We should be, by now, tired of the selfie. It has been everywhere, done everything, and everybody and their president has taken one. The selfie has been in space, under water, in the most intimate spaces of sexual intercourse and the most public award ceremonies in Hollywood. The Selfie, one would have thought, would have just retired from public view, determined to spend the rest of its time in tranquil ignominy, only to be invoked in nostalgic conversations about the times when Pluto was a planet, Hello Kitty was a cat, and the Selfie was something that we all did. And yet, just when you think the day of the selfie is over as Internet trend gurus speculate about the next new fad that would make the selfie fade, it comes back with the resilience of a cockroach, finding new ways of populating the zeitgeist of the digital web. We might as well resign ourselves to the fact the selfie is here to stay.
If you are a part of the selfie parade you must know that it is a misnomer to refer to the selfie as if it is just one thing. The single facepic pouting at a camera on the front of the phone, clumsily extended to be at that perfect angle where we capture how we think we look to the rest of the world was just the beginning of the story. Now, because we can never stop at one, twofies and groufies have become regular events, and the selfie has diversified so that it doesn’t just stick with the face. The Belfie (Butt selfie) as made popular by Kim Kardashian (look, she had to be mentioned once, we are done now) or the Feet selfie, probably made popular by somebody who we don’t know because we could only see their feet, and the #Torsoshot that has finally established that young men should be seen and not heard, have all entered into the visual and circulation vocabulary of our spectacled times.
A part of the allure of the selfie is the promised authenticity in it. Even when we Instagram a selfie to death, editing, cropping, filtering and formatting to make it look like the image of ourselves that we see in our heads, there is a firm belief that the selfie marks us in the here and the now. Like an expert witness testifying to the presence of a tree falling in a lonely forest, the selfie more or less establishes that beyond the cosmetic manipulations that transform the self into the selfie, is the real you, in real time, in real space, doing some real things that are so engrossing, exciting, fun, and absorbing, that you had to capture the moment and then delay experiencing it just a little bit while you upload it to your social network of choice. Which is why the selfie survives and in a world of simulated reality and distributed identities, it remains the one real thing that produces the right now as a moment of future nostalgia.
It in this selfie saturated world that a recent news headlines in Bollywood, in India, caught my attention, where a new celebrity actress Radhika Aapte was responding to ‘fake selfies’ of her being circulated on the viral pornographic grapevine of the digital web. The images that claimed to show her in states of undress, mimicking the Fappening phenomena that selfies have been at the centre of, were summarily dismissed by her as ‘fake selfies’. I do think that it is an indication of the selfie aesthetic where these images were not being questioned as inauthentic, fake, or misattributed but as fake selfies. If you thought that the Selfie was the embodiment of the promise of WYSIWIG that the digital had to offer – so that what you saw was exactly what you were getting – then the notion of a fake selfie is fascinating. Also, given that selfies are fake – Kim Kardashian takes three hours of bodily preparation to get that perfect selfie which she then tweets to her millions of followers (ok, so I mentioned her again! Go and take a Selfie!) – and subject to constant filtering and manipulations, what would a fake selfie contain, and subsequently what is a real selfie?
The Aapte ‘scandal’ died its quick death as more selfies of more people were circulated and shared on the Interwebz, but it does bring to the fore, the question of what a selfie means. A selfie, in its narrowest definition, is an image that somebody takes with a portable camera, generally embedded in a phone, and then through quick digital manipulations, uploads it online, where it can be shared and entered into a space of digital circulation. However, that is taking the selfie too literally. The selfie is not just a thing, it is a form. It defines aesthetic frames of reference, different routes of circulation, a transaction economy of likes and shares, a social negotiation of friendship and intimacy, and a mechanism of verification, authorisation and authentication which are often hidden in the discounting of the selfie as merely fun and games.
If we were to take the selfie seriously and look at not only its popularity but its presence in our daily consumption of visual cultures, we realise that the selfie is everywhere. It is not just an object but a genre that encompasses everything from encounters with the Pope to posing at a funeral. The selfie has its own anthem, and it has become the dominant aesthetic of user generated porn. To discount the selfie is to not recognise that the selfie mixes memory and desire, longing and belonging, to present the self in everyday web. Selfies are not just about click-smile-share but they embody a larger industry of machines recognising us through biometric datasets and curatorial algorithms. Because when you take a selfie, you are not just presenting yourself, you are also subjecting yourself to a series of authorisations that take place on your behalf.
Look at the programme of actions that can be mapped from the moment you take the selfie to the time it starts circulating in the web. As you point your camera at your pouty face, the software is already recognising your biometric data and storing it in your picture. This is how the autofocus function in the camera recognises which part of the picture if your face and focuses on it. At the same time, the geolocation software has captured the essential information of where this selfie is being taken, the time of the day, the date, and the details of the device being used for it. All this metadata gets stored even before the selfie is taken. Once the digital shutter clicks redundantly, the selfie is stored on your phone. If you have an automatic backup of your pictures, it has been saved on to the cloud. If it is real time being shared or distributed, it is already predicting which of your friends it shall visit first. As you manipulate the images adding different filters and trying out the best effect, the application that you are using is monitoring your preferences, your facial expressions, the browsing patterns, and storing that information in the cookies on your phone. Once you press go, the image gets stored into the servers of the application in multiple forms, formats and sizes and starts traveling through notifications, through push and pull mechanisms that identify you. As more and more of your ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ like your selfie, more information is gleaned from you. Your friends’ preferences, locations, interactions and comments help verify that this is a genuine selfie. Your profile is not just about you in the picture but all the others who communicate with you through that picture, thus mapping a complex relationship map of different things and people that you interact with.
As your picture gets popular and you bask in the glory of the thousand likes, the algorithms start a series of correlations that match your picture to the other pictures in its database which are associated with your unique identifier on that system. The same picture can also travel to other databases. If you take a selfie on one platform, it automatically gets tagged to the profiles on other platforms that have a data sharing agreement. Other systems that you are connected with – like your bank, your mobile wallet, your insurance companies – that harvest these social networks for their data also get a copy of your selfie, which is also available to potential bosses and current colleagues, who might be sharing your digital social space. The act of initiating that one selfie, starts an avalanche of data that gets generated, collated, curated and consolidated beyond your imagination or control. And because the selfie is the authentic, is the real, is the actual and the factual indication of your self, it becomes a way of authenticating the real you. This composite quantified selfie profile can have unexpected and surprising consequences. For instance, following your selfie on Facebook and using it as the point of consolidation of all your data, allows a script to figure out what your sexual orientation is. Whether or not you have disclosed it or not. Similarly, your selfie on Twitter can easily be matched with a leaked picture of you on a Slut Shaming website, and algorithms can put two and two together, to start publishing your Twitter handle, your public websites, and contact information on to those compromising images. Or, an adventure sport selfie might eventually finds its way into the insurance databases which might charge you a higher premium on your life policy because of the risky life choices that you make.
Discounting the selfie as merely a representation of us hides the fact that selfies have agency. They might depend upon the human person to click on that button, but beyond that, the tasks that selfies perform are insidious and follow the narrative structures of espionage stories. In thinking about the selfie as a genre and looking at this bewildering set of actions, transactions and mechanisms that it catalyses also allows us to realise that selfies are not just about the individual taking her picture. It isn’t just you and your phone. Selfies can be faked, and they are a growing mode of presenting fiction so that it looks like reality.
It is also necessary to realise that selfies are not just contingent on human agency. Non-human selfie takers surround us. From surveillance cameras on street corners to drones hovering outside our windows, from hidden spy cams that record our intimacy to the authorisation iris scans at official intersections, our selfies are being taken, mapped, matched and consolidated beyond the celebrated idea of self-expression and presentation. Selfies are not just pictures, but they are the beginning of the big data self which is counted, accounted for, and held accountable for the digital data that is captured around it. The selfie is the obfuscation point where correlation and causality meet. The selfie in itself is not important for the content. It is not about whether you look like this or not, as long as you are legible and intelligible to the systems of authorisation, verification and quantification that store and remember all the data chains and traffic routes that the selfie makes your self travel through.
The selfie, then is a counting and an accounting structure. It counts us but it also accounts for us, creating connections and catalysing transactions that override and undermine the self. As the selfie continues to quantify us, ensuring that we are who we are and do what we say on the digital web, there is a need to make the selfie accountable for this process. Locating the selfie as a manifestation of the quantified self processes that convert us into data pods that can be harvested and mined, leaked and recombined to transform us into data subjects, is important to understand that the selfie is not one thing. It exists and is embedded in a complex ecology of data interaction – what is sometimes called Big Data – and that it needs to be subjected to greater scrutiny about how it might introduce vulnerability to the self that is being captured and conscripted in the digital circuits that it travels through.
Nishant Shah is a Professor of Culture & Aesthetic of Digital Media at Leuphana University Germany and the co-founder of the Centre for Internet & Society, India.
