I am not the author of my selfie!
The Oxford Dictionaries website gives the following definition for the term selfie: “A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”.
What is useful about this definition is that it explicates the digital and internet-bound condition of the photograph. A picture taken of oneself with any other means than that of the always-online device and with any other end than that of sharing it on social media is not a selfie. This is the meaning of selfie is interesting for the purpose of this article.
The advent of the internet and more particularly the advent of social media have deeply consolidated the hyperreal notion described by Baudrillard (and other philosophers in similar fashion), a world that is ruled by the imagery, where simulation is preferred to reality, and a world where signifiers have lost the link to their signified. The selfie is a typical, modelic product of this order of things, hence worth analyzing.
To begin with, let's look at the technical means in which a selfie is generated. If a photograph is inevitably a simulation, digital photography is somehow a simulation of a simulation. The lens of an analog camera captures the beans of light in a fragment of a second into the film which registers them alredy with color and shape; digital photography decomposes reality into a mathematical structure of bits of color. The lens of the analog camera in this sense works more similarly to the human eye. The digital camera performs a simulation of sight and produces a complex numerical code which is then turned into an image of more or less quality (according to the quantity of pixels), so in the moment that a digital photograph is created, the resulting image is nothing but the simulation of an image – the image is not really an image but a number. This number can then be replicated in the screens of every corner of the planet, while analog photography has first to travel physically as an image.
The second break of the selfie with scholarly established notions of photography is in the intersubjectivity field. The role of the observer and the observed, the gaze and its object, are completely altered here. There is no longer the vulnerability of the photographed subject at play with the intentionality of the photographer’s subject (which then creates a different-than-innocent place for the spectator). Instead, these roles are united in one unique subject, that is not necessarily that of the photographer and the photographed combined but a new, different one. This creates a complicated puzzle: If the author dies in his creation, and photography kills its object, how is the selfie possible, and how does the subject in it escapes (if it does) this seemingly inescapable circle of death?
Let's now look at the concept of the author as described by Foucault and Barthes. Despite the fact that these philosophers always mention a writer and a text, we can consider these two categories applicable to any procedure where a subject creates anything with a discourse value.
According to Focault, the author precedes the text and is outside from it. Writing is not so much an exposure of one’s interiority but the creation of a signifier more or less autonomous that plays externally with other symbols. In our present day culture, the author is always death in relation to his creation. But, nonetheless, the author plays a function of discourse. We demand authorship for a text (other than scientific) in order to believe it. So the image of the author is constructed in order to confer value to his work. If we relate this with the simulacra theory of Baudrillard, we find that the author-persona (whether if it is self-made or imposed) is precisely the simulation, the transformation of a person into a different kind of ethos, that of the author.
We find here that the author is a hyperreal identity, never an actual individual. He can adopt many egos. Something similar happens with the selfie; in each snap the individual chooses from a palette of egos he can portrait, however the adoption of different egos fits well in the image of an author (e.g. the Instagram profile) but don’t necessarily relate to a real individual (however we don’t demand that it does).
This gives us a clue to try and answer the question: am I the author of my selfie? Answer:
The author of the selfie is the person in the photograph, who isn’t me but an entity of the hyperreal.
Is the avatar-like persona we create in social media a mirror of our private life? Probably not. It is true that social media enables and encourages the promotion of otherwise uninteresting private events, but this doesn´t necessarily mean that the private sphere has been moved into the public gaze. The publication of our everyday life in social media is completely subject to manipulation, and in fact in most cases, successful instagramers and such, are masters at showcasing a life they don´t have, it is a kind of illusionism. Yet followers blindly believe in these crafted illusions, it is simulacra at its finest, the world of aesthetisied everyday life events fits perfectly in Baudrillard´s definition of the hyperreal. Reality is a residue that is left out in the selfie, or in the foodie, it is of no interest to the digital public. Moreover, elements of reality that unbalance the selfie´s aesthetic are a nuisance for the public who will immediately denounce it as if saying: how dare you remind us there still is a real dimension, we demand nothing but perfect, clean simulation.
Social media is the Disneyland of internet. In it we supposedly show an idealized portrait of our daily lifes, it is no more than a platform which can only be filled with inputs from the real world. It is there as a playful field where one can showcase (and judge others’ showcase) in more or less false ways the reality that exists off the internet. But that reality is not there anymore, as it tries to imitate the life in social media; social media then becomes more reliable than offline life.
Private life in the twenty-first century could be something very different to the traditional understanding of the concept. It is no longer the realm of what happens beyond the doors of the private homes of people (since beyond those doors there are a lot of tiny eyes, the various devices which have cameras, and other forms of tracking human activity without cameras) but that which happens in their heads. The only true private sphere today is that of thought, where one is more or less free to think whatever without it being immediately revealed. So private exists only within the limits of the subject that is the individual. When it comes to social interactions, the suspension of intimacy for a potential other’s gaze is always palpable.
For many, it is the internet that has irrevocably changed the way in which we interact, produce, feel pleasure, etc. In other terms, the internet has changed our reality forever in a way so deep that we have yet to decode and understand. In the last paragraph of Photography, or the writing of light Baudrillard suggests that it is not technology that has preceded the disappearance of reality but rather the contrary. (1999; p.184) In a similar fashion, contemporary philosopher and sociologist C. Rendueles has been concerned with debunking the myth that it is new technologies which alter and govern our ways of living and social interacting. He considers that changes in sociological trends are a much slower and complicated process (than that, say, of the advent of Google or Facebook). It is true that the new technologies of information have opened a huge window of possibilities that didn’t exist before it, but these technologies are merely the platform, they have no content. Thus these technologies (these tools), are charged with what its users make of it. New technologies of information might have then greatly amplified existing social trends, but not create them. We are constantly being told that the internet and more specifically social media have irreversibly altered our social intercourses, but the truth is that this technology has come into play in a set of previously existing conditions that have made it develop into certain ways rather than another.
In 1982 Barthes wrote: “we live according to a generalized image-repertoir” (1982; p.118). He meant, as postmodernist school generally does, that our lives and modes of communication have been moved to the realm of the stereotype , the simulacrum, where reality loses weight and finally disappears to leave room for this imaginary that is all that is demanded as account and explanation for our world.
In this hyperreality, the self can only assert its existence adopting a (previously cooked) identity which fits in the established imaginary. The selfie phenomenon, as the culmination of the constructed online identity, is the epitome of this situation. I put an image of myself in circulation through the internet to assert my existence, and the number of likes I get will be an indicator of how important/real my existence really is. But of course the problem is one we have already mentioned, the image in circulation is not myself (it has very little to do with myself), it is merely the showcase of various elements that I put together as an illusion of who I am. These elements include the body (any physical attribute), which is nothing but a commodity (if it fits the current fashionable trends set by explicit capitalist interests I will show it, if not I won’t), and all other things that constitute an identity: profession, social status, taste in art, culinary skills, sport skills, etc. (in reality all these things are also turned into a commodity when they enter the world of social media).
But does this constructed online identity resemble life in the sense that subjects are not alien to the passing of time and death, or is it so detached from reality that these dimensions have also blurred if not disappeared? Now I will go back to try and solve the puzzle of the death of the author and the death of the photographed, and I argue that in the realm of the selfie this dynamic may be altered.
Traditionally, the special feature of photography in face of any other form of content creation was that it was able to challenge the inexorable passing of time, it could create the illusion of stopping time at a given point and freeze it for. By this process, the real can be worn out, and what is produced is an eternal, timeless, image that simulates the real but is its contrary. When a photograph is taken, it is the fulfillment of the metaphysical human desire of stopping time. But with this comes a paradox: if you stop time, you kill life. However, does this magical attribute of photography still stand in the realm of the selfie and social-media-aimed pictures, where they do not constitute the act of wanting to freeze a moment for posteriority but exactly the contrary, to immediately share it with the whole world?
One could argue that the new digital realm of photography, could shift the traditional reading of “death [as] the eidos of photography”, for the mode of production and distribution of the futile digital image (read as selfie, foodie, etc) is much less bond to death than that of traditional photography. The image that is immediately produced and released into the internet dimension (which has no spatial or material limit) is in most of the cases aimed at living for some hours if not minutes and then be forgotten forever. This forgetfulness of the image has not to do with its material support but with the role given to the image from its conception. Somehow, it is the image itself which is condemned to a short life, a sure death, not an eternal and timeless one, therefore the objects in it are resilient of the death that the image imposes on them. The metaphysical transcendence of the act of photographing is lost in the realm of the selfie; we are not capturing a precise moment through the release of a camera’s shutter, but because the digital device that produces the image is constantly on, everything the device lays hands on is recorded, ceaselessly. We may foolishly believe that we are in control of the technology, that we decide when, where and how it can create a record of our lives, but really the device never stops recording. As the inevitability of death that we don’t want to think about much, we also try to lose consciousness of the constant (brutal) alienation that the smartphone imposes on us. We are turned into data, everything that we do through it is made into information that can be used by a dark big brother (be it companies, governments, hackers) yet most of us don’t really care, because we assume the inevitability of it. What makes us be able to not be overwhelmed by this fierce ubiquitous exposure is probably the fact that we can feel the difference between that online identity that resembles to us and the real biological self (assuming such a dichotomy is valid).
References
- Jean Baudrillard, “Procession of the Simulacra”, Simulacra and Simulation, Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, New York: University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 1-30.
- Jean Baudrillard, “La Photographie ou l’Ecrtitue de la Lumiere: Litteralite de l’image” in L’Echange impossible (The Impossible Exchange) Paris, Gailee, 1999, pp 175-184
- Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author”, Aspen 5-7, 1967.
- Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography” , Trans. Richard Howard and Jonathan Cape (London: Cape, 1982) pp 3-119
- Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's Thought, London: Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 101-20.
- Rendueles C sar. . Sociofo ia: el cam io pol tico en la era de la utop a digital. adrid: Capit n S ing.
- Definition of selfie in English: Retrieved April 5, 2016, from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/selfie
- Digital cameras. Retrieved April 5, 2016, from http://www.explainthatstuff.com/digitalcameras.html