See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/315855563

Reading the Self in Selfies

Article  in  Comparative Critical Studies · October 2016

DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2016.0211

CITATION READS
1 1,743

1 author:

Hannah Westley
American University of Paris
3 PUBLICATIONS   34 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Hannah Westley on 18 January 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Comparative Critical Studies 13.3 (2016): 371–390
Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2016.0211


C British Comparative Literature Association
www.euppublishing.com/ccs

Reading the Self in Selfies

HANNAH WESTLEY

Abstract:
Responding to recent scholarship from auto/biography and media studies, this
article situates the selfie as a text which makes meaning through its placement in
a narrative framework. Considering how our online representation interacts with
traditional means of self-representation, the article focuses on how this affects the
way we understand the key concepts of narrative and identity. To what extent are
selfies the most recent incarnation of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, relocating the
problematics of autobiography as genre as an interaction between reader and text?
What we refer to as a selfie refers to the act of taking a picture, the picture itself and
the placement of that picture within specific technologies of exhibition and archiving.
Like the selfie, identity is both a practice and a product and critics must be more
attentive to this distinction.

Every picture tells a story, doesn’t it? But hard as I might try, piecing
together the clues from her facial expression (happy, but sincere?), well-
combed hair (short or tied-back?), white sleeveless dress (dressed for
work?) and the anonymity of the background (are those café chairs, her
kitchen chairs or a friend’s?), there’s relatively little I can read into a selfie
taken and posted on Instagram by someone I don’t know. Of course, my
interpretation of this selfie changes as soon as I follow the user. Now I
see how her selfie slots into other images of her life: posted by herself
and others. I start to have an idea of her age, interests, background. If
I friend her on Facebook, the chronology of her Facebook home page
and the details listed about her home, education and work start to satisfy
my narrative curiosity. When I follow her on Twitter, her interests start
to define the sort of online life she leads: her political leanings, what
makes her laugh and whom she finds interesting. Now a story is starting
to emerge. It’s not the whole story: it’s a fragmented and dispersed
narrative distributed across time and space. It’s a narrative driven by my
participation in the affordances of diverse social media. The user’s selfies
are a large part of how I interpret this story, giving me a face to impose

371
372 HANNAH WESTLEY
on the data; a face that through a series of self-portraits shows this person
looking sunny, sultry or sad.
Social media, as Jill Walker Rettberg has observed, is both serial
and cumulative. There is no closure to the stories we perceive and read
across different networking sites and blogs. Even death doesn’t conclude
a Facebook feed as friends and families continue to post messages and
pictures of the deceased, often addressing them directly. There is also
often, but not always, a lack of causality between images, posts and
updates: it’s hard to discern connections or sequences. Partly for this
reason, narrative has become a problematic term when it comes to
interpreting identity formation on the Internet. But, of course, narrative
refers not only to a product but a process, just as identity is a process:
we cast off one expression, one selfie, and assume another. Selfies resist
temporal containment. Unlike a self-portrait in a gallery or a memoir that
delimits and defines a passage of time, the selfie, through its distribution
across social media technology, is constantly in movement and always
has the potential for change: updates, digital transformation, re-framing.
In a similar fashion, a selfie differs from a framed self-portrait on your
bathroom wall in as much as once you’ve made that image public or
semi-public (determined by the level of your privacy settings), you cede
control of it (and not just to the site whose terms and conditions you
approved). If portraits and autobiographical texts have always been open
to appropriation, interpretation and misinterpretation, how your selfie
is read, as well as the value it acquires, will depend on the level of inter-
activity it solicits. Friends, family and friends of friends and how they
click, like, comment, tag, re-tweet, share and follow will now affect how
that image travels on the Internet and how and where other people see it.
The very nature of identity formation on the Internet is prospective,
rather than retrospective. I am exhorted by Facebook to update my
status with what’s on my mind, Twitter asks me what’s happening,
Instagram asks me to share my photographs and videos. Our online
activity generates a multiplicity of virtual identities. The question this
article will address is whether the selfie, as a socio-technological act,
can be thought of as constituting an autobiographical narrative. Is the
term narrative even applicable here? And if we accept that our identities,
multiple and singular, are composed through narrative, the stories we tell
to others about ourselves, how are we to interpret that narrative? How
do our visual online identities interact with traditional means of self-
representation and how does this affect the way we understand narrative
and identity?
 Reading the Self in Selfies 373
Since the advent of Web 2.0, one of the most significant developments
has been the move away from textual forms of representation (blogs or
websites) towards the purely visual. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter
are being increasingly abandoned in favour of sites such as Instagram,
Flickr, Tumblr, Snapchat and Pinterest whose principal medium is that
of the iconic sign. In 2014, according to data from Samsung, selfies
made up almost one-third of all photos taken by people aged 18–24,
with Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat bearing the
brunt of that load. According to data released in June 2016, 24 billion
selfies were uploaded over the past year to Google Photos alone. What
does this online activity reveal about our identity formation? Does it
indicate that the way we represent ourselves to the world is increasingly
predicated on our sense of the visual; that we privilege sight in identity
formation above and beyond other senses? In this privileging of the
visual, are we thus witnessing a return to a specular coherent sense of self,
one that is dependent upon the ocular-centric Cartesian I/eye? Or does
the proliferation of images, the rapidity with which online images can be
updated with the ease of the technology afforded by handheld devices
and the haptic interactivity of Web 2.0 come closer to the splintered
and dispersed sense of self that is our experience of a lived identity? To
what extent are ‘selfies’ the most recent incarnation of Philippe Lejeune’s
autobiographical pact, relocating the problematics of autobiography as
genre as an interaction between reader and text?1
As narrative has become an increasingly contentious term in the field
of online representation, many auto/biographical scholars have sought
alternative ways to describe the way in which online self-representation
communicates. In 2010, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading
Autobiography proposed the term life narratives as a replacement for
autobiographical narrative as a way to describe ‘autobiographical acts of
any sort’ thereby including the representation of another person’s life
as well as one’s own and the description of non-written forms of self-
representation ‘written, performative, visual, filmic or digital’.2 However
in 2014 in Identity Technologies, Anna Poletti and Julie Rak suggest that
online life writing shows us that narrative is not the only, or perhaps
even the best way, to understand self-representation: they propose that
now is the time to ‘rethink the operation of narrative, and its relation to
identity so that we can understand the explosion of digital identity work
in all its forms’.3 In the same edition, Lejeune foresees in online self-
representation the end of narrative identity.4 In 2015’s Online Lives 2.0,
Rak explores narrative, gaming and cyber life and proposes the concept of
374 HANNAH WESTLEY
automediality as a ‘useful term for naming both the product (media about
a maker) and the process (the process of mediating the self, or auto)’.5
The debate is not confined to autobiography. From the social sciences,
Douglas Rushkoff contends that we live in a ‘postnarrative world’. He
believes that the narrative collapse he perceives has left contemporary
culture in a state of panic and trauma as it struggles to deal with the
permanent present of a digital reality.6
For these scholars, the problem with the term narrative is that it
implies a text, a certain causality, the imposition of sequence on an
otherwise disconnected series of events. As Lejeune has pointed out,
the purpose of narrative identity is to harmonize the past and present.7
He defines autobiographical narrative as ‘the retrospective narrative
in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he puts the
principal accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his own
personality’.8 In light of this definition, the performative nature of self-
representation online appears to come closer to what we understand as
antinarrative: an episodic series of scenes with no obvious chronology,
which highlights the artificial nature of the retrospective autobiographical
narrative.
Narrative is now a widely used, some would say overused, term across
the academic disciplines, from science to politics, from medicine to
cognitive science, therefore its definition is continually revised. However,
a constant in the application of the term is the way it is bound up in stories
and how we tell stories to ourselves about the world we live in. Walter
Fisher’s narrative paradigm sees narrative as the foundation of human
communication. Fisher insists that people are essentially story-tellers and
that individuals choose and create their own stories to make sense of
the world according to history, culture and character. Life is a series of
ongoing narratives which we make sense of through recourse to narrative
rationality: the coherence and fidelity of those stories. From psychology,
Jerome Bruner pushes this concept further to develop his theory of the
narrative construction of reality. In a recent article, autobiographical
scholar Paul John Eakin highlights these two aspects of narrative: ‘two
different yet not mutually exclusive understandings of narrative are in
play here, one conceiving narrative narrowly as a literary form or forms,
the other entertaining a broader view of narrative as something to do
with society, with identity, with the body. Taken together, these two
approaches remind us that both nature and nurture contribute to the rise
and value of talking about ourselves’.9 Eakin situates narrative as being
constitutive of identity: a daily practice we assimilate in a cultural context
 Reading the Self in Selfies 375
that is made up of stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and others,
from earliest childhood.
So too are selfies a learnt practice, a practice that is technologically
and culturally shaped but also shaping, a practice that forms part of our
online identities. But do selfies merely illustrate the stories we tell others
through their representation of those facets, faces and masks that reveal
and conceal our private and public personas? Or are they the building
blocks of narrative that come to constitute our online identity? Just as
autobiographical practice constructs a narrative about the self, so too
do self-portraits. In visual art practice, self-portraits make statements
about the identity of the person represented: statements that are open
to narrative interpretation. Narrative is not the signifier but the signified:
the story we infer from the visual clues we are given. Narrative therefore,
like identity, is part of an intersubjective process: a process of making
meaning.
Just as the term narrative has been challenged in the field of auto/
biographical studies, so too has the term identity become controversial
in cultural studies, leading a number of theorists to reject the term and
look for alternatives such as nomadic subjects, identification or affect.10
For these scholars, the advantage of an alternative terminology is in
its move away from essentialist approaches to human subjectivity and
toward an understanding of identity as decentred and multiple, fluid and
contingent. In studies of online identity formation, it is useful to bear
in mind the dual understanding of identity. There are both utopian and
dystopian views of today’s digital identities and their social, political and
cultural ramifications. There is a recurring theme through much writing
that celebrates the opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 to give voice to pre-
viously oppressed or marginalized identities. There is an equally strong
current of writing that warns against the commodification of online self-
representation. Mark Poster has called identity theft the quintessential
crime of the information age because it highlights the fact that identity
now refers to both ‘an aspect of consciousness (an awareness of continuity
in time and space) and a complex of media content contained in informa-
tion machines that combine to define an individual’.11 This goes to the
heart of one of the selfie’s defining paradoxes: the way in which a gesture,
which is often celebrated as empowering,12 can also be disempowering as
identities as products are circulated, manipulated and appropriated. But
it also highlights the dialectic between process and product, which as we
shall see, has always been at work in autobiography. For the purposes
of this essay, I shall use identity as Woodward defined it, as the practice
376 HANNAH WESTLEY
of actively taking up identity positions and presenting the resulting
constructions to others:13 a process of similarity and difference.
Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Poletti and Rak, this article
adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of online identity:
‘Just as the insights of auto/biography studies about identity and
narrative could prove to be very fruitful when we theorize Internet
identities and how they are constructed [. . . ] so auto/biography studies
could benefit from the work of media studies on non-narrative forms
of identity work.’14 Indeed, the cross-disciplinary interest in online
self-representation was testified to in 2015 by the publication of journals
from different disciplinary fields within a few months of each other: The
International Journal of Communication Special Issue ‘Selfies’ and Biog-
raphy ‘Online Lives 2.0’. I agree with Poletti and Rak that the ‘production
of a self through representation is a more complex affair than a conscious
performance as commonly argued in new media studies’ (p. 5) and that
careful attention must be paid to the processes of mediation inherent in
self-representation. However, if textual analysis is a contested form of
analysis within the fields of media and communication studies, I believe
that it is not only useful but imperative to examine the rise of a phenom-
enon such as the selfie through the framework of autobiographical theory
as this discipline sheds invaluable light on the mediation of the self in
social signification. In the first half of this essay, I shall illustrate the
ways in which the act of taking a selfie and the very medium of the selfie
differ from other forms of photographic self-representation, while in the
second half of the essay, I shall explore the ways in which selfies, once
posted to a media platform, can be seen to constitute a narrative. I will
suggest that selfies function both as bounded texts, identity images that
are open to narrative interpretation, and that they are part of an ongoing
story, a multitude of overlapping images that give rise to a narrative of
identity. My discussion of the selfie will focus mainly on its circulation
on social networking sites such as Instagram and Facebook. However, it
is difficult to limit the discussion to one or two platforms as now when
a selfie is posted to Instagram, it can be shared immediately with other
social networks, which include but are not limited to Twitter, Facebook,
Foursquare, Hipstamatic, Mixi, Weibo, VK, Tumblr and Flickr.

TAKING A SELFIE

It is helpful at this point to remind ourselves of the definition of the selfie.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a selfie is: ‘a photograph that one
 Reading the Self in Selfies 377
has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or a webcam
and uploaded to a social media website’.15 Senft and Baym expand this
definition: ‘a selfie is a photographic object that initiates the transmission
of human feeling in the form of a relationship [. . . ] A selfie is also a
practice – a gesture that can send (and is often intended to send) different
messages to different individuals, communities and audiences’.16 So a
selfie is both the product of photography and the act or process of sharing
this product with others.
Taking a picture of oneself has never been easier. I tilt my phone
looking for the best source of light, the way my head fits into the frame,
I check the background, the best angle. I take one but am dissatisfied
with the result – after all, I’m taking this photo with an audience in mind
and I want them to see me in a certain way: I seek to control the way
my image will be interpreted. The Instagram feed of an acknowledged
serial selfie taker such as Kim Kardashian reveals a mosaic of images,
of which selfies play a small but significant role. To identify the selfies
I look for the use of a hashtag and the intertextual motifs that have
come to define the genre: the upward tilt, the three-quarter shot, the
duckface, the belfie, the ussie, the uglie. These recognizable and accepted
tropes also function as a form of self-reflexivity. The proliferation
of hashtags across the platform gives an indication of the breadth of
representational styles adopted by selfie takers and the multitude of uses
to which the images are put: #selfiesaftersex, #gymselfie, #gayselfie,
#instagay, #selfienation, #pretty, #handsome, #instagood, #instaselfie,
#selfietime, #shamelessselfie, #life, #hair, #fun, #followme, #instalove,
#eyes, #igdaily, #smile, #hot, #memyselfandi, #selfportrait.
Frequently, photos framed by one of these many hashtags reveal only
lips, feet on a beach, a close-up view of a partially revealed part of the
body. Users do not feel constrained by the definition of self-portrait to
provide a recognizable likeness: synecdoches operate like part-objects
standing in for identity. Other users present themselves with friends
or family: bolstered by the presence of another, their identity is also
determined by the company they keep. Selfie takers post numerous
likenesses and these likenesses alter with mood, context and setting.
There is no single image that captures identity. Far from appearing
to believe that their photos reveal an essential self, selfie takers use
their pictures to explore multiple identities within the constraints of the
medium: technological affordances and cultural customs. Not all self-
representations are validated by the media platforms they are posted
to. Facebook’s much debated censoring of certain images and identities
378 HANNAH WESTLEY
(breast-feeding mothers or users identifying as transsexual) mean that
selfies are bound by the conventions of their genre.
As individual entities selfies are self-portraits: taken to express aspects
of the subject’s identity. In order to understand how selfies function
as self-portraits and to understand how self-portraits are, like any
autobiographical act, a construction of identity, we must consider the
interplay between the self and the representation of the self. Walker
Rettberg reminds us that as ‘readers, we encounter other people in
social media as texts. From our perspective their self-expression is self-
representation.’17 The selfie has been made possible by two developments
in photographic technology: the preview screen, which began to appear
in amateur digital cameras at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
and the double-lensed device, one lens pointing in the same direction
as the preview screen. These features allow the portrait-taker to treat
the preview screen as if it were a mirror and adapt pose and focus
accordingly. So the selfie is seen to reproduce the mirror likeness of an
original: an instance of identity that is reflected and received. In this
semiotic economy, the coincidence of the signifier and the signified, we
read the reproduced likeness as representing the portrait-taker’s identity.
As such, we read the portraits to discover more about the subject: we look
to pose, composition, lighting, context, gesture, expression. We consider
what is included in the frame as well as those telltale glimpses of what has
been excluded. In a Cartesian logic, to represent accurately objects in the
world is to know and understand them. In the continuation of this logic,
reading a likeness reveals the identity of the self that took the selfie.
Over the past forty years, theorists and scholars, from
poststructuralism on, have sought ways to challenge and problematize
this specular synthesis. Visual artists and literary autobiographers have
experimented with the expressive means to challenge the notion of an
indivisible self that can be captured in representation and explore how
the media of representation can give rise to multiple and provisional
identifications. Through the mass media technology provided by smart
phones, more people than ever have the opportunity to play with their
identity and the way it is matched or mismatched with their sense of
self. Yet scholars still continue to perceive a discrepancy that exists
between the ‘self’ as perceived by the user and the ‘self’ as theorized by
scholars of media and autobiography. Smith and Watson observe: ‘When
constructing personal web pages or the like, users themselves often
imagine that they are revealing their “real” or “true” essence, a person
or “me” who is unique, singular, and outside social constructions and
 Reading the Self in Selfies 379
constraints. Theorists of media and autobiography, however, approach
the constructed self not as an essence but as a subject, a moving target,
which provisionally conjoins memory, identity, experience, relationality,
embodiment, affect, and limited agency’ (p. 71). The selfie in particular
can create the illusion of access to and representation of a ‘single’ or ‘true’
self and part of the problem lies in photography’s long association with
truth-telling. Analogue photography quoted from appearance: on the
level of denotation, to quote Roland Barthes, the photograph is a ‘message
sans code’;18 it is weak in intentionality because the photographic
message is simply given. Analogue photographs were seen to close the
gap between external likeness and the self of the depicted through the
indexical trace of light waves from the sitter’s body to the photographic
emulsion. However, the advent of networked digital photography has
problematized this semiotic economy.
Traditionally the act of self-representation is the act that challenges
death. A portrait is the story of the life, the story that still has to be
formed and shaped by the representation of it. Death is made intelligible
by portraying and fixing the life-story. Without the act of representation,
the life remains unshaped and indistinguishable from death. From this
perspective, the motivation for the act of representation is the desire
to transform the unacceptable fact of death into an event – an event
in which death is acceptable because it is represented as absence. For
certain theorists, the act of self-representation corresponds to death.
For Barthes, a dependency on a unity-bestowing relation to the self-
image is not desirable but mortifying: the subject loses itself when it
is objectified in representation.19 The loss of self happens because the
objectification of the subject that brings about an experience of wholeness
is a discursive transformation that translates the subject into terms of the
doxa, the platitudes of public opinion. In becoming image, the subject
is not confronted with itself in its essential quality but in becoming
an image it is alienated from itself. However the body appears, the
subject has no control over how others perceive it. To experience the
process by which the subject becomes object is to undergo a kind of
mini-death.
Networked digital photography has brought about a radical shift
in this subject-to-object transformation. As Jose Van Dijck observes,
analogue photographs were often viewed as the ‘still’ input for ‘static’
images while digital photography more explicitly serves as a visual
resource in a life-long project to reinvent one’s self-appearance.20 The
facility and rapidity with which we can take and upload photographs
380 HANNAH WESTLEY
combined with the many possibilities of manipulation and remodeling,
opens up a panorama of potential likenesses. The nature of networked
identity functions in a logic of constant renewal. Selfies are taken to be
shared and users regularly update their photostreams in order to remain
a visible presence in the feed of their followers. Partly as a consequence
of these developments, photographic self-portraiture is moving away
from the photograph as object to the photograph as experience. If
Susan Sontag argued in 197321 that the tourist’s tendency to take
snapshots on holiday reveals how taking pictures can become paramount
to experiencing an event, then today’s selfies are used in a similar fashion,
as postcards, diary entries or linked to the notion of witnessing an event.22
And like postcards, many cameraphone pictures are not intended to be
archived: they are disposable. Users may curate and save digital images
but the popularity of applications such as Snapchat, where users state
how long their ‘snaps’ will be available for viewing, indicate that the
ephemerality of such imagery is part of its appeal.23 Van Dijck observes
how the cameraphone appears to merge oral and visual modalities.
Pictures come to resemble spoken language as photographs become the
new currency for social interaction: pixellated images circulate amongst
communities to establish and reconfirm bonds. Today’s selfies are a true
vernacular genre: taken in order to be communicated.
If online visual self-representation is therefore a language that
communicates and incites exchange, it thus provides us with the means
to elude the mortifying effects of the doxa. Images of the self insert
themselves into the life story and compose a narrative or a language.
Language is a shifting, symbolic order, which appears to cohere into
an Imaginary whole but is always subtended by fragmentation. Rather
than congealing into a purely imaginary entity, this new vernacular
genre destabilizes subjectivity and evokes the dispersed self. So there
has been a fundamental shift in photography’s signification in online
self-representation. The accumulation, juxtaposition and reframing of
visual self-representation online attempts to avoid petrification and
to evade the coalescence of the Imaginary. But of course, whatever
we post online is subject to interpretation and is therefore unable to
guarantee the dispersion of the Subject. The triumph of the Symbolic
over the Imaginary or the Imaginary over the Symbolic is dependent
on the reader’s interaction with the text. Self-representation, however
fragmented or faithful to the discontinuity of experience, remains an
exertion of control over self-image. The subject who is also the object
of his/her own gaze provides a likeness which is then given over to the
 Reading the Self in Selfies 381
gaze of the spectator. The search inherent to self-representation is that of
the desire to recognize and to be recognized.
If visual self-representation is the effect of a constructed similarity
between identity and image, reception of the image galvanizes an act of
recognition that is a production rather than a perception of meaning. Part
of this recognition in the selfie hinges upon those indexical traces that we
continue to look to in an attempt to ground the referent: the flash in the
mirror, the outstretched arm, the armature or selfie-stick. The relational
nature of the autobiographical pact depends on the authorization of the
text’s reader and the trust that reader places in the ‘truth’ of the self-
representation. The indexical signs or traces we look for in online self-
representation both ground and ‘authorize’ the referent. But the divide
between fact and fiction in online identity formation is increasingly
permeable: Facebook reported 1.65 billion monthly active users as of
March 31, 2016 while it estimated that fake accounts make up between
5.5 and 11.2 percent of those users. So the authenticity supposedly
guaranteed by these indexical traces becomes redundant. We can no
longer assume the semiotic economy of mimetic representation: a unity
between signifier and signified. Instead we are forced to acknowledge
the irreconcilable split between the signifier and signified as the subject
is shaped as simulacrum instead of as origin. Thus the problematic
of online self-representation is resituated as a transaction – a search for
identity that is located between self and other, the self represented and
the viewer.24
In the sphere of autobiographical studies, the idea that a text expressed
a self or identity (in other words, conflated the past represented self
with the present writing self) long ago gave way to the notion that
identity is a product of the writing process. In a similar fashion, online
self-representation renders visible the interactive reflexivity and social
construction of identity. Therefore photographic self-representation
now foregrounds the same dilemma as autobiography, highlighted by
Lejeune: refocusing the problematics of transmission and reception onto
the contractual genre that is an interaction between reader and text.
To speak of Lejeune’s ‘pacte autobiographique’ as that of a transaction
between writer and reader is to insist upon the constitutive role of an
intersubjective relation between self and other in generating identity. In
doing so, attention is diverted from the illusory unity of the ego and
towards the more malleable concept of a subject-in-process. Thus self-
representation online cannot be thought of as constructing a stable mirror
382 HANNAH WESTLEY
image of the self which can be exported from text to life but rather creates
a profusion of signs and traces of selfhood, which are generated over time.

POSTING THE SELFIE

‘What does narrative do for us?’ asks Abbott in The Cambridge

Introduction to Narrative, ‘If we had to choose one answer above all
others, the likeliest is that narrative is the principle way our species
organizes its understanding of time.’25 If some scholars have observed
how the digital age has seemingly given rise to a perpetual present
(see Rushkoff), others have observed how photo streams afforded by
applications such as Instagram create a timeline that appears to mirror
real time.26 The problem with a single image is that it stands outside
of the time continuum. We may read a narrative into an image but
often those images, through their lack of or only partial information, will
frustrate our narrative desire. So we look to the context, the surrounding
images, dates and captions. Looking at a selfie on a social network is
the start of an exploration and the viewer’s narrative search spreads
across text, image and other networks. In her early work on narrative
in blogs, Walker Rettberg defines distributed narrative in contrast to
narrative’s traditional unities: ‘Distributed narratives are stories that
aren’t self-contained. They’re stories that can’t be experienced in a single
session or in a single space. They’re stories that cross over into our
daily lives, becoming as ubiquitous as the network that fosters them.’27
When I post my selfie, I solicit interaction from my followers and I am
therefore aware that although I have authored the text, it will now be
interconnected with other authors who will co-construct the narrative.
This awareness might lead me to edit my text: I’ll renew or remove my
selfies or crank up my privacy settings. The identity I curate and create
online accumulates and spreads and communicates aspects of my identity
but there’s always another story that remains untold. The construction
of any autobiographical narrative, through technological and cultural
constraints, conceals as much as it reveals.
The selfie is a very particular instance of self-representation: a
historically specific, technologically enabled and culturally shaped
practice. As we’ve seen, a selfie is defined as much by the way it
communicates within specific technologies of exhibition and archiving,
as by its content. I usually post my selfies online in chronological fashion
but the interactive nature of Web 2.0 does not always respect chronology
and these selfies can be received in a non-sequential manner. As a reader,
 Reading the Self in Selfies 383
I may make a linear reading of somebody else’s selfies but I create
this narrative from a non-linear story field. When I post my selfie to
Instagram, I can immediately share it to other social networks and my
text becomes part of other users’ narratives, users who can, in turn,
make the selfie appear elsewhere depending on my stipulations (or lack
thereof). I make choices both as author and reader about how these
narratives develop. The further my selfie travels, the greater becomes
the likelihood of it giving rise to multiple narrative interpretations: the
denotation remains unchanged but the image’s connotations will vary on
the cultural context in which it is received.
In the analogy of a web, we have the notion of an infinitely expanding
entity: selfies glittering like frost on the complex handiwork of three
billion arachnoid users. In this image of concentric expansion, there are
two forces at work in online self-representation and its relation to identity
formation. On the one hand, we have the centrifugal force pushing out
from the centre (re-posting, re-tweeting, re-presenting): a digital shadow
that expands exponentially with each click on the keyboard. While, on
the other hand, we have the centripetal force pulling back to the centre,
not to an originating image, but back to the latest profile picture, the
most recent selfie: the emergence of the latest likeness that most closely
reflects that user’s sense of identity at that time, in that instant. Inherent
to this tension are apparently contradictory values. The further my selfie
travels in terms of time and space, travel that is generated in clicks
and commentary, the greater its value; especially in terms of branding,
advertising and the promotional material of which selfies now play a large
part on the web. However, the selfie that holds the greatest value for
me is the most recent selfie: that image which captures most closely my
intimacy through its proximity to the present.
Time and causality are central narrative concerns in autobiographical
texts but online we have become adept at reading narratives that have
no apparent causality. Considering the data that arises from lifelogging,
Walker Rettberg observes: ‘Quantitative self-representation is pre- or
post-narrative [. . . ]. We may well infer causality [. . . ] but this requires
interpretation. As the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser (1988) argued, we
are good at reading more into a story than is written there. We fill in the
gaps, what Iser called the lehrstelle, that are not explained in the story.
Perhaps as we become more and more accustomed to reading quantitative
representations, we will become even more adept at interpreting them
as stories’ (p. 11). If causality refers to the force or forces that shape a
narrative, self-representation implicates the author as the governing force
384 HANNAH WESTLEY
behind the representation. In the absence of explicit cause giving rise
to the representation, as readers we rely upon the interactivity afforded
by the media networking interface to impose a narrative sequence that
maps implicit causality. In other words, from the fragments of a story,
I actively construct a narrative arc that makes sense to me. We have
become equally adept at dealing with a never-ending present tense. In
her discussion of serial narrative on Twitter, Ruth Page observes how
real-time narration and reverse-order sequencing of the narrative archive
influence the narrative quality:

First, episodes (or updates, or posts) often avoid the past-tense verb forms
commonly associated with narrativity (indeed, use of the past tense is criterial in
early definitions of narrative, such as Labov’s [1972]). Instead, real-time narration
found most prominently in social-network sites like Facebook and Twitter favors
present-tense or non-finite verb forms, creating an ongoing sense of an ever-present
‘now’ that bridges the asynchronous gap between the time of narrative production
and narrative reception.28

Online, instead of relying on past-tense verbs, we read the dates of posts

as we scroll down the page. However, reverse chronology which helps
us to interpret or impose a narrative reading on social network feeds is
in the process of changing. As I write, Instagram’s proposed changes to
their chronological feed are taking effect, to the indignation of many of
its users. Instead of seeing posts in the order they are posted, algorithms
now determine which posts appear where in our feeds. According to
Instagram, our photos and videos will now be ordered ‘based on the
likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the
person posting and the timeliness of the post.’29 This is in accordance
with the same practice on Facebook, which defaults to algorithmically
determined posts despite users who choose the ‘most recent’ option on
their News Feed.
While such changes are a sharp reminder to us of our own real lack
of agency on social networks, they have little impact on the way we
build narratives. Already, there are multiple different points of entry or
beginnings, in media res, for the narratives we choose to construct. If I
want to see what’s been happening most recently in the life of a Facebook
friend, I switch to their own Timeline, where I can choose to read the
recent posts (in reverse chronological order), the posts I haven’t seen, or
posts from the years she has been active on Facebook. Alternatively, I can
build a portrait based on her selfies under ‘Photos of her’, her interests,
life events, the books or the videos she’s posted. On Instagram, I use the
 Reading the Self in Selfies 385
Discover tab to select and follow users whom I find interesting. If I hover
over the time icon in the top right-hand corner of the image, I find out
when exactly it was posted. I can also turn on the notifications option to
be alerted to when they post their next picture. Such user interactivity
replaces linear causality or teleology in a similar fashion to the reader
negotiating a text in ergodic literature, cyber or digital fiction. The lack of
closure in serial narrative non-fiction is not a new phenomenon. As Page
points out, ‘Other story arcs are possible that do not imply a problem-
solution pattern or place interpretive or aesthetic value on a point of
closure.’30 They are familiar to us from such media as diary writing,
reality television, sports commentary and news reporting.
My past online takes form in patchwork fashion but I can curate
my pictures to create a backstory for my readers. We post photographs
from the past as well as the present, both of ourselves and others,
as babies, children and graduates. Throwback Thursday is a trend on
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that invites us to post old photos.
Facebook’s A Year in Review also allows us to select the past year’s
highlights. The popularity of selfie timelapse videos testifies to our
fascination with watching the effects of time on our self-representations.
Memory has traditionally been conceived as visual and photography has
long been associated with memory and remembering. Much modern
autobiography draws upon the mnemonic power of visual imagery often
leading the autobiographer to include or refer to or describe photographs
or to adopt a fragmented text, analogous to a collection of snapshots.31
Memory is inherent to self-representation, constituting in large part the
knowledge or sense of the self. The building of online visual memory
archives is a process of voluntary memory: an effort of recall that
involves the recognition of the relevance of the past to the present
moment. The photographic moment interrupts the timeline continuum
by taking a frame out of its context for perusal in the future. In this
way, the use of online images comes close to the notion of linear time
as constituted through traditional autobiographical narrative. However,
the collaborative nature of online image archiving, the invitations to like,
tag, comment and share mean that images do not always appear as and
when expected. There are times online when a picture of myself from
the past appears unbidden, thrown up by an algorithm or posted by
someone else, and it is in its potential as a catalyst for involuntary memory
that photography has often been most prized by autobiographers. This
incorporation of images of the past creates the effect of looking at the self
as though the self were another. A picture of the past flashes upon the
386 HANNAH WESTLEY
consciousness of the reader/viewer and transforms our perception of the
present reality. The picture of the past, detached from history, represents
an unexpected confrontation of the past with the present moment thus
giving rise to involuntary autobiographical memory.
While social network interfaces often invite us to build sequential
narratives, these narratives can also be formed through other dictates,
such as emotion. To like a selfie implies that it has an effect on us, an
affect that can be likened to Barthes’ concept of the punctum. If Barthes
develops the notion of the studium to denote the cultural, linguistic, and
political interpretations of a photographic image, the punctum denotes
the detail within the image that establishes a direct affective connection
with the object or person within it.32 Paul Frosh has observed how
selfies conspicuously integrate still images into a technocultural circuit
of corporeal social energy he calls kinaesthetic sociability.33 This circuit
connects the bodies of individuals, our mobility through physical and
informational spaces, and the micro-bodily hand and eye movements
we use to operate digital interfaces. This corporeal dimension opens
up space for thinking about affect and the way in which we respond to
selfies, indeed to any online image, in an instinctive and reactive fashion:
interfaces encourage us to respond emotionally, via a physical response or
gesture (clicking) before we have registered the reasons for our reaction.
Affect deals with a state of inbetween-ness: in the capacities to act or be
acted upon.34 In such a way, we might curate archives of images governed
by emotion rather than logic: shaped by subjective or experiential time
rather than objective or calendrical time. Our personal experience of
the duration of time is dependent on our emotional experience of an
event: the way it affects us. These non-linear or multi-strand narratives
superimpose the past upon the present and interrupt the flow of time.
Both past and present selves can be accessed simultaneously therefore
these past selves represent not only a reliquary of memory, a catalyst of
nostalgic sentiment, but demonstrate how our present identity is formed
also through reference to the past and the eruption of the past in the
present.
The autobiographical impulse is more prevalent than ever due to the
widespread usage of Web 2.0 and the role of the prosumer in generating
their own online life narratives. It could be argued that unlike the fixity
and finite possibilities of self-representation in traditional autobiography
and self-portraiture, Web 2.0 with its multiple possibilities for self-
representation comes closer than other media to representing the
discontinuous nature of affective experience. The possibility for status
 Reading the Self in Selfies 387
updates, the renewal and replacement of images means that selfies
come and go, overlaying each other as they move down or off the
page. The multiplicity of identities proposed and created by Web 2.0
offers variety and diversity: there is no single perfect selfie. Identity is
unlocatable and involves displacement. It is not what the Self is but what
the Other perceives. Lejeune’s concept of the ‘pacte autobiographique’
is that of a relationship that the reader enters into with the text
and consequently with the autobiographer: the reader enters into the
relationship confident that the self-representation will have relevance as
well as referentiality. Self-representation therefore has an overt public
dimension; it is a performative process where subjectivity evolves at the
point of encounter with the viewer. It not only involves an engagement
or negotiation with the conventions of genre but also with an imaginary
Other, an interpolated subjectivity that receives and responds to the
image with which it is presented. Thus the self online, like the self
offline, becomes a process of invention, performance, reciprocity and
intersubjectivity. Online self-representation does not offer a reflection
of existing images but rather dispels fixity as it engenders a sequence
of provisional recognitions. It could be argued that new media offers the
possibility of constructing a different subject, a ‘subject-in-process’, to
use Julia Kristeva’s term, a subject which is not fixed but ‘constantly
called into question’.35 But can the representation of this subject through
the medium of the selfie be read as narrative?
As I have indicated, narratives of identity across the Internet cannot
be conceived of in a traditionally linear fashion: the past can be re-
framed and represented at any present or future moment. This online
autobiographical narrative may strive for a unified self but it remains
fragmented, inconclusive, a series of provisional self-portraits where the
multiplicity of images breaks up and offsets the imposition of a mono-
lithic identity, revealing the premises of its construction. Rather than
the diachronic development of a traditional autobiographical narrative,
we are witnessing identity formation expand synchronically in a story
composed of images contributed both by ourselves and others, which
means that there is great fluidity at the level of narrative interpretation.
There is also a countervailing drive towards stasis in the form of the
image. The image stands outside of the time continuum and represents
disruption and discontinuity. The temporality of an image is that of an
instant and is therefore liberated from the chronological transcription
of the quotidian. However, if a single selfie stands outside the time
continuum, expressing the experience of a moment, multiple selfies
388 HANNAH WESTLEY
distributed across different platforms can structure a time course in a
variety of ways: either mirroring chronology, using reverse chronology
or governed by principles such as emotion. As an author, I post the
selfies that are the scenes or the building blocks of my self-representation
online; as a reader, I infer causality and organize the narrative. If selfies
are to be seen as a genre of self-representation that blurs visual and
verbal modalities, their semantic status depends upon the meaning we
accord them and this meaning is bound up in the stories we tell each
other about our lives. The tension or pull between movement and stasis
in online narratives of identity is created by the dual nature of the selfie.
It is as both practice and product that the selfie signifies and critics must
remain attentive to this distinction. Selfies offer instances of identity but
these identities only take shape through the framework of narrative.

NOTES

1 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

2 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010) p. 4.
3 Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, Identity Technologies (Madison, WI: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2014) p. 9.
4 Poletti and Rak, Identity Technologies.
5 Julie Rak, ‘Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab’, Online
Lives 2.0, ‘Biography’, 38.2 (2015), 155–180 (p. 161).
6 Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York:
Penguin, 2014).
7 Lejeune, ‘Autobiography and New Communication Tools’ in Poletti and Rak,
Identity Technologies, pp. 247–258 (p. 251).
8 Lejeune, in Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 1.
9 Paul John Eakin, ‘Autobiography as Cosmogram’, StoryWorlds: A Journal of
Narrative Studies, 6.1 (2014), 21–43 (p. 37).
10 See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Stuart
Hall, ‘Who Needs Identity’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall
and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 1–17; and Luciana Parisi and Tiziana
Terranova, ‘A Matter of Affect: Digital Images and the Cybernetic Re-wiring of
Vision’, Parallax 7, 4 (2001), 122–127.
11 Mark Poster, Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 113.
12 For example, David Nemer and Guo Freeman, ‘Empowering the Marginalized:
Rethinking Selfies in the Slums of Brazil’, International Journal of Communication,
9 (2015), 1832–1847.
 Reading the Self in Selfies 389
13 Kathryn Woodward, ‘Introduction’, in Identity and Difference, edited by Kathryn
Woodward (London: Sage/Open University Press, 1997), pp. 1–6.
14 Poletti and Rak, Identity Technologies, p. 7.
15 The word selfie was added to OxfordDictionaries.com in August 2013, when it was
also made the Word of the Year.
16 Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym, ‘What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a
Global Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015), 1588–1606
(p. 1589).
17 Jill Walker Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs
and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), p. 12.
18 Roland Barthes, L’Obvie et L’Obtus (Paris: Seuil, 1981).
19 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980) p. 30.
20 Jose Van Dijck, ‘Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory’, Visual
Communication, 7.1 (2008), 57–76.
21 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2008).
22 See Michael Koliska and Jessica Roberts, ‘Selfies: Witnessing and Participatory
Journalism with a Point of View’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015),
1672–1685.
23 For further discussion on how SnapChat affords the ability to create ‘meaningful
language games using images both as grammar and vocabulary’, see James Katz and
Elizabeth Thomas Crocker, ‘Selfies and Photo Messaging as Visual Conversation:
Reports from the United States, United Kingdom and China’, International Journal
of Communication, 9 (2015), 1861–1872.
24 Katherine Lobinger and Cornelia Brantner explore the ways in which viewers
perceive expressive authenticity in selfies in ‘The Eye of the Beholder: Subjective
Views on the Authenticity of Selfies’, International Journal of Communication, 9
(2015), 1848–1860.
25 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 3.
26 Kris Fallon, ‘Streams of the Self: The Instagram Feed as Narrative Autobiography’,
in Proceedings of the Interactive Narratives, New Media & Social Engagement
International Conference, edited by Hudson Moura, Ricardo Sternberg, Regina
Cunha, Cecília Queiroz and Martin Zeilinger, online, 2014, pp. 54–60.
27 Jill Walker Rettberg, ‘Distributed Narrative’, in Internet Research Annual Volume
3, edited by Mia Consalvo and Kate O’Riordan (New York: Peter Lang, 2004),
pp. 91–103 (p. 91).
28 Ruth Page, ‘Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media’, in StoryWorlds: A Journal of
Narrative Studies, 5 (2013), 31–55 (p. 40).
29 Instagram blog post: < http://blog.instagram.com/post/141107034797/160315-
news > [accessed 20 October 2016]
30 Page, ‘Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media’, p. 34.
31 For discussion of the influence of photography on autobiographical writing, see
Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997)
32 Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 49
390 HANNAH WESTLEY
33 See Paul Frosh, ‘The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory,
and Kinesthetic Sociability’, International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015),
1607–1628.
34 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010).
35 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 129.
 Your short guide to the EUP Journals
Blog http://euppublishingblog.com/

A forum for discussions relating to

Edinburgh University Press Journals

1. The primary goal of the EUP Journals Blog

To aid discovery of authors, articles, research, multimedia and reviews published in Journals, and as a
consequence contribute to increasing traffic, usage and citations of journal content.

2. Audience
Blog posts are written for an educated, popular and academic audience within EUP Journals’ publishing fields.

3. Content criteria - your ideas for posts

We prioritize posts that will feature highly in search rankings, that are shareable and that will drive readers to
your article on the EUP site.

4. Word count, style, and formatting

• Flexible length, however typical posts range 70-600 words.
• Related images and media files are encouraged.
• No heavy restrictions to the style or format of the post, but it should best reflect the content and topic
discussed.

5. Linking policy
• Links to external blogs and websites that are related to the author, subject matter and to EUP publishing
fields are encouraged, e.g.to related blog posts

6. Submit your post

Submit to ruth.allison@eup.ed.ac.uk

If you’d like to be a regular contributor, then we can set you up as an author so you can create, edit, publish,
and delete your own posts, as well as upload files and images.

7. Republishing/repurposing
Posts may be re-used and re-purposed on other websites and blogs, but a minimum 2 week waiting period is
suggested, and an acknowledgement and link to the original post on the EUP blog is requested.

8. Items to accompany post

• A short biography (ideally 25 words or less, but up to 40 words)
• A photo/headshot image of the author(s) if possible.
• Any relevant, thematic images or accompanying media (podcasts, video, graphics and photographs),
provided copyright and permission to republish has been obtained.
• Files should be high resolution and a maximum of 1GB
• Permitted file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx, key, mp3, m4a,
wav, ogg, zip, ogv, mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, 3gp, 3g2.

View publication stats