Morgan Lang - Response to Selfie Article

Morgan Lang
     

Before I started this assignment, I never gave selfies that much thought. After reading the article, it made me think about selfies in a whole new way. I now understand that selfies can be individually very expressive. When reading this article, Maddox talked about how a selfie gives a person the power to bypass the media's bias against it.

However, I don’t agree with Maddox’s assertion. I believe that she’s trying to intellectualize something that can just be left alone. I don’t think a selfie is that important, but rather just something fun to do with my peers. When I was taking selfies on SnapChat, I tended not to take the selfie for me, but rather for the person I sent it to. Therefore, the selfie wasn’t the “…coalescing subject and object into one.”.

I think it’s great that selfies allow Others the ability to have more of a say in how they want to be viewed. They should be able to express themselves as they see fit, but I don’t want to over complicate the issue. I’m sensitive to people’s rights and their feelings. I just don’t happen to buy into the proposition that selfies are this deep misunderstood freedom of expression subject. As I said before, it’s just a selfie.

I understand Maddox believes that the selfie is a tool of pure expression, without any outside influence, but there are many ways to express yourself than just the selfie. You can express yourself in many other forms, like how you dress or act. Why is the selfie a special tool to do so?

Maddox is good at using words to express her beliefs. The problem is that I’m having trouble seeing where her proof comes from. I don’t doubt that the mass media has influence. In my opinion, the media still has an influence on how we take selfies. We are constantly being told how they define an appealing selfie, verses one not worth taking. 

What I do see, is that in the last decade the media has been proven repeatedly to have lied, mislead, or obfuscated the facts. From this, I conclude that they have a lot less influence then they used to, as people now question more and more of what’s being fed to us. Thus, I question how Maddox sees it the way she presents.

Overall, I think that this piece was a bit to wordy, and went on and on, about something that seems simple and straight forward. I think the selfie is a helpful tool in how someone expresses themselves, but it is just a tool.