Beyond Biometrics: Feminist Media Theory Looks at Selfiecity

Elizabeth Losh
University of California, San Diego

The word selfie became the Oxford English Dictionarys neologism of the
year for 2013. At the same time, the scholarly literature around this specific form
of self-representation through closely distant mobile photography has struggled
to keep up with theorizing emergent new media practices that utilize lenses,
screens, mirrors, and armatures in novel ways and generate compositions with
distinctive framing and posing that mark belonging to selfie taxonomies.
Although many regard the selfie as proof of the vainglory of contemporary social
media obsessions, those familiar with the nuances of the genre know that its
peculiar combination of humanizing individualized self-portraiture that dates back
to Renaissance self-fashioning and the detached gaze of the digital technical
apparatus that senses rather than sees may actually be uniquely characteristic of
more complicated forms of marking time, disciplining the body, and quantifying
the self. As large-scale media visualizations from the Selfiecity database of
images shot in five cities on four continents indicate, the selfie has become a
truly transnational genre that is as much about placemaking as it is about the
narrowcasting of particular faces and bodies.
In popular culture there have been a plethora of famous selfies that have
been widely discussed in both social media lifeworlds and in more conventional
mainstream print and broadcast media venues. Political figures -- including
Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin have become prominent participants in
selfie-oriented civic scenes, as the interaction of government officials with their
constituents that is documented in visual culture has moved beyond the
traditional handshake or photo op to adopt the norms of what Henry Jenkins has
called participatory culture. From princes to popes, even august authority
figures with long historical lineages have appeared in selfies, although youthful
celebrities active on social media such as Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Taylor
Swift, Beyonc, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and James Franco clearly have
shaped many of the conventions of the genre, and the selfies of these high-
profile performers have inspired particular forms of imitation, appropriation, and
satire as well. There has also been a robust cultural conversation about when
shooting seemingly self-aggrandizing selfie images should be taboo, such as at
funerals or in the presence of the ill or the homeless, as contemporary rhetoric
about purity and danger (Douglas, 2005) broadcasts indignation about violations
of decorum around pollution as well as polices the boundaries between public
and private life.
The possibilities both for a liberating performance of gender and sexuality
and for victimhood via female objectification have been extensively rehearsed in
discussions about responsibility and virtue involving selfies of young women. For
example, Lauren Greenfields short film Selfie, which depicts a girl in a
bathroom self documenting with her bejeweled smartphone, was shot as part of
an advertising campaign with the hashtag #trulyrich and the tag line You only
have one self. Do you really need 29 selfies? As a documentary photographer,
Greenfields previous projects have included gallery exhibits for her books Fast
Forward and Girl Culture, which similarly moralize about adolescent commodity
fetishism and precociousness. Yet a number of feminist critics note that selfies
can reconfigure the classic dynamic of men look / women appear from art history
(Berger, 2008), as different kinds of agency in image-making are explored. For
example, Natalie Hendry has been collecting examples of feminist and queer
selfie political communities that manifest resistance to dominant norms about
gender and sexuality.
However, it is important to resist overly simple emancipatory narratives
that conflate use of a self-documenting technology with self-awareness.
Longstanding Internet memes, such as Noah Kalinas Everyday (2006) or Ahree
Lees Me (2006), present digitial self portraits with faces of uniformity devoid of
affect that steadily age but otherwise change little over the course of years during
their reflexively archival projects, unlike Elle Mehrmands w3eks (2006), in which
the artist documents herself every fifteen minutes and includes moments of
extreme emotion and personality change. Professor Jill Walker Rettberg has
participated in online courses for women using selfies, such as Becky Higgins
Project Real Life or NOW YOU workshops devoted to self care and nurturing
ourselves wholeheartedly, and she argues that like blogging and scrapbooking
these feminizing Internet communities facilitate both expression and repression
in instructing subjects to document their lives.
Foucault talks about technologies of the self, and about ways in
which different cultures have seen it as necessary to cultivate (and
discipline) the self, and that self-care for the ancient Greeks was
seen as a pre-requisite for self-knowledge. . . These courses are all
about empowering women always women to see beauty in
themselves and their surroundings. They can also be seen as a
way in which women are disciplined, much as womens magazines,
as Angela McRobbie notes, have been instrumental in the training
of middle class young women. (Rettberg, 2014)
Rettberg has joined a number of scholars in a Facebook group called The Selfies
Research Network, which was founded by Teresa Senft to share bibliographies,
disseminate new work, and curate specific selfie images. Currently the group
has about two hundred members, most of whom are female scholars who identify
as feminist.
In contrast, the Selfiecity project was created by a mostly male team with
Lev Manovich as the coordinator, and Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani,
Dominikus Baur, Jay Chow, Alise Tifentale, Daniel Goddemeyer, and Nadav
Hochman as the collaborators. Manovich, author of The Language of New Media
and Software Takes Command, managed coordination between New York,
California, and Germany. The Selfiecity group collected 656,00 Instagram images
shared in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and So Paulo during the week
of December 4 12, and then narrowed the dataset to 640 images from each city
(3200 in total). The analysis revealed that for each city, there are more female
selfies than male selfies. The projects visualizations show gender and age
patterns for each city using an approach that Manovich calls media visualization
(visual representations constructed from all images in a database rather than a
more abstract information visualization devoid of the original content). Although
Manovich is best known for working with the products of professional content-
creators in media such as paintings or manga pages, he has also looked at
vernacular design practices on sites such as deviantART using the tools
developed in his Software Studies Initiative such as ImagePlot. Using this
software, what Manovich calls style space can be mapped, so that particular
large-scale patterns of entropy and order in cultural production can become
visible (2011)
In the Selfieexploratory viewer, visitors to the site can filter selfie images
by region, gender, body pose, and gaze direction, as well as sort by the
openness of the mouth or eyes on a given image. For example, selfies in which
the subjects all tilt on the same diagonal direction or look directly upwards at the
same angle would be grouped together by the software. Because computer
techniques for photo analysis continue to be imperfect, as in the case of guessing
a subjects gender and age, the team also utilized Amazons Mechanical Turk
workers to classify images.
This database of images obviously could serve as a kind of common
anthology from which scholarly critics could perform analysis or assign viewing
sets of images in teaching courses. Of course, it is important to point out that
feminist critics in The Selfies Research Network would likely point out three
potential problems with relying on the Selfiecity site for research. First, gender is
presented in strongly binary terms, with female and male as the main
categories separated by a territory demarcated by a question mark. Although
software measurements treated gender as being represented by continuum of
variable expressions, default tags used by Mechanical Turk emphasized an
either/or logic. Looking through the archive of photos, it was clear that the
subjects who self-represent as butch or femme might choose to identify
themselves differently and to resist to anatomical determinism that is strongly
heteronormative. Categories for transgender, cisgender, and gender queer now
being adopted even by commercial social network sites were nowhere to be seen
on the Selfiecity website, and ways to tag images more appropriately would seem
to be essential tools for those studying how gender and sexuality are performed
online. Second, many scholars see the work arrangements for labor in Amazons
Mechanical Turk system as exploitative, and find their contracts difficult to
reconcile with academic values, particularly when even master workers can have
little influence on their employers (Aytes, 2013; Irani and Silberman, 2013).
Using an alienated labor pool seems less desirable than urging scholars to resist
the tendency to trivialize tagging and data entry work. By valuing digital labor as
intellectual contributions done inside the academy, we strengthen our
methodological training in metadata standards and the scholarly character of the
database as a form of academic publication. Finally, the use of facial recognition
technology reinforces potentially hubristic confidence in what Kelly Gates has
called our biometric future that rationalizes questions of difference and justifies
a society of surveillance (Gates, 2011).
Nonetheless, in browsing the image sets, I did find Selfiecity useful in
providing evidence for a number of important ideas in my own articulation of
theories of media ecologies that include user-generated content from smart
phones that promote the datafication of human subjects. These concepts include
1) close distance, 2) transparent mediation, 3) authoring supplanting authorship,
and 4) sensing supplanting seeing.
Close distance refers to the orientation of the selfie subject in presenting
foreground/background relationships to an implied audience that is expected to
be able to recognize the most significant features quickly in the frame. Of course,
because of the way that the data was selected, the human head dominates the
real estate of Selfiecity, although belfie photography of bottom selfies might also
attract significant numbers of followers in other contexts. In the peripheral space
around each subjects head in Selfiecity we might see an unmade bed, a display
wall of cosmetics, a luxury car, a Starbucks coffee drink, a sign indicating a
specific geographical location, generic miniblinds masking the setting, a well-
known landmark, or a bathroom stall. All of these myriads of possibilities indicate
placemaking activities in which an individual face can be correlated with a
background that can communicate copresence by transmitting elements of the
rhetorical scene to others in an imagined social network. Although the activity of
recording for purposes of dissemination implies distance, the constraints and
conventions of selfie photography also require closeness. The camera can only
be held so far away from the face by the human arm, and when a mirror is used
proximity is still needed to make sense of the subjects identity. Even though
careful scrutiny reveals that some of the selfie images in Selfiecity were likely
taken using timers or third parties, these images still observe the conventions of
framing associated with the intimacy and alienation of the genre.
Transparent mediation describes a significant subset of images on
Selfiecity in which the apparatus shooting the photo is present within the frame.
Of course, this practice of sometimes revealing the image-making technology of
the camera goes back over a century and a half in the history of self-portraiture in
photography, and in oil painting before that the mirrors that made likeness-
making possible might also be made manifest, as in the case of Parmigianinos
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror. Elsewhere I have argued that showing the
hypermediated character of ones lived experience is actually a strategy to
establish credibility and that demonstrating how authentic presence is mediated
through a viewer or screen explicitly is a way to communicate trustworthiness
(Losh, 2012). When the equipment that captures the digital file is shown
simultaneously to the viewer, the reveal draws attention to the ethics of
disclosure that admit that the moment is staged. For example, the come-hither
look of a long-haired woman in Bangkok imitates the gaze of manufactured
desire on the face of a commodified cover girl, but we also see her camera
phone case covering the edge of her chin, and we can look into the glinting
aperture of the lens of her device just as easily as we look into her own eyes. A t-
shirt wearing young man from So Paulo in a black and white photo studies the
machine that renders the text on his chest in reverse, and his act of reading
replicates our own act of reading and its barriers to fluent comprehension. These
disruptions to familiar scripts of immediacy constitute the new scripts of
hypermediacy that establish online ethos by including the means of mechanical
reproduction in rhetorical scenes, although the physical topographies of the local
memory chips and remote servers in which images are stored remain black
boxed.
Authoring supplanting authorship acknowledges the fact that world-
making is increasingly procedural and collective in character and driven by the
design capacities of the distributed development teams that shape visual
aesthetics (Losh, 2013). Although we do not see the original context of the
Instagram site from which the data is scraped, we can see evidence of various
filters on another significant subset of Selfiecity images in which choices about
the sharpness, lighting, hue, or color saturation of the images draws attention to
the use of software rather than to the activity of aiming and focusing a camera as
a tool for recording an instant in time. Because the star of the selfie may choose
atmospheric effects from menus but probably cannot manipulate specific
variables with precision on a touch screen, much less write lines of the collective
code in programming environments for authoring tools, authoring systems,
and authoring languages, traditional modes of authorial control associated with
older forms of self-publishing and desktop composition appear to have taken a
haptic turn in which information even about the opacity and transparency of
discrete layers can no longer be accessed, given the limited affordances of the
portable screen to run programs such as Photoshop.
Sensing supplanting seeing may be more difficult to discern in these
photos, although we can observe how the human-computer interaction modeled
in Selfiecity depicts users wielding their smart phones as collections of semi-
autonomous sensors rather than as neutral instruments that extend their own
vision or tools that gives them mastery in subject-object relationships. A new
wave of scholarship in media studies sometimes associated with the material
turn is breaking with cinema studies to question the priority of the graphical user
interface and the disembodied gaze. Theorists such as Geert Lovink, Ian Bogost,
Alexander Galloway, Wendy Chun, and Matthew Kirschenbaum insist that the
complexity of the material cultures of computation beyond the screen in
blackboxed devices cannot be ignored and that the path dependencies created
by unseen choices about particular chip designs or technical protocols create
constraints and affordances that are difficult to apprehend. If the emphasis of
critical inquiry shifts to embodied activation and away from subject-object
viewership, what opportunities exist for rethinking media? If the phone is both a
part of the body and not part of the body, capable of giving us feedback with
vibrations from its accelerometers, much like the walking stick of Gregory
Batesons blind man, how do we experience it as an actor in our networked social
relations?
When Barack Obama posed for a selfie with other heads of state at the
funeral of former South African President Nelson Mandela, conservative pundits
pounced on the image captured by Agence France photographer Roberto
Schmidt as evidence of the telegenic presidents supposed tendencies toward
disrespectful cults of personality and signs of a flawed personal character as a
political figurehead obsessed with the narcissistic distractions of social media
and gimmicky ubiquitous communication technologies. It is notable that Santiago
Lyon, the Vice President and Director of Photography for the Associated Press,
cited Obamas Johannesburg selfie in introducing his New York Times op-ed
protesting what he called draconian restrictions governing the access of
photographers to the president. As Lyon observed of the funeral selfie image of
Obama with prime ministers David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the
moment captured the democratization of image making that is a hallmark of our
gadget-filled, technologically rich era. According to Lyon, the meritocratic
leveling effect of vernacular mobile photography which also produces citizen
journalism with more gravitas exists in sharp contrast to the manifestly
undemocratic policies of the administrations image control enforced in
hypocritical defiance of the principles of openness and transparency that
Obama campaigned upon. As a feminist and a rhetorician, I would argue that
selfies do much more than merely promote democratization, openness, and
transparency, and to theorize selfies with Selfiecity points to more complicated
cyborg identities, networked subjectivities, and partial literacies than the access
narrative would suggest.


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