Selfies

This week there was some conflict in the scheduling for our classes. Thursday, Mia was leaving for Oslo to present her experience as a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen.

For the next week we will have Tuesday off, which gives us a great opportunity to do browse and search the numerous tools that Mia have shared with us, such as; https://www.net-art.org/, http://rhizome.org/about/, and http://www.adaweb.com/context/stir-fry/.

Personally, I am really stoked for Mia’s chance at presenting her #SelfieUnselfie installation project, I think that she is on to a great idea and I think it will go over well. But I am not so stoked for the same reason that most people in my generation probably would be. Although I am very accustomed to smartphone apps, I do have my own grievances with apps like Instagram, Twitter, and *. I’ve never been a fan of selfies or the culture surrounding it. Fairly often are selfies—like Mia pointed out in class—a distortion of reality.

Selfies serve as the next level to Facebook statuses—they serve to portray a certain contained message, or cypher, to the surrounding world and are framed in a particular way to lead the reader/viewer to arrive at a predestined goal. Someone in class pointed out how the only selfies they take are “ironic” or “sarcastic” selfies, and Snapchat happens to have a very serviceable application for exactly this—as you are encouraged to forward selfies to friends and close ones. (Except for in the case where you can publish your snaps to the public, but we’re not talking about that right now, shush)

Twitter on the other hand is an app I just never got into. And it’s a shame too since a great deal of participation in this class is directed towards Twitter. But my grievance with Twitter is pretty similar to my points above. There isn’t much diversity in the usage of twitter, than just to forward your—is 250 characters the limit?—character limited message, be it self-promotion in a professional way, promotion of your personal business, or simply just the act of spreading messages by a digital form of word of mouth.

In summary of my points above, it is really hard to be part of these things when you’re vehemently against them. Which poses several questions for one self and others.