CSCT 708 Selfie/Culture: Commonplace Book -Compiled by Jiyeong

CSCT 708 Selfie/Culture Commonplace Book and Journalling by Jiyeong

[commonplacebook2024]

Self-life Inscription

Photos courtesy of wonderful Bianca! Taking an aesthetic photos of a study space takes time and skill.

In many ways, the selfie exemplifies the undeniable force of self-life inscription in contemporary culture and politics that has motivated this book, and the need for scholars of contemporary culture to develop responsive, sensitive frames for reading the importance of everyday acts of mediated self-representation. (175-6) Poletti, Anna. "Conclusion: Life Matters." Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book, New York, USA: New York University Press, 2020.

Selfies and self-life inscription: Does the act of taking a selfie capture a life (story) or is the narrative inscribed post-selfie? If selfies are automedial in nature, they can be used as a political tool and a historical record like Ai Weiwei's exhibition.

[commonplacebook2024]

Disability and Selfies

I struggled with taking these photos as I don't keep a physical journal and prefer pdf files and ebook over hard copies for the sake of convenience; it's just not aesthetic to photograph a laptop and a water bottle. Grad school is fun but much too busy for a romanticized college life. But I did find these photos can be used to narrate a story of my academic journey as a grad student.

And while community building holds a significantly positive place in participants’ responses, there is a need to theoretically problematized this notion and the affect entangled within it. (42) Yadlin-Segal, Aya. “What’s in a Smile? Politicizing Disability through Selfies and Affect.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 24, Issue 1, January 2019, pp. 36–50.

A connection to Saraswati can be traced here. While community building and increased representation is a positive outcome of this selfie project, it still fails to escape the privatization of the systemic problem. Publicization helped form a community and fostered public exposure but it still does not attack the systemic issue.

[commonplacebook2024]

Automedia

Snow day!

...drag performance is an automedial practice that creates “queer time” (Halberstam), making use of the changing status of camp as a practice for constructing, and mediating identity. Poletti, A., and J. Rak. “‘We’re All Born Naked and the Rest Is’ Mediation: Drag As Automediality”. M/C Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, Apr. 2018, doi:10.5204/mcj.1387.

Expanding the application of automediality in selfies to video games (Sims) and drag performances is, in essense, inscribing a story/narrative on life (or a simulation of it). A story's main objective is to be shared, risking censure to explore and reaffirm identity. It is safer not to publicize life stories but the desire to explore and validate identity is highly compelling. At the same time, there is a tension between queer automedial life-story and commodification of private life.

[commonplacebook2024]

Kinesthetic Sociability

...the selfie is a “gestural image” and that we should not understand its aesthetics purely in visual terms. Rather, selfies conspicuously integrate still images into a technocultural circuit of corporeal social energy that I will call kinesthetic sociability. This circuit connects the bodies of individuals, their mobility through physical and informational spaces, and the micro-bodily hand and eye movements they use to operate digital interfaces. (1608) Frosh, Paul. “The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability.” International Journal of Communication (Online), 2015, pp. 1607–1628.

How about selfies that do not contain faces or bodies (or just hands and forearms)? Can it still retain kinesthetic sociability? I find Studyblr photos to have a similar energy as it mediates feelings of studying, college/student life and education. What about front-facing vlogging/videos? Many such videos are filmed on the move.

Links to Studyblr examples can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

[commonplacebook2024]

Tumblr's Reverb and Affect

Sunny but cold day!

...[This essay] pays attention to a small subset of the practices of a group of queer people to demonstrate that there is a dynamic of connection and interaction on Tumblr based on a nonlinear, atemporal rhizomal exchange of affect and sensation, a “queer reverb” of repeat and repeat; and there may be a possibility for this sort of transmission to buoy an antinormative or resistant politics. (47) Cho, Alexander. “Queer Reverb: Tumblr, Affect, Time.” Networked Affect, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 43–57.

How does reverb and affect amplify Tumblr's unique aesthetics which is curiously resistant to monetization? Can aesthetics be the end of Tumblr users instead of a means for exposure and monetization? Affordances of anonymity and insulated (non-algorithm) feed contribute in creating Tumblr's interest-based communities as well.

More details on Cho's discussion on affect can be found in this article by Cho.

[commonplacebook2024]

Neoliberalism and Selfie

I argue, the underlying structure of their social media campaigns is governed by, and therefore projects and perpetuates, neoliberal values such as “self-improvement/ investment in the self/ entrepreneurship,” “personal responsibility,” and the “sharing economy”— hence the term “neoliberal self(ie) gaze. (2) Saraswati, L. Ayu. "The Neoliberal Self(ie)." Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie. New York University Press, 2021.

Saraswati argues that neoliberalism privatizes the social issues into isolated, personal cases. This explains so much about the commodification of self and selfies in social media sites. Self(ie) gaze—including hand-held vlogs and TikToks? How much should we include in selfies/selfie-adjacent?