selfie isn’t just an autograph anymore. It’s a record of identity; a journal entry. Every night out is a photo-op, every art book is a photo-op, and every mirror is (most definitely) a photo-op. In 2023, the selfie is now fully established as a solid form of visual communication. The official language of the twenty-first century.
In the good old days of the 2010s—when King Kylie marked a generation with her plastic displays of young wealth and the “Rich Kids of Instagram” defined a post-Tumblr aesthetic that was very performative—selfies were more polished and edited. But in the early 2020s, there was a shift in selfie culture and we saw a popularization of the photo dump post format. Photo dumps are a collection of spontaneous-looking photos, rather than uber polished, posed, and glammed photos. Photo dumps are casual posts, often demarcated by blurry and off-centered photos that display life on-the-go.
This brought up a debate online over performative Instagram versus casual Instagram. Some claimed that casual Instagram is actually more performative than the explicitly performative kind of posts. They argued that now, with photo dumps, people are forcefully trying to take aesthetically pleasing photos that look spontaneous and raw, masking any process of creation and setting unrealistic expectations for the aesthetics of everyday life. I think this is a moot point, and we’ll get to why in a second. But, if anything, this new aesthetic reflects the chaotic experience of being a young person during a pandemic, and abruptly trying to keep up with unsafe cities and an incredibly unstable global climate. In part, it also demonstrates a tactic of romanticizing the urban chaos in search for beauty amidst turbulence and sadness. Some have also argued how this push for casual Instagram is an active rejection of the capitalist and overglamurized influencer culture from the previous decade.
It was cool to see a popular discourse online about the way we are all communicating; overall I believe it is just good practice to constantly develop media literacy—thinking about what you’re posting, what you’re consuming, how it affects you, and how it affects others—, especially if done collectively. But at its core, the debate around casual versus performative Instagram is a moot point because a selfie is nothing but a performance of life and of who we are. No matter how curated or spontaneous.
Nicholas Mirzoeff wrote that “The selfie depicts the drama of our own daily performance of ourselves in tension with our inner emotions that may or may not be expressed as we wish.”[4] So poetic and dramatic. Selfies: the Pisces of technology—who would’ve thought! But anyway, the basic take-away here is that the selfie is a tool for expressing one’s present self and building a personal narrative. It is a tool that communicates personal expression and identity in a much more holistic, unconscious, and multifaceted way than words ever did. And it’s different than previous photographs due to its instantaneous nature and inherent shareability. A selfie is how I say hi and how I share a song. It’s how I catch up and how I flirt.
In The Fall of Public Man, sociologist Richard Sennett writes that post-Enlightenment beliefs became more and more centered on “the immediate life of man himself,” on one’s own experiences as a definition of all that one can believe in. Life became more and more about immediacy, sensation, and the concrete. “As gods [were] demystified, man mystifie[d] his own condition.”[5] In the last few centuries, personality became the way to think about meaning in human life. As collective trust in institutions like the Church and forms of government fell apart and melted into air (to borrow from my forever postmodernism muse Marshall Berman), the “immediacy of sensation grew more important.”[6] Now in 2023, this couldn’t be further from the truth. We have not only lost faith in institutions, but we also struggle to rely on the democratic tools of information that we create and feed ourselves (i.e., social media). Information and images can so easily be twisted, that truly the only measure of reality is the self. Therefore, the selfie becomes the most powerful instrument in processing identity and establishing one’s position in society. My selfie is the last object I can trust because it comes directly from me; my body is visually and physically attached to it, something even emphasized in mirror selfies. In featuring my arm holding up my (camera) phone, the mirror selfie completely embodies my identity, in contrast to front-facing selfies that only show my face. This connection to the body manifested in mirror selfies then strengthens the centering of the self as one’s main source of meanings and beliefs. My selfie is my body, my thoughts and feelings, and my selfie is my voice.
The selfie is a tool of communication for a generation that grows more and more visual. Looking through one’s personal camera-roll and seeing the evolution of one’s selfies resemble a similar feeling to that of reading old journal passages. My selfies remind me of happy moments and sad moments. They remind me how it felt to fall in love and how it felt to feel alone—somewhere between mirror selfies at bars and mirror selfies at home. The selfies in my camera roll help me process the development of my identity in a nostalgic and visual way. The selfie depicts inner tensions that I might have not even known of at the time it was taken, but looking back at it, I can tangibly see who I was then and who I am now. The selfie is a time stamp that captures way more than words can describe, and the camera-roll or Instagram feed then becomes a sort of time capsule for future-me to reflect on.
It is not so much about whether selfies are real or not, performative or casual, but more about the cultural significance of selfies in communicating visual emotions as well as archiving culture and our individual journeys. So why do we take selfies?! I would say it's to document our growth for our personal archives, journals, or for sharing what era we’re in with the people we love. To communicate who we are and build a history of it for our personal development. To share emotions (and dare I say: vibes) that could only be communicated visually. The selfie is a visual text that holds so many feelings and memories in ways that 280 characters could never describe. And this speaks to the modern acceleration of life. The capitalist desire to communicate more, and faster. The selfie is more, the selfie is fast, and the selfie is everything around it.
Endnotes:
[1] Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 62.
[2] Mirzoeff, 63.
[3] “Selfie, N.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/390063;jsessionid=59E28ED4146D92D031C781A7AB8E57CA (accessed February 5, 2023).
[4] Mirzoeff, 30.
[5] Richard Sennett, Fall of Public Man (Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W, 1992), 151.
[6] Sennett, 151.