"Selfie culture"

Humans have been creating self-portraits for ages, but only in recent years have technology and culture come together to make self-portraiture so simple and so common that almost anyone can participate in the action. Furthermore, social media has made easy the sharing such "selfies" with wider audiences than ever before.

The modern "selfie" can be taken with almost any kind of camera, though cell phones held at arm's length and built-in laptop webcams seem most common. The main function of the selfie is to be shared online; thus they are by nature digital photographs. The stereotypical selfie-taker is a teenage girl, though the selfie genre has adherents across every demographic.

But what do selfies represent? Most commonly, and most simplistically, they are said to be distilled narcissism. Some argue, often through a feminist lens, that selfies represent a new form of self-expression with radical possibilities. Or perhaps the selfie is merely the latest iteration of the human need to document, reflect, and create images.

If we return to the idea that selfies are a continuation of the tradition of self-portraiture, then their current status (dismissed and frivolous and subject to endless hand-wringing debates) may lie with the selfie's most devoted practitioners. The interests and actions of young women are systematically delegitimized. It may be true that a selfie is not art in the same way that a painter's self-portrait is art (a selfie does, after all, require less training and investment of time) - yet selfies can have artistic merit; the difficulty is in picking such images out of the firehose. And some of the rejection of selfies' artistic potential comes from their ubiquity - the self-portrait, and all the self-expression it implies, is no longer the province of a select few.

Yet the selfie may be a new genre. Jerry Saltz argues that it is; the selfie has a place alongside portraiture, still-life, landscape, and the rest. The act of creating a selfie is quick - hold up the camera, push the button. The selfie has a fairly specified distance between camera and subject - the cell phone held out in front of you, the laptop sitting on your knees or on your desk, giving a selfie an automatic form without requiring any artistic consideration/knowledge/sensibility on the part of the selfie-taker.

Rejecting the idea that selfies represent mindless narcissism - what do they represent, for their creators and their viewers? The internet has seemed to oscillate on the subject of "real names" - in the early days, terms of access through institutions meant that everyone was using whatever name their employer or school had on record; I came online before the rise of Facebook, a teenager at the tail end of "don't share any personal info online" paranoia; now social networking sites are rejecting pseudonymity in a way that both follows and forces shifts in online behavior. I posit that selfie culture could not have flourished in an era of anonymity and pseudonymity; the human face is less searchable that a first and last name, but to post such a photograph creates a link between online and offline existence that was not always acceptable.

The selfie may therefore represent an attempt to create and control a public image. Such a photograph can be crafted through techniques as diverse as makeup, camera angles, and photo editing software. In this way, a selfie may not be so different from a professionally-made portrait - except that the selfie is under the control of a single person from its inception to its sharing, and that person is the subject. The decision to share a selfie also belongs entirely to its creator.

Of course, what happens after sharing is out of the hands of the selfie's subject. Let loose online, her image moves forever out of her complete control; "the internet is forever." While many selfies are constructed to present the subject's best "look," be it great eyeliner or a good hair day, even the most conventionally attractive woman may be subject to negative comments about her appearance in her selfie. Certain selfies become famous or infamous - whether for their artistic merit, boggling inappropriateness, or sheer awesome - giving them a wider and more permanent life than their creators planned.

Moral panic aside, the selfie is unlikely to wither away. People enjoy them too much. Perhaps, in aggregate in the future, selfies will be able to tell people something about us - how we lived, what we valued.

***

Farah, Judy. Huffington Post. "The Selfie Craze: Are We Becoming a Narcissistic Nation?" Posted March 18, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judy-farah/selfie-craze_b_4983014.html

Saltz, Jerry. Vulture. "Art at Arm's Length: A History of the Selfie." Posted January 26, 2014. http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/history-of-the-selfie.html

Slavin, Lauren. feminspire. "The Evolution of Selfie Culture: Self-Expression, Narcissism, or Objectification?" Accessed April 1, 2014. http://feminspire.com/the-evolution-of-selfie-culture-self-expression-narcissism-or-objectification/

Walker, Melissa. Teen Vogue. "The Good, the Bad, and the Unexpected Consequences of Selfie Obsession." Accessed April 1, 2014. http://www.teenvogue.com/advice/2013-08/selfie-obsession