Many critics view selfie-taking as an inward-looking and self-centred act, inhibiting the so-called Millennial / Generation Y / Generation Z from engaging with the events they’re physically attending. This view of selfies as the epitome of a shallow, self- absorbed and narcissistic modern mentality has dominated popular debate and public discourse on the issue. Some psychologists have identified the association between self-photography and personality traits such as narcissism.
The naturalised reading of a selfie is ‘look at me’. In the context of the Comic Relief image, Dooley’s selfie with the Ugandan refugee child could thereby be interpreted along the lines of ‘look at me not the child’ or ‘look, it is me who is with the child’. In selfies, the self/subject or subjectivity is the primary representational object in selfies as a visual medium.
A selfie can also be read as ‘look, this is my perspective on this issue’? The essence of our understanding of the selfie resides in this subtle shift of focus from ‘me’ to ‘my perspective’, and underpinning this shift are two assumptions about the selfie: First, from a social semiotic perspective, a selfie contains certain ‘social propositions’ to be negotiated between the image maker and the viewer, and the visual structures of a selfie will provide the textual clues for these propositions.
Secondly, as a visual sign, what is being negotiated in a selfie is not the relationship between the visually represented self and the viewers (i.e. me vs the other) but the different perspectives or points of view on visually represented phenomena (i.e. my perspective on me vs other’s perspective on me). Simply put, the ‘social proposition’ to be negotiated in a selfie is the relations between various perspectives.
Historically, the self-portrait has regularly been at the forefront of cultural identity, influencing how selfhood is conceived within a culture. The development of digital technologies has allowed the selfie to become the most prominent form of self-portrait. Selfies are mainly taken by private individuals, especially young people, and groups visible in news and entertainment media, such as politicians and celebrities.
The development of the selfie is linked to a broad range of (emerging) social practices:
- perpetuating consumerism and facilitating the commodification of different aspects of social lives;
- highlights “discourses about how people ought to represent, document and share their behaviour” (Senft and Baym, 2015);
- seenasreflexiveprocessesofvisualself-authoringandpersonal confession (Hall, 2015);
- capturea‘raw’andauthenticrepresentationoftheselfina fleeting moment.
Selfies have three ‘discursive’ functions (Zhao and Zappavigna, 2018):
- it is a conversational, visual message, where interpretation depends heavily on the ‘triangle’ formed by its sender, the occasion represented and the intended recipient;
- new,moredynamicrelationsofpowerbetweenthe object of looking and the looking subject;
- social semiotic relationship to photographic representation.
Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) – the interactional structure of an image creates an imagined relationship between the visually represented participants and the viewer.
A human face is not present – the gaze is made redundant.
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