Summary
The entirety of chapter 3 consists of everything having to do with selfies. Most of the chapter reflects the history and evolution of selfies from way back when there was no smartphones or social media. The emphasis of selfies chosen for most of the examples was the chronicling of one’s face. One major example was Szucs portraits of herself. She began taking pictures of herself in 1996, before Instagram came about. But during this time, people were sharing their lives online. Another form of this self-authoring and self-expression was presented by Frank O’Hara, who took a little time out of each of his days to write a little, many compared it to micro blogging. As more media has become available, people have been creating time lapse selfies, in which they take pictures of themselves for a long while and then gather all of the pictures and create a sort of video out of them, where differences are noticed over time. Ahree Lee, Noah Kalina, Karl Baden, Tehching Hsieh, and Rebecca Brown have all done this in one way or another. One of the last subjects presented, was automatic photos, or photo booths as we know them. You go into a little booth, close the curtain, hit the button, and then your picture is take in a series of photos one after the other. There is no time to change position or figure out what to do with such little time in between, so people’s natural emotions are withdrawn from photo booths. This was an earlier example that lead into the idea of self portraits and time lapse photos.
Analysis
The main point made in chapter 3 was that selfies are a form of self-representation and self-narration that has been around, in several forms, for many years. I definitely would have to agree with this point, as I have had experience with selfies and social media. Instagram, for instance, allows one to create an image to his/her liking. Filters and a ample amount of editing can be added to make us portray ourselves in a way we would like to be seen, which is our self-expression. At the bottom of an Instagram picture, though, we may add a caption; a description of what is going on, how we are feelings, a joke, etc. This would be self-authoring; choosing who we are and telling the world who we are. Self-authoring takes place on many other social media applications and other resources, such as blogs, twitter, Facebook, VSCO, articles, diaries, etc. We always portray ourselves as who we think we are to the world.
Making Connections
I think most of the generation I am a part of and younger can say they are able to make several connections to this chapter as a whole. We have grown up with technology and social media. It has been all around us for our entire lives, so we most definitely have a connection with the subject. Just as I gave the example above about Instagram, I was thinking of myself. I take a photo somewhere and utilize the filter and editing components of the application, and then take a long while to think of a caption. For one of my photos, I captioned it ‘”couldn’t be happier.” If I had not written that caption, I am not sure if people would have realized my happiness, or on the flip side, realized that not my entire trip to Florida was spectacular. We choose how we want the world to see by our descriptions of ourselves.
clares1.home.blog 