Riley Duda Selfie Response

Riley Duda

Mr. Roman 

Photo 100 

9 July 2018 

“Rethinking the Selfie”

I found this academic literature extremely hard to get through. It was difficult to dig through the vocabulary that was used throughout and I think if the words selected were not at such a high level it would not have obscured the message trying to be portrayed about selfies. As I read on I found parts interesting such as this quote, “The collapsed boundary and newly formed relationship between photographer and photographed, or, rather, self and pic-tures-of-self, impacts how the subsequent viewer/viewed binary is constructed” (3).  Here the author is explaining how the selfie completed changes the relationship between the photographer and who is being photographed. Instead the selfie creates a binary relationship where one can be both the photographer and the photographed. However, at times I kind of got the vibe that the authors were digging a little too deep or making things out to be bigger then they actually are. For example, “Anne Burns, Terri Senft, Nancy Baym, and Katrin Tiidenberg have argued that selfie criticism abounds because the initial adopters of the selfie movement, and those who gave the practice popularity, were Others. These Others are considered to be women, racial minorities,individuals who are queer or transgender, individuals with disabilities, etc.—any person that falls outside the dominance of the American heteropatriarchal standard” (5-6). Here I am not one-hundred percent sure what the author/s are grasping at. I for one believe that selfies were created by the younger generation as a way of self expression and do not think that it matters if an “other” was an initial adopter of the movement. Another point I found important was the fact that because the selfie has grown with such exponential speed technology has been forced to grow with the selfie and create tools that “aid” in taking the selfie. Things more obvious like the front facing camera on cell phones or even cell phone cases that light up so you can take a selfie in the dark have all been created just to make your life easier when taking a selfie. Finally the journal wraps things up be saying, “To adequately decipher this new way of self-portraiture, we must consider form in tandem with content, photographer alongside the photographed, and the self together with the selfie” (24). This statement once again took me some time to decode but eventually I came to the conclusion that I am in agreement with it and I am a believer that the selfie has changed the traditional relationship between photographer and the photographed.