Summary: There are three distinct modes of self-representation in digital media. The first being a written format, in which the person uses their own text or articles that they produce to represent themselves; such as a blog post or a diary. The second being a visual format, in which the person uses pictures/ a collection of pictures to represent themselves; such as a photo album or a post of the pictures to a social media platform. The third being a quantitative format, in which the person uses data that has been collected on themselves to represent themselves; such as showing people the amount of total steps you took or how far you drove. Self representation has always been a part of our culture. And sometimes we want to be seen as a person that we aren’t.
Main Ideas/ Terms: Technology is a means to see part of ourselves, it can reflect back to us a version of who we are. The data, filters, and social media platforms we use distort our in their own particular ways.
1.) Micro-celebrity: someone that is known amongst a community of people that they might never have been known by if it weren’t for the social media platforms.
2.) Filter blogs: they have a personal style, but the aim is to share materials and ideas that the blogger is interested in rather than telling the story of the bloggers life.
3.) Topic-driven blogs: they often mix posts about general research with topics that are clearly self-representational.
4.) Anonymous blogs: they may consist of nothing but captioned reaction gifs and won’t expose anything about the author’s identity, yet still express personal life experiences.
5.) Selfie: a picture that someone has taken of themselves, mainly while expressing a certain mood or attitude, and usually gets posted to social media.
Commentary: I thought that her perspective on self-representation was for the most part unbiased and controlled. She basically wrote a history book on the origin of how self representation came to be and how it has changed. What I mean by that is she wrote a lot about historical figures and cultures that used and developed advancing ways to represent yourself; such as starting out writing on different materials, to diaries, to photos of a person, to social media now. She used a lot of quotes from some of the more famous people that were involved in self representation. She also used a real world example of how criticism never truly goes away, with the Keller’s condemnation of Lisa Adams, a cancer victim and mom of three that posted on social media regularly.
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