Selfie Identity And The Rejection of the Digital

In post-digital sentiment, the rejection of a digital hegemony now seems increasingly synonymous with rejections of selfie identity; so ubiquitous is the selfie to our contemporary digitality. If we were to imagine a post-selfie identity then it would be a post-digital one: an identity that rejects postmodernism's hyperreality and the blurred lines of our selves and simulacrum of our selves.

The academic fascination with the digital as a zone for unlimited experimentation with identity belies the fact that it is our postmodern cultural identities themselves that are "less stable [and] more malleable than they have been historically" (Reed, 2014) and the Web, as an individual, technological tool, only came after the commodification of self had already become rampant under the neoliberal turn and had reached new heights in the "no alternative" (Fisher, 2009) zenith of the 90's.

Even within a purely digital frame of reference, the re-representation of our lives, our intentional framings that present a so-called good life, predate the selfie: entwined with the hyper-mediated self, they already existed in every blog post, forum identity, early social media activity and in every shared meme (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). Information, by word or bit, was already reshaping our lives; only now it is done by instant image sharing. In this light, we were already abiding by Goffman's dramaturgical model (1959): the selfie has only made the usage of societal 'masks' more legible and only in that legibility has selfie identity developed its transgressive quality.

So I would say that the selfie hasn't actually signified some massive cultural shift or divergence; our lives did not change on the advent of the selfie. Instead I propose that our lives had already been changed at the advent of the digital, only selfies have managed to elucidate this to people more widely and, coded particularly with youthful, feminine narcissism, have been offered up to the altar of enlightened criticism.

But if selfies haven't ushered in a new form of digital identity, how can we explain the unique anxieties that surround the acts of selfie taking and sharing?

Selfie identity has meant that our relationship to self-commodification is now direct, tangible and (comparatively) universalised. This has perhaps cumulated in one particular anxiety: the idea that everyday digital inauthenticities are causing us to lose our authentic selves. Less a matter of simple identity loss though, I would assert that this feeling is derived from a transitionary confusion in the movement towards new, digitised identities; rather than lose our identity, we have lost the lexis to understand identity itself (elucidated by how we are often perplexed that the only way to express anti-digital sentiment is within digital spheres themselves).

Works Cited

Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. A. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Reed. T.V. (2014). “Who Are We Online? Digital Masquerade, Privacy, Anonymity, Community and Cyborg Dis/Embodiment,” in Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era. New York; London: Routledge.