Week 4: Regulating Self-Representation

In the first chapter of “Seeing Ourselves Through Technology,” Jill Walker Rettberg discusses the creation of self-representations online: blogs, activity trackers, and perhaps the most literal interpretation, the selfie.

Rettberg spends most of the chapter chronicling the history of self-representation, beginning with the first diary and leading up to habit tracking, to explain more modern and widespread phenomenon. But the first chapter also contains a brief discussion of the disciplining of self-representations that is an interesting look into how we mediate the act of creating online content.

Rettberg mentions depictions of selfie-taking in pop culture being especially disdainful, with much of that hatred directed toward “the stereotypical selfie-takers: young women.” Because teenage girls are often derided for being superficial or vapid, selfie-taking becomes a gendered activity, and one deserving of the kind of scorn directed towards other stereotypically feminine interests (like makeup and boy bands). Rettberg hypothesizes that the negative reaction to young women online is part of a larger attitude regarding “who has the right to speak in public or to share images in public,” which is why established figures are allowed/expected to create content while the average teenage girl is mocked—often by adults—for doing so.

There are not exactly official rules for navigating the world of selfies and status updates, but one can find a lot of potentially well-meaning articles that try to propose commandments for online self-representation. Many rules, like the 5 “Rules for Taking #Selfies on Instagram” seem arbitrary, reflecting our expectations about activity online rather than genuine safety and privacy concerns. For example, the first rule is a hypothetical age restriction, and another is a simple “don’t look stupid.” It’s interesting that social media, a relatively new phenomenon with few (if any) established “authorities” is so conducive to the creation of “new ways to regulate who will be heard and who will be taken seriously.”

One thought on “Week 4: Regulating Self-Representation

  1. mbmistler

    Looking at that list of rules for taking selfies does not leave much room for actually taking selfies. I wonder if that is the point of the article, to show that nobody should be taking selfies in the first place; or it could be just ironic. People are so obsessive over “rules” like these that it builds up the selfie to be something even more than it originally started out as. Remember MySpace bathroom mirror pics with the flash on? I don’t think people made such a big deal over those.

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