For this first selfie, I took the picture in front of a mirror so it wouldn’t shift the picture to the opposite side that I took it at (like the rest of the selfies). I then cropped the picture to just show my head because I didn’t want all of the background showing (especially my phone). I was thinking about how to make the selfie look decent at least and not odd because no one wants to see an “ugly” selfie. This selfie is also unfiltered if you couldn’t tell already because I thought that if I’m going to take one, it’s just going to be the selfie and that’s it. I do this for all of the rest of the selfies below too. A couple reasons for not filtering the picture are: my filtering skills are below average, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, and I wanted it to seem genuine. If I filter all of these selfies, it gives of a surreal and unrealistic tone to what your looking at. I am not trying to look like anyone or imitating another persons style.

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                                                                                                           For this second selfie, I took the picture after I just worked out. I was sweaty, exhausted, and hungry at this moment as you can tell from the excitement on my face. I took this picture not only because it was another selfie for this assignment, but because it shows the “ugly” side of me. I think that if you are going to show the good, you should also show the bad because it tells people that you aren’t fake and that your life isn’t this dreamy and superficial world in which every picture/selfie looks good. This selfie also shows what one of the things that I like to do is, working out because you look healthy and feel healthy after every workout. I like to stay in shape for myself, it is a personal goal of mine that gets reset after every workout.

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For this third selfie I wanted to include my car (a 09′ Subaru Impreza WRX) because I value it a lot and it’s something that I take care of (it was kind of cold out as you can tell). I say this because cars have been an interest of mine for a long time, from seeing “NASCAR” for the first time, to looking through the “Automobile” and “Car and Driver” magazines, to watching the “Fast and Furious” movies. I think that if you want to show people your different interests and hobbies, a selfie or just a plain old picture is a great way to do it. It gives people a visualization of what you like doing. It’s easier to understand what a persons interest is by taking a picture or recording a video of them doing it rather than just writing (typing now-a-days) about it or saying it to someone. I think that it also brings out character by it not just being a bland selfie that you take in a bathroom or your room or something like that.

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For this fourth selfie I wanted to take one outside, so this is the product of wanting that. This picture includes some bad lighting (my fault), cold weather (nature’s fault), and windy weather (also nature’s fault). I wanted to take a selfie outside in the open air because it was brighter than inside and because the background was better than a bathroom. I think that taking a selfie outside can be a good thing because it exposes you to all of the elements of nature and being outside, in particular the sounds and movements of nature and people doing their daily activities. I think that both outside and inside environments both offer different opportunities to take pictures, but I think that outside offers more.

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For this last (fifth) selfie I just took it randomly and used it for this assignment. This happened to be before I got my haircut and was also my first time taking an actual selfie. I guess I wanted to do what everybody else was doing in their selfies (except the filter), I tilted my head, didn’t smile, and kind of did a slight “duck-face.” I did it this way because I thought it was the proper way to take a selfie (from what minimal experience that I had taking pictures), I just mainly checked my Instagram feed and found a couple to go off of. One thing that I don’t like with taking a selfie, is the way it mirrors everything, it’s the total opposite way of what it actually looks like. I also didn’t really care about what I was wearing, as you can see by me wearing a plain NIKE sweatshirt that I wear often. Overall I would say that this is about the most plain and simple selfie out of my small collection, I think that I failed at taking a good selfie, and it didn’t turn out how I wanted it to.

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In conclusion I would say that it was an alright process to complete. I don’t like taking pictures of myself mainly because I am too self-conscious and afraid of the negative feedback that I might get if I do post it. I think that taking these selfies has made me just a bit more comfortable to do from now on, even though I most likely will not take any more selfies if I don’t have to. For this collection of selfies, I wrote out a micro-narrative for each one, which is pretty much just a detailed caption describing the photo and reacting to it as well. I also used cumulative self-representations and a sort of time-lapse collection as well because all of these are in order from the time taken, I did this the opposite way by putting the eldest selfie on the bottom and the most recent one at the top. I didn’t use any digital selfies in this collection for reasons that I described in the micro-narratives in the first and second selfies above. I didn’t smile in any of these because if I would have, it wouldn’t have been genuine because I wasn’t excited or happy at the time, so the main reasons are my mood and because I don’t have a good smile (I know I shouldn’t care how my smile looks, but I do). At the end of the day we are all different from one another, so take your selfies how you want to, and don’t let what other people think or what the cultural filters are in society affect you because if I did care too much, I would have done a lot more to my selfies than what I did.

 

 

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.

1. Micro-Narrative: a comment that expresses an aspect of the writer or an image showing a version of themselves.
2. 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.
3. Time lapse videos: shows us a certain aspect of something change over time, particularly selfies.
4. Profile pictures: the picture that you choose when signing up for a social media account that differentiates you from other users.
5. 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.

Whenever we open up Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, we see the most recent posts in our feed. We constantly see filtered pictures with a cliché caption under it and we like it and comment on it complimenting how good the person looks, everyday, almost like a routine. But when do we question it; how fake the picture is, or how much they filtered it, or even if it’s photoshopped. We usually don’t because when we first start our accounts on any social media platform (that allows pictures), we get recommendations or suggestions on who to either check out or follow and they are usually celebrities or famous people. They have the resources to make a picture look almost too good and we start to follow these people more and more, so all that we are seeing is filtered photos, this then inclines us to filter every picture that we post onto our accounts because we want to look like them.

This can be backed up by just looking at how many people filter or alter their pictures. Another aspect to look at is how many followers the person has, which can let us see just how many people they are influencing. I see it almost everyday, a person (famous or not) puts a filter on their picture, then puts a motivational/inspiring caption underneath it, and posts it (sometimes even reposting the same picture). They then get complimentary comments on how good they look. For example if you look on one of the most followed accounts on Instagram with around 120 million followers, Kim Kardashian, you see that she posts a picture of her posing with expensive outfits on for whatever reason (photoshoot, endorsements, or representing some brand). And she puts a motivational caption or a caption thanking a certain brand and you can clearly see that the picture is filtered and that she has a heavy amount of make-up on. Her followers see this and just mimic what she does, which throws out the creativity and realness with the pictures that they post.

In my opinion I think that just posting the good things that go on in your life isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you start altering the good to make it look even better, you are getting farther away from reality. It gives everybody the notion that your life is perfect and that nothing is ever wrong. I think that looking up to a celebrity or famous person is just fine (everybody does it at some point), it’s just when people try to mimic or copy them to a point that they are copying the personalities and mannerisms of that person, I think is too far and is bad for you. I think it’s bad because it’s giving you a false sense of reality and it’s affecting you and everyone around you; it can be self-destructive to your self image. It’s fine to post filtered pictures, but don’t do it too often or else people will change the way they see you in a negative way most of the time.

Summary: The way we see ourselves online is through a filter. We filter about everything that we do online. We can change or remove filters when they get “clogged up” by unwanted aspects of the picture that will make us look bad or give us an unattractive assumption about ourselves. Our social media feeds and cultural filters teach us to copy what the models of social media or social media stars look like through these filters because we want people to think that we are like them. This mimicry of popularized social media stars is used to try to get ourselves more followers more times than not. Not only can social media picture filters be a filter, but many other things can be considered, by definition, a filter (from a man-made dam to a curtain on the window to a snapchat filter). Technological filters can allow us to express ourselves in certain ways but not in others; we can apply certain filters to an image we post to Instagram but not Tumblr, we can post GIF’s to Reddit but not to Facebook, etc. We tend to post pictures about the good things and not the bad, like a highlight reel of our life.

Main Ideas & Terms:

1.) We filter everything we do online.

2.) Filters can change the way we look to show the perfections instead of the imperfections.

1.) Neo-liberal citizen: the people most likely to succeed on any social media platform, most likely to gain followers, and most likely to have their feeds filtered into your newsfeed.

2.) Cultural Filters: the rules and conventions to guide us in our culture, mainly through technology.

3.) Baby Journals: a type of journal that is used to form a collection of pictures from the new-born baby’s first year from being born.

4.) Social Media: websites and apps that allow users to create and share content with each other.

5.) Digital Filter: a system in which alters different aspects of a picture to make it look more attractive.

Analysis: I thought that this chapter was pretty spot on in that it describes the different filters that people use, how we use filters, and why we use filters, in depth. I agreed with most of what the author was stating in this chapter. I did like the coffee analogy as well, “social media isn’t simply the kind of filter that removes impurities, but also shapes them and flavors people as the ground coffee beans flavor the water that passes through them.” It shows that people are more concerned about how attractive they look instead of how they act/see other people. I do agree with the authors argument that you shouldn’t put a filter on yourself just to get compliments and attention, but I disagree that you can’t change the picture a little bit. For example, if the lighting or shading is really bad, you can change it to make it look good, but when it comes to anything else, don’t do it.

The first time I read through this article I didn’t seem to retain anything from it. In my mind, this was because one of two reasons, I either wasn’t fully concentrated on reading and comprehending the article or the article was harder to read because of it’s wording and the topic not being too clear. Thankfully I found out that it was the second reason and that I wasn’t alone on not getting it. But the more I read it, the more I could understand what he was getting at (even though I do so paragraph by paragraph). I think that he writes in a unusual but clever way, he seems to make a lot of metaphors and references in this article. I think that the main idea of popular culture blinding individuality is a topic that people don’t really want to talk about. People don’t want to criticize popular opinions and beliefs because there is always backlash and you then become a target. People conform to these beliefs because they are afraid of what other people will think about them if they don’t. You can see this conformity and backlash if you don’t conform to certain ideas and beliefs in many different areas and physical places in our society; religion, fashion, politics, the economy, sports, education, etc. The press and media affect us in both positive and negative ways. A few positive ways are: creating idols, awareness of ideologies, different beliefs, and finding out what interests you. A few negatives on the other hand are: it creates stereotypes, there is a loss of freedom to conformity, it creates a specific order in which you follow, and it can keep you from doing what you want. I do think that the media does do a bad job in basing their research on factual evidence, they tend to go off of what they think about a topic or  they go off of what other people heard or just try to get a headline worthy article to get something in the spotlight,  which creates false information and may even ruin a persons life/ create a bad reputation for them. For example the news stations (most) created a bad reputation for and had a bad view on Donald Trump as President because he criticized them for not being truthful all of the time or as he puts it “fake news.” Which in a sense he is correct in saying because it does happen a lot. In conclusion I think we need to stop relying on the media for creating personal beliefs or ideologies for us and do it on our own. We need to stop being easily offended by the littlest criticisms and let people think what they want to think, say what they want to say, and do what they want to do (in reason of course). In other words, just ignore the haters and keep doing what makes you happy.

Summary: The article describes and concentrates mainly on the negative effects of popular culture on the public that seem to be unseen/oblivious to them. Some specific habits of our minds have led to an almost natural reaction of exaggeration and necessity of the value of so-called “correct views” that the media puts out. These same habits and views have led to the disliking of modern art because we think it lacks a “message.” By keeping this mindset trained and conditioned to embrace popular beliefs in our culture, we have been accepting of the attitudes and opinions of the press/media. We as an industrialized society have lost the acceptance and conformity to uniqueness and individuality of our beliefs and opinions. We tend to believe what we see when it comes to the press and media.

Main Ideas and Terms:

1.) We have been accustomed to believe what we see when the press/media comes out with an article or tv segment.

2.) Popular Culture has shaped our country in mainly negative ways.

1.) Popular Culture: culture based on the tastes of ordinary people rather than an educated elite.

2.) Discontinuity: distinct differences of characteristics between parts of something.

3.) Modern art: the creative world’s response to the rationalist practices and perspectives of the new lives and ideas provided by the technological advances of the industrial age.

4.) Media: collective communication outlets to store and deliver information or data.

5.) Compliance: the act of agreeing with a set of ideas or beliefs.

Analysis: This article, though short, uses unusual and articulate wording to summarize the big problems with popular culture, specifically press/media. The author seemed to think that media and the press was the root of all evil in a society in terms of the negative effects it has on our society and through many different points criticizes media outlets, particularly the press and television. Although I do agree with him on the points of popular culture making us compliant to the media’s opinions and beliefs (that are regarded as the way you should do things/correct), I disagree with him on it being all bad and distasteful. For example it gives us a chance to form our own opinions and ideas from what we take in from the media. It also gives us a blueprint/basis for growth and change; it lets us see what’s good and what’s bad with our society and change it for the future. It can also be good in that it can allow kids to find out who their idols are and what they are like and what they do, so they have that hope and inspiration of becoming someone like their idols.

Through reading this article I found out that blogging isn’t what I thought it would be. In my mind I thought it would just be “inspirational and informational” collections of self-written articles, but about observational themes going on in the world, kind of like a news outlet mixed with social media. I seen blogs as a way for journalists to express their opinions more in depth than a regular news article. This perspective of blogging was formed by just what I heard from the internet and media. Before starting my own blog through this class, I didn’t really know much about blogging, I had never really read any or started my own. But now through not only starting my blog but reading these articles about blogging, I have a better idea of how they work and the community of it. This “community” is called the “blogosphere,” basically everybody that either has a blog that doesn’t really blog or has a blog and regularly blogs. From reading this article my perspective on who blogs and what the atmosphere around blogging is like has changed because the research provided by the Perseus Development Company suggests that most of the blogs that are created are abandoned because of inactivity. And that there are more than one type of blog, such as the “diarist” blogs and the “conversational” blogs. So with this information I now realize that the “Blogosphere” is made up of people that like to blog daily and have an interest in doing so and people that only want to do it just to try it and the information that either put out is either personality based or event-based. I also didn’t know the story behind how blogging got it’s popularity, it did so mainly because of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in New York. You get both perspectives of what happened that day from bloggers and newspapers/media outlets. The aspect that blogging had that the news didn’t were first hand accounts of what was happening, bloggers were actually typing what they saw while the destruction was going down. The media just had coverage of the second plane hitting and they generalize what everybody was feeling and what actually took place. There are many differences between blogs and media; blogs are non-profit and the media covers it for the money, blogs are described as a gift economy whereas the media is described as a market economy, and so on. This article covers the advantages of blogging over newspapers and traditional media, for example, it’s a democracy, meaning that anyone that has the requirements to blog (computer and internet access), can. A good example that they write about is the story of Kevin Barbieux of the “Homeless Guy” fame, in which this homeless guy decided one day to start blogging through the computers at a local library and continues to do so to this day. But a downfall to blogging is the access to a computer or internet, many poor countries can’t afford that many computers and in Bangladesh for example you can get internet if you are in the middle to upper class. In conclusion blogging can be a good way to express your feelings and whatever is on your mind because you have the freedom of writing whatever you want whenever you want if you are a blogger and blogging seems to be getting less popular with the rise of social media platforms.

Summary: The “Blogosphere” takes on a form of an iceberg, in that the vast majority of blogs float out of sight and out of mind. Active blogs might represent the conception of blogs in through the public’s perspective, but aren’t representative of blogs in general. It is seen that a “typical blog” is written by “a typical teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on activities/things that happen in her life.” The sense of community in the “Blogosphere” is made into existence within the minds of it’s members in a style that comes from the instant publishing medium itself to create a discursive, transnational, online imagined community. This “Blogosphere” community is based on a new form of journalism practiced by people who probably will never meet each other, yet can engage and interact with each other and even find a shared identity.

Main Ideas and Terms:

1.) Two-thirds of blogs that are created through hosting services are considered abandoned because they haven’t been updated in a couple months.

2.) The “Blogosphere” engages users as both consumers and producers at the same time.

1.) Meatspace: the term used by bloggers to describe the off-line world.

2.) Periphery: the outer limits of an object.

3.) Currentness: the quality of being current or up-to-date.

4.) Diarist Bloggers: write about personal lives and share individual experiences.

5.) Conversational Bloggers: write to educate and inform people and to also start conversations/debates.

Analysis: This article to me was good at expressing not only the authors point of view on this imagined community of the “Blogosphere,” but many different points of view from all different people (Perseus Development Company, Benedict Anderson, Jay Rosen, Senator Trent Lott, Kevin Barbieux). Some of their perspectives have the same main ideas and ideology and the others have completely different ways of looking at it.  The article also did a good job at using real world examples of these different perspectives; the newspaper vs blog idea, the rise of blogging through the 9-11 attacks, the fact that a homeless guy can start and run a blog. Although I see these as good things, I also see a bit of bias towards blogging instead of other ways of writing. For example the phrase: “blogging clearly has the upper hand on print and broadcast journalism,” yes it may be a better way of going about writing about different subjects and getting instant gratification but it is not the only way and it might not be an efficient way to do so to other people. It also had a lot of generalizations as well, which I can see as being adaptable for this type of article, but it doesn’t take into account other ways or perspectives of blogging through all of the different types of people that might not blog or do, but go about in a unnatural way.

I thought that this article/short book was informational and accurate (at least I think it is) based on the fact that the author Jill Retburg, backed up what she wrote with historical and real world examples of how self representation came to be and what it’s effects are on the individual and the social world around them. I liked the fact that she first states what the article/book is going to be about before she starts in with the chapters because it’s then easier for someone to know what it’s about right at the start and know what they are getting into. She says that she is going to cover three main aspects of self-representation; written, visual, and quantitative, which she does in detail. But I also thought that she wrote too many things that she didn’t need to, mostly common sense statements such as, “self representations have always been a part of our culture,” “people that were alive in the 16th century couldn’t get there opinion out mainly because there was a lack of technology,” and “social media is about communication with others.” I agree with her on the topic of amount of body we tend to show in pictures that get posted than previous times. I feel like there is a unnecessary need to show more of your body than you have to, for example, girls tend to show more of their skin than boys do because they think it will get them more attention, which it does in most cases. I’m not saying that it’s not alright to do that, do whatever you want, but I am saying that we see it more now than let’s say the medieval/colonial age, up to the 80’s and even the 90’s. There are a lot of ways that you can represent yourself and with every one, unless private, will get criticized at some point or the other because certain people have certain beliefs and they can’t accept anything that’s different. I get people have their own opinions on things but some people don’t need to go as far as they do, like I was taught, if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all and keep it to yourself. I also agree with how technology has advanced and grown to affect a larger amount of the population when it comes to self representation with cameras on our smartphones, different types of blogs, and social media platforms. It can’t be denied that if you want to get represented in a big way today, you have to either do what’s trending or be totally unique in what you do. And that to get the feeling of representation, you have to be responded to, commented on, or the amount of likes you get.  I guess it depends on the situation that a person is in because different topics need to be discussed more in depth and the comments or discussions that arise from these topics either provide a good or bad “footprint” on it and it can’t really be prevented. Overall this article/book gave me more knowledge on how self representation  has changed in society through technological developments.