Weekly Schedule
Introductions and Overview of course structure/class policy
Read [Please read prior to class]:
- “Selfies Introduction ~ What Does the Selfie Say?Investigating a Global Phenomenon” (Theresa Senft, Nancy Baym, 2015)
For next week:
- Read Charles Baudelaire’s “The Modern Public and Photography” (1859)
- Read the Introduction to Selfie Society: Narcissism and the Celebration of Mediocrity (2015)
- Read the Introduction to Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1988)
Week 2 (Thinking Historically-I: New Media Old Problems)
Discussion of Baudelaire’s essay and Wagner’s Introduction. Both texts are from different periods, but are there shared assumptions? What can we learn about our contemporary culture based on a reading of these two pieces? Does Marvin’s introduction help you think about selfies historically, or do you think selfies are a complete break from older cultures of looking?
For next class:
- Read Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931)
- Read Jerry Saltz’s “Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie” (2015)
- Mandatory Assignment-I (See Sample Assignment-I)
Week 3 (Thinking Historically-II)
Discussion of Benjamin’s essay and Saltz’s essay. We will also go through your posts to think about our contemporary discussion of selfies in a historical context. What do older and newer forms of photography afford to the presentation of the self. What are the relative differences?
For next class:
- Read Introduction and Chapter 3 from Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Jill Walker Rettberg).
- Read Derek Conrad Murray’s “Notes to self: the visual culture of selfies in the age of social media” (2015)
Week 4 (Digital Self-Presentation)
Discussion of Rettberg and Murray. What are their main arguments? How does Rettberg conceptualize the “self” as a cumulative form? How does Murray conceptualize the “oppositional” self?
For next class:
- Read the Introduction to Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
- Read Chapter 4 (“Dissemination: The Hashtag Function and Identity”) from Brooke Wendt’s The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait
- Read Chapter 1 (“How to See Yourself”) from Nicholas Mirzoeff’s How to See the World: An introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies and more (2016)
Week 5 (The Selfie as a Conversational Self)
Discussion of Goffman, Wendt and Mirzoeff. What does Mirzoeff mean by the “planetary majority?” How can you connect his idea to Wendt’s idea that the hashtag has a community function? How can we connect these ideas to Goffman's pre-digital musings?
For next week:
- Read Chaps. 2 and 3 from Wendt’s book
- Read Lev Manovich’s “Designing and Living Instagram Photography: Themes, Feeds, Sequences, Branding, Faces, Bodies” (2016)
Week 6 (Platforms of the Self)
Discussion of Wendt and Manovich. How do specific platforms and apps influence the shape of the selfie-image? What kind of platform habits do we see as “natural” and what do we look down upon and why? Is the “self” in the selfie finally a result of corporate involvement?
For next week:
- Read Henry Giroux’s “Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance” (2015)
- Read Sanaz Raji’s “‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’: Selfies, Surveillance and the Politics of Being Unseen” from Adi Kuntsman ed. Selfie Citizenship (2017)
- Go through “DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification”
Week 7 (Selfie Surveillance)
Discussion of Giroux and Raji. What are their shared assumptions? What do they warn against? Does Facebook’s Deepface-tech reflect some of their concerns?
For next week:
- Read “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949)
- Read Jesse Fox and Margaret Rooney’s “The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites” (2015)
- Read Chapter 1 (“The Many Wonders of Admiring Yourself”) from Jean M. Twenge and W. K Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009)
- Mandatory Assignment-II (See Sample Assignment-II)
Week 8 (Selfies as Disorder-I)
Discussion of Lacan and Fox & Rooney’s essay. Now that we know that reports of a “selfitis” epidemic are a hoax (https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/mental-health-disorders-substance-use//selfitis) how do we approach the moral panic around selfie-use? What according to you, are the possible psychological pitfalls of selfie culture? Should we be concerned about the “narcissism epidemic?”
For next week:
- Read Amanda Du Preez’s “Sublime Selfies: To witness death” (2017)
- Read Zachary Crockett’s “The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Deaths” (2016)
- Go through Pranev Sharma and Vassilios Vassiliou’s “Pokémon Go: cardiovascular benefit or injury risk?” (2016)
Week 9 (Selfies as Disorder-II)
Discussion of Du Preez and Crockett. Given that most selfie-related deaths do not capture the moment of death, how do we conceptualize a fatal selfie? Are selfies themselves fatal, or is it a larger problem of distraction and immersion in our everyday network habits?
For next week:
- Read Catherine Bouko’s “Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’” in Adi Kuntsman’s Selfie Citizenship.
- Read Jakob Svensson’s “The Expressive Turn of Citizenship in Digital Late Modernity” (2011)
- Read “The Political Consciousness of the Selfie” Parts I and II
- Mandatory Assignment-III (See Sample Assignment-III)
Week 10 (Selfie Activism)
Discussion of Svensson and Bouko. How do selfie’s exemplify the “expressive turn” in participatory democracy? Bring your own examples of the expression of a “political consciousness” through selfies.
For next week:
- Read Anne Jerslev and Mette Mortensen’s “What is the self in the celebrity selfie? Celebrification, phatic communication and performativity” (2015)
- Read Jesse Weaver Shipley’s “Selfie Love: Public Lives in an Era of Celebrity Pleasure, Violence, and Social Media” (2015)
- Prepare for discussion by bringing examples of celebrity selfie streams that you follow or have discovered.
Week 11 (Selfie and Celebrity Culture)
Discussion of Jerselv & Mortensen and Shipley. How can we locate the selfie as a part of celebrity culture given that it is not necessarily a professionally managed publicity image? What did you learn from the readings about the dispersion of celebrity culture through self-based media? We will also discuss the examples you bring to see how some of our observations fit or diverge from specific celebrity selfies.
For next class:
- Read Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering’s “Technologies of memory: Practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography” (2014)
- Read Chap. 1 from Mark Andrejevic’s Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Week 12 (The Broadcast Autobiography)
Discussion of Keightly & Pickering and Andrejevic. In what ways can selfies be called “autobiographical?” What are the crossovers between the selfie and reality TV? Is a selfie-stream a performed life?
For next week:
- Read Maurizio Lazzarato’s “Immaterial Labor” in Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt
- Read “Circuits of Labour: A Labour Theory of the iPhone Era” by Jack Linchuan Qiu, Melissa Gregg and Kate Crawford (2014)
- Read “#selfie: digital self-portraits as commodity form and consumption practice” by Mehita Iqani and Jonathan Schroeder (2016)
Week 13 (Selfies and the Market)
Discussion of Lazzarato, Qui et.al. and Iqani and Schroeder. What do selfies say about our consumption practices? Are we still working when we take a selfie? This discussion requires you to connect to discussions of surveillance, corporate platforms etc. from earlier weeks.
For next week:
- Read Chap. 5 from Eric Freedman’s Transient Images (2011)
- Read Gaby David and Carolina Cambre’s “Screened Intimacies: Tinder and the Swipe Logic” (2016)
Week 14 (Intimacies…swiped right)
Discussion of Freedman and David & Cambre. What role do images play in online dating? How might we arrive at an understanding on image-based intimacy based on our acquired knowledge of self(ie) construction?
For next week:
- Prepare for roundtable discussion.
Week 15 (Summary and Wrap-up)
Mandatory Roundtable Discussion. Key issues (These are not exclusive. You can and should bring in more topics based on how your interests have developed over the semester)
- What is a selfie? Is it a photograph or more?
- What does a selfie do? What are its pitfalls and potentials? Think across the topics covered this semester.
- How have your selfie-habits changed (or not) throughout this semester?
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