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How we use blogs, selfies and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves.
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Seeing Ourselves Through TechnologyHow We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves
Parmigianino: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524)
Jill Walker RettbergProfessor of Digital Culture University of Bergen
Three modes of self-representation:
Textual
Diary: (CC) Ellen Thompson http://www.flickr.com/photos/eethompson/2142754337Selfie: (CC) TempusVolut http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrmorodo/11230014075Nicholas Fultron: The Fultron Annual Report, 2007. http://feltron.com/ar07_01.html
Visual Quantitative
Personal media are the opposite of mass media.
Lüders, Marika (2008) ‘Conceptualizing Personal Media’. New Media and Society 10 (6): 683-702.
Photo: Jeff Hitchcock (“Arbron”) (CC) http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbron/65785552/
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearables to See and Shape Ourselves.1. Histories of self-representation2. Selfies3. Cultivating the Self4. Filtered Reality5. Real-Time Diaries6. Quantified Selves7. Privacy and Surveillance
Why is it not permissible in the same way for each man to portray himself with the pen, as he portrayed himself with the pencil?
Montaigne, in Essais (late 16th century)
Technology always distorts
...filters
...and allows us to see ourselves as we otherwise cannot
First photographic self-portrait: Hippolyte Bayard: Self-portrait as a Drowned Man (1840)
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.
Susan Sontag: On Photography (1977)Image (c) Chris Felver http://www.chrisfelver.com/portraits/writers2.html
Germaine Krull: Self-Portrait with Cigarette and Camera (1925)
The photobooth - the first mass market selfie technology
The mirror on my phone
Filters can be technological. Filters can be cultural.
From Damon Winter: Life as a Grunthttp://www.poyi.org/68/17/third_04.php
Alper, Meryl. "War on Instagram: Framing conflict photojournalism with mobile photography apps." New
Media & Society (2013): 1461444813504265.
It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image.
– news photographer Nick Stern, qtd by Meryl Alper
Filtered Realities
Eleanor Antin: Carving, 1972.
http://www.everyday.noahkalina.com/
People love it – and make their own versions
Tehching Hsieh, 1980-1981
Thanks to Mark Jeffery for telling me about this.( )
We follow cultural
templates both in living
and documenting
our lives.
(CC) Carlos Mendozahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/fotodisenocm/385028368/
Preformatted baby journals are examples of normative discursive strategies that either implicitly or explicitly structure our agencies.
Van Dijck, José (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
http://corriehaffly.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/do-it-yourself-pregnancy-and-baby-journal/
What happens when these narrative patterns aren’t hand-crafted but are automatically generated?
Image: (CC) Terren in Virginiahttp://www.flickr.com/photos/8136496@N05/2196367188/
Manovich, Lev (2009) ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production.’ Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 319-31.
Mass cultural production follows templates set up by the professional entertainment industry. Are we even more firmly colonized by commercial media today than in the 20th century?
Image:http://www.bijt.org/wordpress/2005/11/
Social media marketing strategist for Findus Fish at Bergen Chamber of
Commerce, Nov 28, 2013
The wonderful thing about
digital media is you can
measure it.
She meant Facebook results. But measuring is also increasingly a way we see ourselves - and others.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/former-card-counters-new-start-up-helps-count-productivity/?_r=0
trixietracker.com
Sunday at home with the kids.
Monday at work.
Tuesday - walked to work, used standing desk, more aware of not just sitting still.
Fitbit as diary
The Shine Misfit uses badges to represent your activity through the day.
(the moment the Shine first
detected movement -
i.e. was picked up - becomes
read as my wakeup time)
Our technologies track us in many ways we don’t even consider.
There are no digital natives but the devices themselves; no digital immigrants but the devices too. They are a diaspora, tentatively reaching out into the world to understand it and themselves, and across the network to find and touch one another. This mapping is a byproduct, part of the process by which any of us, separate and indistinct so long, find a place in the world.
http://booktwo.org/notebook/where-the-f-k-was-i/
James Bridle
Machine vision - new aesthetics
And of course, often we can’t see the data about us. But others can.
(this isn’t new)
Benjamin Franklin’s virtues:Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Chastity, Tranquility, Humility
How academic positions are decided at the Humanities Faculty at the University of Bergen (Excerpt from faculty board meeting papers Nov 2013)
We bring up our children to expect detailed tracking
http://youtub.blogg.no/1253879937_anmerkninger_ordfrern.html
In the early twentieth century, the technology of public schooling was designed to regulate children to work in factories: children were trained to respond to bells, walk in lines, and perform repetitive tasks. (..) Web 2.0 technologies function similarly, teaching their users to be good corporate citizens in the postindustrial, post-union world by harnessing marketing techniques to boost attention and visibility. Marwick, Status Update, page 12.
“You need to measure
everything, make adjustments,
measure again.”
Social media marketing strategist for Findus at Bergen Chamber of Commerce,
Nov 28, 2013
But what about the things you can’t measure?
Measurements don’t give the whole picture? Then
measure more. Put up more weather stations. Get more
data to create a more complete picture.
Anders Brenna (@abrenna) to Bergen Chamber of Commerce, 28 Nov 2013.
So what should we add?
Self-documentation for self-improvement (Chapter 3)
@jilltxton Twitter
jilltxt.netBlogging 2nd ed (Polity Press, 2013)
I’d love feedback!!
