City University History of Contemporary Photography & Virtual Mini Me Paper Instructions in the attachment.. I need a high quality paper The Selfie: Making

City University History of Contemporary Photography & Virtual Mini Me Paper Instructions in the attachment.. I need a high quality paper The Selfie:
Making sense of the “Masturbation of Self-Image” and
the “Virtual Mini-Me” 1
Alise Tifentale, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY)
Figure 1. Montage of selfies and data visualizations from Selfiecity.
1
For the sources of these two metaphors for the selfie, see, respectively, the following articles: Marche, Stephen.
“Sorry, Your Selfie Isn’t Art,” Esquire, The Culture Blog, July 24, 2103.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/selfies-arent-art and Clark, Roy Peter. “Me, My Selfie and I,” CNN Opinion,
November 23, 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/23/opinion/clark-selfie-word-of-year/
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
Contents
1 Introduction: Selfiecity and The Networked Camera
2 Why Selfies Matter?
3 Selfie as Old and New Genre of Photography
4 Why Instagram Matters?
5 Art of the Masses, Finally
6 Taking a Snapshot of the Paradigm Shift
7 Acknowledgments
8 Annotated Bibliography: Suggestions for Further Reading
8.1 Vernacular Photography
8.2 Portrait Photography
8.3 Self-Portrait Photography
8.4 Photography, the Internet, and Social Media
8.5 Selfies
2
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
Introduction: Selfiecity and The Networked Camera
Can a single selfie tell us something meaningful about a whole city? A thousand selfies?
A million? Does the quantity of selfies make a difference? Can the methods used to analyze
selfies produce a new meaning that could not be discovered otherwise? What could possibly a
group of selfies, taken in a particular city, reveal us about this city? They definitely can tell quite
a lot about the specific individuals who happened to take and post their selfies from a given
geographical area within a given time. They also tell a lot about Instagram as an exemplary
online image-sharing platform and thus offer some insights into some of the uses of social media
in general.
Selfies make us aware about a particular method of self-fashioning and communication
that is historically time-specific in the sense that it could materialize only in the moment when
several technologies have reached a certain level of development and accessibility. These include
the availability of Internet connection, hardware such as easy to use smartphones with cameras,
and software that drives the online image-sharing platforms, geo-tagging of uploaded images and
other features. Moreover, selfies suggest new approaches to studies of vernacular photography in
general, as smartphones in this case function as cameras connected to the Internet (networked
cameras), thus presenting a new and hybrid image-making and simultaneously image-sharing
device significantly different from all its predecessors. New image-making and image-sharing
technologies demand also radically new ways of looking at these images. Big data require “big
optics,” borrowing Paul Virilio’s term from the early 1990s. 2
Selfiecity, the research project led by Dr. Lev Manovich and Software Studies Initiative,
is an attempt to make sense of a multitude of selfies posted on Instagram. While searching for
2
Virilio, Paul. “Big Optics” in Robert Fleck, E.A., ed. On Justifying the Hypothetical Nature of Art and the NonIdenticality Within the Object World (Köln: Walther Koenig, 1992), 82–93.
3
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
answers to some of the abovementioned questions, Selfiecity reveals the inherent complexities of
understanding the selfie as a product of the advancement of digital image-making and online
image-sharing as well as a social phenomenon that at the same time serves as a means of
individual and creative self-expression.
The selfie is a hybrid that requires hybrid methodological approaches. In Selfiecity, the
selfie is treated as a form of self-expression of individual Instagram users as well as a communal
and social practice. The research project considers both the individual artistic intentions of a
singular image and the overall patterns revealed by large amount of selfies made in a particular
geographic location during one week. The team downloaded Instagram photographs that were
taken in one week in October 2013 and geo-tagged in the central areas of five global cities:
Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo. From all images, random 140,000
photographs were selected for further analysis. Three Mechanical Turk 3 workers were assigned
to identify selfies from this pool of images, and finally from the results of their work doublechecked by team members, 640 selfies were selected for each city. During the different stages of
the research, the project team employed a variety of methodological approaches including
computational image analysis methods and custom-made software tools for big data analysis and
visualization.
This essay reviews some of the recent debates on the selfie and places it into a broader
context of photographic self-portraiture, investigating how the Instagrammed selfie differs from
its precursors, as well as mapping out avenues for further research and interpretation of the
results obtained in Selfiecity.
3
For a definition of this service, see the following websites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
and www.mturk.com.
4
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
Why Selfies Matter?
Since November 19, 2013 when Oxford Dictionaries announced selfie as “the
international Word of the Year” 4 this hybrid phenomenon of vernacular photography and social
media has created quite a bit of media hype. A selfie, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is “a
photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and
uploaded to a social media website.” 5 According to Jenna Wortham, technology reporter for The
New York Times, “Selfies have become the catchall term for digital self-portraits abetted by the
explosion of cellphone cameras and photo-editing and sharing services. Every major social
media site is overflowing with millions of them. Everyone from the pope to the Obama girls has
been spotted in one.” 6 Selfies have been called “a symptom of social media-driven narcissism,” 7
a “way to control others’ images of us,” 8 a “new way not only of representing ourselves to others,
but of communicating with one another through images,” 9 “the masturbation of self-image” 10
and a “virtual “mini-me,” what in ancient biology might have been called a “homunculus” – a
tiny pre-formed person that would grow into the big self.” 11
4
“Language research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors reveals that the frequency of the word selfie in the
English language has increased by 17,000% since this time last year.” http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/pressreleases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/
5
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/ See also Wikipedia
entry on the selfie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie
6
Wortham, Jenna. “My Selfie, Myself.” The New York Times, October 19, 2013.

7
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/10459115/Australian-man-invented-theselfie-after-drunken-night-out.html
8

Scholarly reflections on the ‘selfie’

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9
Rawlings, Kandice. “Selfies and the History of Self-Portrait Photography.” Oxford University Press Blog,
November 21, 2013. http://blog.oup.com/2013/11/selfies-history-self-portrait-photography/
10
Marche, “Sorry, Your Selfie Isn’t Art.”
11
Clark, “Me, My Selfie and I.”
5
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
Some of the scholarly responses to the sudden rise of popularity and even notoriety of the
selfie reveal even wider multiplicity of approaches and possible meanings. For instance, Mark R.
Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and author of The Curse of
the Self: Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life (Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004) and editor of Interpersonal Rejection has pointed out that “by posting
selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that
are posted online, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the
clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo,
people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will
garner social rewards.” 12
Karen Nelson-Field, Senior Research Associate, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing
Science, University of South Australia, and author of Viral Marketing: The Science of Sharing
(Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) is more critical and sees a calculated
premeditation behind all the cute, playful, and instantaneous self-portraits posted online: “We
now all behave as brands and the selfie is simply brand advertising. Selfies provide an
opportunity to position ourselves (often against our competitors) to gain recognition, support and
ultimately interaction from the targeted social circle. This is no different to consumer brand
promotion.” 13 Nelson-Field’s argument sounds plausible, as indeed most of the selfies posted to
Instagram can appear to be attempts at self-branding, trying to “sell” the best version of #me:
positive, happy, accomplished, proud, well-dressed (sometimes partly or completely undressed),
seductive or sexy. As Casey N. Cep has rightly noted, “all those millions of selfies filling our
albums and feeds are rarely of the selves who lounge in sweatpants or eat peanut butter from the
12

Scholarly reflections on the ‘selfie’

13

Scholarly reflections on the ‘selfie’

6
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
jar, the selves waiting in line at the unemployment office, the selves who are battered and abused
or lonely and depressed. Even though the proliferation of self-portraits suggests otherwise, we
are still self-conscious.” 14 Jenna Wortham has also pointed out that “selfies often veer into
scandalous or shameless territory — think of Miley Cyrus or Geraldo Rivera — and at their most
egregious raise all sorts of questions about vanity, narcissism and our obsession with beauty and
body image.” 15 Moreover, let us not forget Kim Kardashian’s white swimsuit that everyone
seemed to talk about in 2013. 16
To conclude, scholars so far have proposed that the selfie among else can function as a
means of self-expression, a construction of a positive image, a tool of self-promotion, a cry for
attention and love, a way to express belonging to a certain community (even if it is as vague and
ephemeral as “all the young, beautiful, and successful ones”). We could confirm or reject such
claims by inspecting individual selfies photos. Sometimes the claims are made based on
outstanding exceptions that catch people’s attention, go viral, and easily become a symbol of the
whole phenomenon (think again of Kardashian’s white swimsuit selfie, which is featured in
numerous articles discussing the selfie). Yet such symbolic images are not necessarily
representative of larger trends. Therefore, before making conclusions in order to avoid
generalizations unsupported by measurable evidence, some methodological questions should be
clarified. For instance, if we use content analysis, a standard method used in communication
studies, we should be able to answer the following: what is the source of the selfies we are to
analyze and why we have chosen this particular source, what is the total amount of selfies
inspected, what kinds of categories we should use for analysis, what is the statistical breakdown
14
Cep, Casey N. “In Praise of Selfies,” Pacific Standard, July 15, 2013. http://www.psmag.com/culture/in-praise-ofselfies-from-self-conscious-to-self-constructive-62486/
15
Wortham. “My Selfie, Myself.”
16
http://instagram.com/p/fjw59uuS7b/#
7
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
within this set of selfies supporting and contradicting our preliminary hypothesis, etc. By
analyzing large sample of selfies taken in specified geographical locations during the same time
period, Selfiecity argues that we may be able to see beyond the individual agendas (such as the
notorious celebrity selfies) and instead notice larger patterns, which sometimes can contradict
popular assumptions. For example, considering all the media attention the selfie has received in
2013, it can easily be assumed that selfies must make up a significant part of images posted on
Instagram. Paradoxically enough, Selfiecity revealed that only approximately four percent of all
photographs posted on Instagram during one week were selfies.
Selfie as Old and New Genre of Photography
In addition to the multiple interpretations expressed so far, it seems especially relevant to
view the selfie in the larger context of history of photography and self-portraiture in general. The
selfie can be interpreted as an emerging sub-genre of self-portraiture, as an example of the digital
a turn in vernacular photography as well as a side product of the recent technological
developments, which in their impact and scope are not unlike the revolution in photographic
practice associated with the Kodak Brownie camera and its availability for the masses starting in
the early 1900s.
Often the term is applied retroactively to proto-selfies or self-portraits made in the
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century photography. These accounts inevitably start with
Robert Cornelius’s selfie, a daguerreotype self-portrait made in 1839. 17 Another outstanding
example of early attempts at dramatically staged self-portraiture is Hippolyte Bayard’s Self-
17
See, for instance, http://nypost.com/2013/10/17/the-art-of-taking-selfies-is-nothing-new/, or
http://mashable.com/2013/07/23/vintage-selfies/.
8
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840). 18 In the context of early photographic portraiture and selfportraiture it is also interesting to note the chosen background or environment. “If a European
staged himself outside the studio, the site was most likely a classical or Egyptian ruin. The
American pioneer (‘The American Adam’) situated the self in space – unquestioned,
unquestioning, claiming the ultimate otherness of the wilderness, building the American Self,”
wrote curator James Lingwood. 19 Kandice Rawlings, art historian and Associate Editor of
Oxford Art Online asserts: “It seems that from photography’s earliest days, there has been a
natural tendency for photographers to turn the camera toward themselves.” 20 Photography can
easily be used as a tool for constructing and performing the self. Photographic self-portraits offer
ultimate control over our image, allowing us to present ourselves to others in a mediated way.
The same problem has been encountered and addressed by artists and photographers. Dawn M.
Wilson has pointed out that “[i]n self-portraiture, an artist seeks to have the same kind of access
to her own face as she has to the face of any other person whom she might choose to portray; this
is why mirrors are invaluable: it is not possible to see my own face directly, but I can see my
own face in a mirror.” 21
It seems even disquieting how true and relevant is what art historian Jean-François
Chevrier wrote almost thirty years before the explosion of the selfie-mania: “The most intimate
place for narcissistic contemplation, the room with the mirror – a bathroom for example –
becomes in this context the most common of places, where every distinction of the self is in the
18
For an engaging discussion of this photograph, see Michal Sapir. “The Impossible Photograph: Hippolyte
Bayard’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man.” Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 3 (1994): 619-629.
19
Lingwood, James. “Introduction,” in Lingwood, James, ed. Staging the Self: Self-Portrait Photography 1840s1980s (Plymouth: Plymouth Arts Centre, 1986), 6.
20
Rawlings, “Selfies and The History of Self-Portrait Photography.”
21
Wilson, Dawn M. “Facing the Camera: Self-Portraits of Photographers as Artists.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 70, no. 1 (2013): 58.
9
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
end abolished.” 22 By inspecting individual Instagrammed selfies that were analyzed in Selfiecity,
a selfie taken in front of a mirror stands out as a particular type or even sub-genre of the selfie.
Moreover, often it is the very bathroom mirror mentioned by Chevrier, sometimes also a mirror
in an elevator or a gym. Attempt to identify mirror selfies from large data sets using
computational image analysis methods would be quite challenging. Because Selfiecity project
aims to show what computers can see in images today, the team did not focus on the analysis of
the background spaces in the photos.
Chevrier makes unpacking this construction of the self and the selfie even more
complicated by applying terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis to photographic self-portraiture.
According to Chevrier, “We can no longer escape the obvious truth that every identification presupposes the mediation of an image and that there is no identity that does not pass through this
process of alienation. (…) Every self-portrait, even the simplest and least staged, is the portrait of
another.” 23 This “another” is also a social construction. As research by Nancy Van House,
Professor at University of California Berkeley School of Information, has shown, “making,
showing, viewing and talking about images are not just how we represent ourselves, but
contribute to the ways that we enact ourselves, individually and collectively, and reproduce
social formations and norms.” 24
Furthermore, in photographic self-portraiture, according to Amelia Jones, “technology
not only mediates but produces subjectivities in the contemporary world.” 25 Accordingly, the use
22
Chevrier, Jean-François. “The Image of the Other,” in Lingwood, James, ed. Staging the Self: Self-Portrait
Photography 1840s-1980s (Plymouth: Plymouth Arts Centre, 1986), 10.
23
Chevrier,“The Image of the Other,” 9.
24
Van House, Nancy A. “Personal Photography, Digital Technologies and the Uses of the Visual,” Visual Studies 26,
no. 2 (2011): 131.
25
Amelia Jones, “The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment.” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 950. Emphasis in original.
10
Alise Tifentale, February 2014 / Selfiecity.net
of technology, the new online platforms of dissemination of the images in particular, is what
makes selfies different from earlier forms of self-portraiture. Rawlings notes that “On one hand,
this phenomenon is a natural extension of threads in the history of photography of selfportraiture and technical innovation resulting in the increasing democratization of the medium.
But on the other, the immediacy of these images – their instantaneous recording and sharing –
makes them seem a thing apart from a photograph that required time and expense to process and
print, not to mention distribute to friends and relatives.” 26 Instantaneous distribution of an image
via Instagram and similar social networks is what makes the phenomenon of the selfie
significantly different from its earlier photographic precursors. It is a product of a networked
camera. The selfie consists not only of a self-portrait photograph, but also of the metadata,
generated automatically and by the user, of the chosen platform of sharing it as well as the
following comments, “likes,” and re-sharing by other users.
The very raison d’être of a selfie is to be shared in social media, it …
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