Il rapporto tra Selfie e Self-Presentation
The Selfie in the Digital Age: From Social Media to Sexting
The selfie phenomenon is a pervasive part of our culture: "selfie" was even Oxford dictionary's word of the year in 2013. As a way to connect, selfies are often used to share important experiences and to express feelings at a particular time. It is not a new phenomenon for people to use photographs to document experiences or events. However, with smartphone capabilities, it is now possible to capture a moment spontaneously and to express mood without having to wave down a passerby to take a photo. These expressive images can immediately be shared with social circles via social media. A selfie can be more intimate than a staged photograph because it captures a moment in time that is meant to be shared with others. Many adolescents are trying to develop their sense of identity, experimenting with different looks and experiences, and deciding how they feel while sharing with their social circle. Selfies can be an important part of development within the digital age. Social networking itself has the potential to increase self-esteem and well-being in adolescents because they receive positive feedback on their social network profile. It also gives an opportunity for affiliation, self-expression, and control over self-presentation. (1) Since people control how they are portrayed in their social network profile, they are able to increase their self-esteem momentarily while presenting a positive self-view to others. (2) Social networking can enhance a person's self-esteem and positively affect his or her well-being, particularly when he or she is focused on strong ties to other people.
Dawn of the Selfie Era: The Whos, Wheres, and Hows of Selfies on Instagram
Online interactions are increasingly involving images, especially those containing human faces, which are naturally attention grabbing and more effective at conveying feelings than text. To understand this new convention of digital culture, we study the collective behavior of sharing {selfies} on Instagram and present how people appear in selfies and which patterns emerge from such interactions. Analysis of millions of photos shows that the amount of selfies has increased by 900 times from 2012 to 2014. Selfies are an effective medium to grab attention; they generate on average 1.1--3.2 times more likes and comments than other types of content on Instagram. Compared to other content, interactions involving selfies exhibit variations in homophily scores (in terms of age and gender) that suggest they are becoming more widespread. Their style also varies by cultural boundaries in that the average age and majority gender seen in selfies differ from one country to another. We provide explanations of such country-wise variations based on cultural and socioeconomic contexts.
Modeling first impressions from highly variable facial images
Understanding how first impressions are formed to faces is a topic of major theoretical and practical interest that has been given added importance through the widespread use of images of faces in social media. We create a quantitative model that can predict first impressions of previously unseen ambient images of faces (photographs reflecting the variability encountered in everyday life) from a linear combination of facial attributes, explaining 58% of the variance in raters’ impressions despite the considerable variability of the photographs. Reversing this process, we then demonstrate that face-like images can be generated that yield predictable social trait impressions in naive raters because they capture key aspects of the systematic variation in the relevant physical features of real faces.
Self-portraits are more likely to show the artist’s right than left cheek. This phenomenon may have a psychobiological basis: Self-portraitists often copy their subject from mirrors and, if they prefer to present their left cheek (more expressive due to right-lateralization of emotions) to the mirror, this would result in a right-cheek bias in the painting. We tested this hypothesis using SelfieCity (3200 selfies posted on Instagram from December 4 through 12, 2013 from New York, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Moskow, and Bangkok), which includes two selfie-taking styles: a “standard” (photograph of selfie-taker) and a “mirror” (photograph of mirror reflection of selfie-taker) style. We show that the first style reveals a left cheek bias, whereas the second reveals a right cheek bias. Thus side biases observed in a world-wide, large, and ecologically valid database of naïve self-portraits provide strong support for a role of psychobiological factors in the artistic composition of self-portraits.
This study explores teenage girls' narrations of the relationship between self-presentation and peer comparison on social media in the context of beauty. Social media provide new platforms that manifest media and peer influences on teenage girls' understanding of beauty towards an idealized notion. Through 24 in-depth interviews, this study examines secondary school girls' self-presentation and peer comparison behaviors on social network sites where the girls posted self-portrait photographs or “selfies” and collected peer feedback in the forms of “likes,” “followers,” and comments. Results of thematic analysis reveal a gap between teenage girls' self-beliefs and perceived peer standards of beauty. Feelings of low self-esteem and insecurity underpinned their efforts in edited self-presentation and quest for peer recognition. Peers played multiple roles that included imaginary audiences, judges, vicarious learning sources, and comparison targets in shaping teenage girls' perceptions and presentation of beauty. Findings from this study reveal the struggles that teenage girls face today and provide insights for future investigations and interventions pertinent to teenage girls’ presentation and evaluation of self on social media.
Travel selfies on social media as objectified self-presentation
While disseminating self-related information and travel selfies via social network sites, many tourists strategically adjust photographic images to manage their impressions. With a sample of Korean female tourists, this study aims to examine the underlying nature of strategic self-presentation behaviors characterized by women's personal efforts to edit and package their travel selfies posted on social media webpages. The results of this study indicate that several elements of self-objectification, including appearance surveillance and appearance dissatisfaction, are closely associated with female tourists' strategic self-presentational orientation. This study suggests different management implications to help tourism practitioners successfully distribute desired destination images using their clienteles' strategic self-presentation behaviors.
Selfies| The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability
A selfie, whatever else it might be, is usually a photograph: a pictorial image produced by a camera. This banal observation informs widespread understandings of the selfie as a cultural category: “A photograph that one has taken of oneself” (Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year, 2013, p. 1). Yet despite the selfie’s obvious photographic provenance, little scholarly research has drawn systematically on the intellectual resource most closely associated with the aesthetics of its host medium: photography theory. In a way, this is unsurprising. The selfie is the progeny of digital networks. Its distinctiveness from older forms of self-depiction seems to derive from nonrepresentational changes: innovations in distribution, storage, and metadata that are not directly concerned with the production or aesthetic design of images. As the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries definition continues, the selfie is typically “taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It is these innovations that are thought to distinguish the selfie: 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. (Tifentale, 2014, p. 11)
Selfies| The Selfie Assemblage
As digital technology becomes increasingly powerful and portable, means of self-expression have fundamentally changed. To speak in this media milieu is to tweet, update a status, or post photographs to social networks. These forms of self-expression provide new means of communicating the self and articulating a sense of connection to others. The selfie, a form of self-portraiture typically created using smartphones or webcams and shared on social networks, has rapidly risen into the common visual vernacular and seems to accent a culture obsessed with itself. While labels of narcissism abound, the selfie also invites a different consideration about the complex nature of networked society. At the moment of capture, a selfie connects disparate modes of existence into one simple act. It features the corporeal self, understood in relation to the surrounding physical space, filtered through the digital device, and destined for social networks. Each of these elements appears in relation to the others, attracting competing logics and languages of belonging and expression into one quick photograph. In other words, the selfie exists at the intersection of multiple assemblages (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Wise, 2005) that draw complex and often contradictory subjectivities together. In this essay, I examine the selfie as a representational form within locative media that enunciates each of these inherent dimensions as it manifests within a constellation of assemblages. This positioning allows for critical examination of selfies as entanglements of subjectivities within a massively mediated and networked society.
Making Selfies/Making Self: Digital Subjectivities in the Selfie
The contemporary and rising trend of the “selfie,” or self-portrait shared online through social media, has rarely been studied. When addressed, selfies by young women are criticized by mass media as acts of narcissism and self-absorption. Selfies, and the social critique of selfies, however, can be analyzed as the products of a complex set of embedded power systems. First, the selfie must be viewed as a product of our technological times as it necessitates a specific combination of new technologies: the front-facing camera on a mobile phone, photo-manipulation software and social media on the internet. Second, selfies and the social critique of selfies, must be analyzed through the historically patriarchical trajectory of self-portraiture and the embeddedness of the male gaze. Third, the capitalist underpinnings of pervasive mass media images of the female body are also important to this analysis. Rather than narcissism, the process of taking, analyzing, editing and posting selfies is an active and therapeutic negotiation of a girl’s self-image made amidst the stormy forces of technology, patriarchy, capitalism, mass media, peers, and personal agency.
The Selfie in the Age of Digital Recursion
The latter point of view is represented by the cover of the 4 December 2013 issue of the New York Post, which shows a young woman in sunglasses posing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and taking a selfie. Scientific Vision-The Birth of Media As McLuhan and the graphic designer Quentin Fiore show us in The Medium is the Massage (through images of circuit boards, phonographs, books, film stills, newspaper clippings, mirrors, clothing, railroad tracks, etc.), media are always embodied, and, as such, materially constrained and specific.