The Selfie Assemblage

Abstract

As digital technology becomes increasingly powerful and portable, means of self-expression have fundamentally changed. To speak in this media milieu is to tweet, update a status, or post photographs to social networks. These forms of self-expression provide new means of communicating the self and articulating a sense of connection to others. The selfie, a form of self-portraiture typically created using smartphones or webcams and shared on social networks, has rapidly risen into the common visual vernacular and seems to accent a culture obsessed with itself. While labels of narcissism abound, the selfie also invites a different consideration about the complex nature of networked society. At the moment of capture, a selfie connects disparate modes of existence into one simple act. It features the corporeal self, understood in relation to the surrounding physical space, filtered through the digital device, and destined for social networks. Each of these elements appears in relation to the others, attracting competing logics and languages of belonging and expression into one quick photograph. In other words, the selfie exists at the intersection of multiple assemblages (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Wise, 2005) that draw complex and often contradictory subjectivities together. In this essay, I examine the selfie as a representational form within locative media that enunciates each of these inherent dimensions as it manifests within a constellation of assemblages. This positioning allows for critical examination of selfies as entanglements of subjectivities within a massively mediated and networked society.