Summary: When we take selfies, we are expressing ourselves onto the online world by posting them on our social media accounts. The structure of our self-representations are influenced by both technological filters and cultural filters even if we don’t put a filter on the actual selfie or picture. The cumulative form of our social media account feeds are considered to be a technological filter that lets certain kinds of content seep through while others are held back (not shown in the feed). A popular way to express ourselves in the physical form is by taking daily pictures of ourselves over a long period of time because it shows the physical changes that our bodies go through over time. Depending on the person that is doing this collection of selfies, it can receive positive or negative feedback when posted online. As selfies increasingly become part of our culture, it is likely that more of us will make our own time lapse videos in some way or another.
Main Ideas and Terms:
1. Selfies posted over time share a lot of similarities with a traditional diary.
2. Self portraits have changed a lot over time, especially the way we take these self portraits; going from paintings to pictures taken on our phones.
- Micro-Narrative: a comment that expresses an aspect of the writer or an image showing a version of themselves.
- Cumulative self-representations: documents pictures in order of time it was taken, in which each picture has a micro-narrative connected to it, and it ends up forming a collection of posts/pictures.
- Time lapse videos: shows us a certain aspect of something change over time, particularly selfies.
- Profile pictures: the picture that you choose when signing up for a social media account that differentiates you from other users.
- Selfies: a picture taken from the perspective of someone looking at you, like a mirror image of your face.
Analysis: In this chapter I thought that they talked a little too much about the time lapse photos/selfies because they kept giving examples after examples of it trying to explain what it was, how it was received by other people, and its history. I would agree that it was a popular thing to do back then but I don’t think they are anymore. I say this because I don’t see it on social media or YouTube anymore, now people just speed the video up if it’s something that takes a long time, which is pretty much the closest thing that I see to a time lapse video/selfie time lapse video. I think that it’s a cool thing to do, but there has to be a point where it gets boring and not exciting anymore if you do it over and over again. If it’s for yourself that’s fine but if that’s all of what you post, it will get dull over time.
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