Digital Cultures

Smeeta Mishra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032103426
• eBook ISBN: 9781000360431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

The book explores contemporary selfie-taking practices; digital experiences of love, romance and infidelity; sexting rituals; self-tracking habits; strategies used by the Internet famous; and the power of hashtag campaigns and memes in espousing a cause. Rejecting binary narratives on digital cultures, it showcases the fascinating ways in which we use our digital devices, social media platforms, and apps by drawing upon academic research, everyday observations and a determination to challenge assumptions and hasty generalizations. It also engages with emerging narratives on online authenticity, privacy, digital detox, and the digital divides prevalent both in India and abroad.

1 Exploring selfies

Beyond “duckfaces” and adolescent rituals

A “selfie” refers to a picture you take of yourself alone or with other people usually with a cell phone camera and often with the purpose of sharing it on social media. Internet culture researchers, Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym in their now-famous article titled “What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon,” identify the selfie as both an object and a practice with the capacity for complex and nuanced communication. According to them, a selfie is a “photographic object that initiates the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship…A selfie is also a practice—a gesture that can send (and is often intended to send) different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences” (p. 1589).

As we all know the Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” as the word of the year in 2013 after it beat “twerk,” another buzzword that year referring to the sexually provocative dance move popularized by singer Miley Cyrus (ABC News, 2013). Meanwhile, the first documented use of the word “selfie” has been traced to a post on an Australian online forum in 2002 where a user called “Hopey” wrote about how he tripped and injured his lip in a drunken state and sought advice on whether licking his lips would make the stitches dissolve faster than they should (Liddy, 2013). The text was accompanied by a close-up picture of his swollen lips with black sutures on them. Thus, the word “selfie” has been in use since the year 2002 and transformed from being a “social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph” as more people started taking their own pictures and posting them on social media (ABC News, 2013).

The word “selfie” also led to several spinoffs such as “helfie” when you focus on your hair in the picture, “belfie” when you focus on your bottom, and “drelfie” when you take a picture of yourself in a drunken state (“‘Selfie’ coined,” 2013). Of course, none of these words have managed to become as popular as the word “selfie.”

While self-portraiture has a long history, the “selfie” is a more recent phenomenon reflective of the current fascination with the visual medium. It is different from previous forms of self-portraiture not only in terms of technique and form but also in the way it is perceived as something spontaneous and casual (Walsh & Baker, 2016). Some selfie researchers, however, question the perception of spontaneity held by people about selfies (Walsh & Baker, 2016). They point that although selfies are portrayed as a photograph taken in the moment, many individuals may opt for multiple takes on a selfie before they decide on just the right one to post on a social media platform.

A visit to a mall or a shopping plaza in any Indian city will give an idea about the number of young men and women working hard on the right angle, the right exposure, and the right facial expressions for their selfies even as they strike just the right pose standing beside glamorous mannequins outside different outlets of well-known brands. Taking selfies and posting them online increased exponentially with the availability of inexpensive camera phones, the popularity of front-facing camera phones, and social media platforms (Senft & Baym, 2015).

Selfies function as a personal branding tool for many. In fact, management scholars have identified 7 primary genres of selfies including autobiography, parody, propaganda, romance, self-help, travel diary, and coffee table book based on an analysis of images on Instagram (Eager & Dann, 2016). Of course, such a classification does not include non-mainstream apps which may produce alternative classifications.

Although much has been written about selfies in general, there is little agreement on the motivations of selfie-takers and the impact of selfies on our lives. While marketers use happy consumer selfies to communicate a hip and youthful message, news media often highlight the harmful effects of selfies including narcissism, body dysmorphia, and psychosis (Senft & Baym, 2015). For instance, an article in The Atlantic magazine expresses the confusion surrounding selfies really well:

Are you sick of reading about selfies? Are you tired of hearing about how those pictures you took of yourself on vacation last month are evidence of narcissism, but also maybe of empowerment, but also probably of the click-by-click erosion of Culture at Large? (Garber, 2014)

Evidently, the term “selfie” and practices associated with it remain a source of controversy and debate even as a resolution any time soon appears unlikely and far-fetched (Senft & Baym, 2015).

This chapter starts with an account of gender stereotypes reflected in some selfies. It then highlights allegations of narcissism that have been leveled at selfie-takers, especially women, even as the impact of selfie-taking habits on their lives has been analyzed by many. The chapter moves on to give an account of alternative perspectives on selfie-taking practices and takes the reader on a journey of exploration of alternative selfies including those by domestic violence survivors, rape survivors, sexual minorities, people who are ill, and those who try to resist normative definitions of beauty and body type. The chapter concludes with the need to avoid giving reductive labels to selfies and selfie-takers and acknowledge selfies as a new form of visual language instead.

Gender stereotypes: “feminine” women and “macho” men

Do men and women pose differently in their selfies? To find an answer to this question, communication researchers Nicole Döring, Anne Reif1, and Sandra Poeschl examined the degree of gender stereotyping in Instagram selfies and then compared it to magazine advertisements.

They found that Instagram selfies not only reproduce gender stereotypes, they do so even more than advertisements in magazines. For instance, the study showed that women may lie down on a couch or strike a kissing pose while men stand solidly on the ground. The researchers claimed that young women often used “visual codes of subordination” identified by previous researchers such as “feminine touch, lying posture, imbalance, withdrawing gaze, loss of control, and body display” and other gender-specific expressions popular on social media such as “the kissing pout implying seduction/sexualization and the faceless portrayal (implying focus on the body solely)” (Döring et al., 2016, p. 961). Meanwhile, young men focused on showing their physical strength and muscles in their selfies.

One of the reasons why the researchers found such a high degree of gender stereotyping could be the method they used to identify selfies for the study. The researchers selected selfies that had general hashtags such as #selfie, #me, or #myself and not those more reflective of women with feminist identities or those belonging to sexual minority groups such as #queerselfie, #transselfie, or #feministselfie (Döring et al., 2016). Here, it must also be mentioned that not all gender stereotypical selfies win “likes” on social media. Döring and her fellow researchers also draw attention to “the line between gender role conformity that is appreciated among young people of different cultures and milieus, and gender stereotyping that is perceived as inauthentic, staged, ridiculous or ‘cheap’?” (p. 961). For instance, while the kissing pout is a common pose for young women taking selfies, it is also criticized as “duckface” by many (Döring et al., 2016).

The much-debated “duckface” selfie actually elicits varied responses from people: “Online daters think duck face is hot; college students think duck face means you’re a slacker; and scientists think duck face means you’re emotionally unstable” (Lebowitz, 2016). The fact is that selfies, especially those of women, are under constant social scrutiny (Shah, 2015). Nishant Shah, a digital research scholar, argues that it is the very nature of selfies as something that is “temporary, multiple, travelling, visible, and public that leads to it becoming an object of shame and control, particularly of women’s bodies in the digital spaces” (p. 88).

Selfies also prompt many to try and deduce someone’s personality type from the type of selfies they take and post online. The following section discusses the allegations of narcissism often made against selfie-takers.

Selfies and personality types: Allegations of narcissism

When we see someone’s Facebook profile full of their own selfies, what is the first thought that comes to our minds? Many of us are likely to assume that the person must be narcissistic. Several researchers have also linked selfie-taking habits with narcissism. For instance, Jesse Fox and Margaret Rooney, both communication researchers at Ohio State University, examined if personality traits could predict social media usage and selfie-taking and editing behaviors among American men and found that narcissistic men reported spending more time on social networking sites. The researchers also found that narcissistic men posted selfies more frequently. Further, the study claimed that narcissists and those high in self-objectification edited their selfies more frequently before posting them on social networking sites.

But does narcissism imply mental illness? Online culture scholars Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym (2015) vehemently reject linking narcissism to any form of mental illness. They point out that even the study by Fox and Rooney mentioned above, which analyzes men’s selfie-taking habits using the “Dark Triad” of personality traits including narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, refers to a level within the normal range of functioning. Thus, one should be cautious about extreme views which allege that people who take frequent selfies are abnormal in some way.

Many other scholars have also been critical of the increasing linkage made between narcissism and selfie-taking behaviors in popular discourse, especially in news media reports. For instance, Derek Conrad Murray, art history and visual culture expert, laments that the recent debates amongst psychiatrists and psychologists on whether narcissism is an actual personality disorder has not made journalists and scholars from various disciplines more cautious in associating the term with selfie-taking behaviors, especially in women.

Jessica Maddox, a researcher at the University of Georgia, argues that journalists have wrongly adopted the Narcissus story to describe selfie-taking activities. She points out that while most selfie-takers share their images on social media platforms, Narcissus loved himself and his image so much that he would not share it with anyone.

Refuting the allegation that selfies are merely “narcissistic overshares,” Alicia Eler, author of The Selfie Generation: Exploring our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture, points out that taking selfies represents just one aspect of our digital lives today. She argues that it’s usually men who refer to female selfie-takers as narcissistic due to their own patriarchal conditioning wherein women are regarded as objects to be viewed and photographed rather than as people who can actively take their own pictures. She explains that a woman taking a moment to look at herself is a courageous act in a world that only validates men looking at women. In fact, when a woman looks at her own image in a public space, she risks being considered vain (Eler, 2019).

In all likelihood, Eler’s arguments will resonate with women living in patriarchal societies who have experienced the male gaze in public places. In such a situation, it is the woman who is expected to look away even as the man continues to evaluate her. In fact, young women in patriarchal societies are often trained to “ignore” the intrusive male gaze which is considered “normal” and socially acceptable. Eler’s claims about society being too critical of women taking selfies also come in the context of researchers and laypersons alike focusing, analyzing, and judging women’s selfie-taking habits. The next section will highlight the findings of studies that analyze the impact of selfies on women’s lives.

#Killfie: Death by selfie

Selfies have become so ubiquitous that some feel compelled to take a selfie even in dangerous locations and conditions leading to injuries and even death. For instance, a 19-year-old student slipped into raging waters and died while trying to take a selfie standing on the edge of the barrage in the Ganges in Kanpur (IANS, 2016). It had rained and the water levels in the Ganges were high that day. His six friends jumped into the water to save him but all of them were swept away by the current and died. Unfortunately, India witnesses the largest number of such selfie-related deaths in the world based on a study conducted by researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Based on an analysis of news reports in English-language dailies, the study indicated that there have been 259 selfie-related deaths between October 2011 and Novem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Exploring selfies: Beyond “duckfaces” and adolescent rituals
• 2 “Send me a sexy picture”: Love, intimacy, and infidelity in the digital era
• 3 Self-tracking one’s way to wellness: Expert patients, quantified health, and online communities
• 4 Becoming Internet famous: Performing “authenticity” and engaging audiences
• 5 Digital activism: The power of hashtags and memes
• 6 “Digital Detox”: Resisting the lure of the digital
• Conclusion
• Index