Are a Thousand Pictures Worth a Single Word? The Struggle between Condemnatory and Affirmative Discourses on Photographic Change in Slovene and UK Mainstream Media News Reports on Selfies

Abstract

The proliferation of visual communication in contemporary societies, fuelled by the rapid transformation of photography from a specialised activity into a ubiquitous social practice, has not gone unchallenged and the recent “picture craze” has revived many long-seated objections and fears over the power of the image. This article presents one strand of these contestations that were articulated by the mainstream news media reports on the popular informal photographic self-portrait known as the selfie. This is presented through a discourse-theoretical analysis, which shows the discursive struggle about how to give meaning to the phenomenon. In order to show the confrontation between condemnatory and affirmative discourses on photographic change, 255 news articles and commentaries published by three Slovene and three UK mainstream news media, between 30 November 2012 and 30 November 2014, are analysed. The analysis traces the development of the contesting articulations of the discourse of photographic change that are structured around three nodal points—image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance. The article also outlines the ideological implications of psycho(patho)logisation of the selfie that is prevalent in the analysed articles—of treating selfie primarily as a psychological rather than as a sociological communicational or photographic phenomenon.

KEYWORDS:

• selfie
• discourse theory
• mainstream media
• news
• photography

Introduction

Over the past two decades, a number of cultural commentators and scholars¹ have argued that contemporary societies are characterised by a growing importance of “the image” in the process of societal communication. More concretely, claims have been made that images have become a privileged modality of representation, meaning-making and communication. This development has at the same time been hailed for its emancipatory potential, lamented due to the alleged loss of rationality and even condemned for the loss of the experience of reality itself. Proclamations on the “pictorial turn” and the “visual turn” or on the “ocularcentrism” of contemporary western societies were quickly adopted outside the meanders of scientific literature. Popular discourse quickly embraced these proclamations of images, which turned them into a new idiom, offering a new modality and vocabulary for contemporary communication, as if echoing a passage from Walter Benjamin's A Short History of Photography that states: “not he who is ignorant of writing but ignorant of photography will be the illiterate of the future” (1999, 215).

Recently, much of the contemporary upsurge of image production has been attributed to the rising popularity of an informal photographic self-portrait known as the selfie, which will be the focus of this article. The ever-increasing visualisation of everyday life in—what we can call—the age of ubiquitous photography and mediated mass self-communication has restructured the visual field and produced a new culture of visual display, extending what John B. Thompson (2005) described as a new mediated visibility, evolving from the “privileged” few, members of political elites and celebrities, to the self-publishing “masses” of the social networks (Castells 2013). The process of “democratisation” of this new mediated visibility, however, has not gone unchallenged, and this article will investigate the discursive struggles that surround one of its emanations—the attempts to define the selfie phenomenon within the public arena of the mainstream media. From this perspective, the discursive struggles over the meaning of the selfie and its social role can be seen as part of the broader discursive struggles over the conditions of this new visibility and the social status of the image in contemporary societies. This article will investigate the selfie phenomenon through a discourse-theoretical analysis of mainstream media reports on selfies.

Ubiquitous Photography and the Discourse of Transformation in Photographic Theory

This article's analysis of the mainstream media news reports on selfies follows Mitchell's (2002, 173) suggestion not to treat the notion of the pictorial turn as a singular historical moment but as a “diagnostic tool to analyze specific moments when a new medium, a technical invention, or a cultural practice erupts in symptoms of panic or euphoria (usually both) about the visual”. From the position of discourse theory, the selfie—just like any other social phenomenon or cultural object—has no intrinsic meaning but is invested with meaning by individuals, groups and institutions. Moreover, these meanings are not stable, but object and the result of discursive struggles. To use Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's language: These struggles are the result of processes of articulation, attempts to achieve a partial fixation of meaning around a set of privileged discursive signifiers (1985, 112).

Laclau and Mouffe define discourse as a “structured totality resulting from articulatory practice” (1985, 105). This structured totality is not a fixed, stable structure, but an outcome of symbolic struggles over the (temporary) fixation of meaning of certain privileged signifiers, which Laclau and Mouffe name nodal points (1985, 112). A nodal point is a “point of crystallisation within a specific discourse” (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002, 28), a signifier that has the potential to fix the unstable and multiple meanings of other signifiers. Nodal points are not unique to a particular discourse: different discourses can share signifiers and also nodal points, but the articulatory practice then makes the meaning of these signifiers (and nodal points) particular. Nodal points also determine the ordering of other signifiers into meaningful clusters that discourse theory refers to as chains of equivalence. The articulation of these chains of equivalence is constitutive for discourses, and allows the production of closure, a partial and by definition always incomplete (and hence always potentially contestable) stabilisation of meaning (Torfing 1999, 84–93). In the case of the analysis of selfie discourses, we will see how different competing discourses make sense of the selfie (and the photographic change it encompasses), but simultaneously how all discourses share a set of nodal points that deal with the subject and the text.

The following analysis of these competing discourses that make sense of the selfie phenomenon, which is presented below, is based on a the double-staged structure of what Carpentier and De Cleen (2007) label discourse-theoretical analysis, in which in the first stage a case-specific discourse-theoretical framework is initially developed. This will then support the empirical analysis of the material in the second stage (see Carpentier and De Cleen 2007). This second stage is further strengthened by making use of van Dijk's (2000) discourse-analytical approach method, which he deploys for analysing racism in the news.

All that Is Solid Melts into Pixels

In the first (theoretical) stage, we can discern three nodal points that structure the discourses on the changes of the photographic medium, and on the contemporary photographic practices in the age of ubiquitous photography. These three nodal points are image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance. The concepts provided by discourse theory (in particular, the concept of the nodal point itself) will be used as primary sensitising concepts and combined with the discourse-theoretical (re-)reading of the literature on photography, with the latter serving as “secondary sensitizing concepts for a textual analysis” (Van Brussel and Carpentier 2012, 490). Together, the discourse-theoretical concepts and discourse-theoretical (re-)reading of the literature will produce the analytical model for the second, empirical, stage.

Throughout the major part of the twentieth century, the dominant social usages of photography have been the preservation of memory (individual and collective) and social integration (transforming individuals into family members, members of social groups, citizens or consumers). These two usages have been maintained by two quite thoroughly separated spheres of photography: private (personal photography) and public (press and documentary photography, advertising and fashion photography, art photography), which at the same time demarcated the division between amateur and professional production. Put differently, private photography was articulated within the domesticated confinement of family albums (Hardt 2000), integrating the individual into the family gaze, personal practices of remembering and a network of family and kinship relations (Spence and Holland 1991; Hirsch 1999; Rose 2012), which served to articulate the boundary of the sphere of domesticity. Public photography, generally the domain of photographic professionals, was displayed in public; most prominently on the pages of newspapers and magazines, where the role of images was not confined to dramatisation of witnessing historic events but extended to the integration of individuals into the macro-social categories such as nation and interpellating them into the role of citizens (Hariman and Lucaites 2008; Tagg 2009), thereby transforming media audiences into political public(s). From the pages of the same magazines and newspapers, but also from the space beyond media (e.g. outdoor advertising or art galleries), audiences were also simultaneously interpellated into the roles of consumers (through advertising and fashion photography) and cultivated individuals (through art photography). The distinction between these two spheres of photography has been maintained not only through the choice of subject matters or styles of representation, but also through a network of supporting institutions and economies. Until fairly recently, these distinctions were so firmly entrenched that even professional photographers were rarely allowed to simultaneously excel in competing modes of photography. Similarly, amateur photography was only rarely let out of the confinement of the domestic sphere. Its entry into the public arena has traditionally been conditioned by having to adopt certain aesthetic standards (as in camera club photography) or by being curated by authoritative voices from the sphere of public photography. Moreover, ever since Kodak's “invention” of family photography (Munir and Phillips 2005), the division between public and private photography has been gendered: “personal photography and practice of album-making were positioned towards women, while serious amateur photography, alongside professional and art photography, were dominantly framed as ‘masculine’” (Hand 2012, 7).

These distinctions, including the remarkably stable boundary between private and public photographic spheres, have started to erode as mass production of cameraphone images transformed photography from a professional or specialised process into a routine and unavoidable aspect of everyday life. Across the eroded boundaries, the style and content of the formerly separate photographic spheres have started to merge as public photography has adopted the styles, motives and methods of addressing the audience, which were previously the domain of personal photography (e.g. personalisation and emotionality), as the sphere of personal photography—through public display and storage of images—became gradually politicised and as it acquired more characteristics that used to belong to the domain of public photography. Within photographic theory, these shifts are presented as discourses of photographic change at the level of photography as a medium and at the level of photographic practices. In this article, I want to claim that these discourses are structured around three nodal points—image producer identity, photographic image value and photographic subject relevance—although it should be kept in mind that each of the discourses identified in the analysis below articulate these nodal points differently.

Image Producer Identity

While in the past the (amateur) producer's identity was connected to his/her privately produced images, and thus firmly rooted in the private sphere, contemporary photographic practices allow both the images (that previously belonged to the private or even intimate sphere) and, through these images, the image producer to enter the public communicative space. This publicness enables a continuous process of identification of the de-cantered subjects (Hall [1996] 2000) of late modernity. The notion of identification implies a continuous process of subjectification—of dialogical self-reflection, of individual's negotiating between and experimenting with a number of identities in the processes of communication that is becoming increasingly visual. Identities are being articulated as image and communicated through (photographic) image. As van Dijck put it:

individuals articulate their identity as social beings not only by taking and storing photographs to document their lives, but by participating in communal photographic exchanges that mark their identity as interactive producers and consumers of culture. (2008, 62).

As the presentation of the embodied self has become increasingly dependent on new communication technologies, many authors claim that (private) photography's dominant social usage has now shifted from the preservation of memory to the facilitation of communication. While both usages have always been an integral part of photography, what has shifted is the balance between them, with communication gaining the upper hand (Sontag 2004; van Dijck 2008; Rubinstein and Sluis 2008). Increasingly being recorded, stored and displayed with the same device—the smartphone—used to create and process other types of information, vernacular photographs enter the information flows of the Internet, just as other pieces of computerised information. An individual, who is the locus of this new online visual culture, constructs and maintains his or her identity through two interconnected activities that Couldry (2012) termed presencing and archiving. Presencing refers to the practice of maintaining constant online visibility (e.g. on social networks), while archiving refers to the practices of managing this constant public presence in the temporal dimension (Couldry 2012, 49–52), which is essentially structured according to logic of corporate promotion and branding (Senft 2013, 5). This has two important implications for contemporary photography. On the one hand, the new channels of distribution generate broader audiences for vernacular photography, composed out of known and unknown individuals (Rubinstein and Sluis 2008, 18). On the other hand, (personal) photographs distributed through the Internet may gain unforeseen “permanency”, publicness or uses, “turning up in unforeseen contexts, reframed and repurposed” (van Dijck 2008, 68).

Value of the Photographic Image

The second nodal point of the discourses of photographic change is the value of the photographic image. Theoretical arguments describe the change as a shift of emphasis from the photographic image itself to the practice of image-making, a shift from object to experience.² Produced in large quantities, digital photographs are not taken to be saved, archived, and organised into a visual narrative for future remembrance, but serve predominantly as affirmation of personhood and personal bonds, or as van Dijck put it: “in the networked reality of people's everyday life, the default mode of personal photography becomes ‘sharing'” (2008, 68). As vernacular digital photographs are quickly discarded, photography becomes important as an event, as an act of bonding through which identities and personal relations are performed in front of the camera (cf. Haldrup and Larsen 2003). Performative and bonding aspects of contemporary photography imply increased playfulness and experimentation both in front of the camera and in the post-production of images, the latter being facilitated by the changed knowledge economy of image processing and manipulation. In the shift from the mnemonic to communicative role of photography, contemporary photographic practices are not so much about past time as they are about pastime, about playfulness and fun. As photographing moved from being a specialised activity to a mundane activity, taking and sharing images becomes an integral part of experiencing the everyday life, of being present in the world. The gesture of photographing becomes a ritual gesture of confirming a momentary importance of an event (Becker 2013) and a recognition of one's presence in the world. Another dimension of the “post-representational” aspect of photography is evident at the level of image storage Social networking sites that now typically provide the service value photographs not for their content but for the non-pictorial information they carry—their metadata and “data on user transactions that surround their posting and exchange” (McQuire 2013, 237), which can be monetised for advertising purposes.

Photographic Subject Relevance

The third nodal point of the discourses of photographic change articulates the relevance or legitimacy of the subject of the publicly communicated photograph. As photography in contemporary societies increasingly becomes an integral part of everyday life, the “everyday” is becoming both content of, and setting for, photographic activities (Hand 2012). The proliferation of photography and communication through photography does not only imply the legitimisation of the public presence of embodied individuals, but also fundamentally re-negotiates and blurs the division between public, private and intimate spheres. These “everyday” images, frequently taken inside homes, bedrooms and bathrooms, challenge the separation of the three spheres through the public display of private and intimate settings, moments or activities. This becomes especially visible with the mediated or public display of images of sexual nature or nudity, such as sexting, publishing nude photographs to be rated by other users, #aftersex selfies, revenge pornography and so forth. The sexualised embodied self-representations collapse the division of public, private and intimate spheres and challenge the modernist conceptualisations of sexuality and the (naked) body as ultimate private domains (Lasen and Gómez-Cruz 2009).

The relevance, and by extension legitimacy, of the subject of photography is structured around the notion of desired public looking, of what can and should be exposed to public gazing. This aspect is the most contested dimension of the discourses of photographic change since it is not linked to an evaluation of photographic practices per se but to deep-seated, culturally conditioned notions of visibility, rationality and perceived power of images that in the West have, ever since Plato, been perceived at the same time as powerful, seductive, dangerous, magical—and worthless. The aniconistic devaluation of the senses in favour of the intellect has created a gendered binarism in which the masculine rationality of the mind has been juxtaposed with feminised, irrational senses, with images being defined “as women”, as irrational, emotional, and seductive (Mitchell 2005, 35; original emphasis). This has influenced the articulation of an understanding that only certain types of images, produced by certain types of actors, are desirable for public display and viewing—the ones structured by rational, dispassionate looking, by a desire to gain knowledge or discover truth (e.g. photojournalism,³ documentary photography, forensic photography, etc.), while the looking driven by sexual drive, or merely by the desire for spectacle, is deemed improper, immoral (e.g. paparazzi photography, pornography, “snuff photographs”, “ruin porn”, etc.) or suspicious at best (e.g. fashion and advertising photography). In this historically-based articulation, the public display of the self, so prevalent in contemporary vernacular photography, can fall under the category of improper looking and can be associated with pathologic tendencies such as exhibitionism or narcissism. Even though contemporary photographic theory articulates the public display of the embodied self as a legitimate type of looking, the notion of potential risk and improper looking is present, especially in relation to the self-display of young sexualised female bodies.

To sum up, the three nodal points play a structuring role in the articulation of the narrative discourses of photographic change. Through these discourses, change becomes seen as a shift from photographs being permanent documents to becoming a flow of fleeting images, which increasingly act as a mere stimulus for communication, or a substitute for talk, and which are becoming a prominent modality of contemporary communication. The main aim of this type of communication is to share everyday experiences and participate in a continuous process of (public) construction of personal identity and maintaining the maintenance of interpersonal relations. This activity that is not immune to risk (e.g. to personal integrity) or critiques of improper looking and display, since it relies on the often self-administered blurring of the separation between public, private and intimate spheres.

The Selfie: A Snapshot Introduction

Selfies, informal portrait photographs of oneself typically taken at arm's length and published on social networking sites, have recently become a photographic subgenre in their own right. As a type of a photographic image, selfies existed well before they became a “phenomena of our times” and the tag “selfie” has been used for nearly a decade before the “selfie explosion” that started late 2012 (Ahmad 2014). In 2013, selfies quickly became an omnipresent part of contemporary visual culture and were gradually transformed from a fashionable online practice into a strategic marketing tool, used in advertising and business promotion, political communication or social awareness and fundraising campaigns. By 2014, the phenomenon was embraced by traditional mainstream institutions such as political parties, museums, galleries, central banks and states. Media reports on the selfie phenomenon have been a constitutive part of this “mainstreaming” of selfies, which—as they moved from being a type of a photograph to becoming a photographic sub-genre in their own right—seem to have attracted as many words as they have attracted gazes. Within the mediasphere, the selfie's recent entrance into the contemporary mainstream conceptual imaginary was undoubtedly boosted through its linguistic recognition—the announcement of “selfie” becoming the Oxford Dictionary’s 2013 word of the year (Oxford Dictionaries blog 2013) has been picked up and reported by the bulk of mainstream media outlets worldwide. This, and several other selfie-related stories involving political figures, celebrities or controversial topics⁴, gave sufficient news value to the phenomenon to guarantee its ongoing inclusion into the mainstream news, and made the mainstream news media one of the arenas of discursive contestations over the meaning of the selfie phenomenon. The mainstream news media were not central or the most prominent arenas of these discursive contestations over the meaning of the selfie—the tabloid press and the blogosphere both made considerable investments into parallel discursive struggles. A series of mainstream news media outlets were selected for my analysis because of their symbolic capital, because of their long-term commitment to articulate their audiences as imagined political (for example, Tönnies [1922] 1998) and national communities (for example, Anderson [1983] 1991), with shared public agendas, social values and moral principles.

In their attempts to explain the selfie phenomenon to their audiences, mainstream (news) media have repeatedly been posing two interrelated questions: what can selfies tell us about the individuals who are taking them; and what can the widespread practice of selfie-making tell us about contemporary society? As if echoing the popular saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, these two questions can be seen as the media's attempt to provide the thousand words that would describe the meaning of a single picture, the selfie. The aim of this article, however, is to restructure the question—asking, rather, if a thousand pictures are indeed worth a single word? In the theoretical discussion presented above, three nodal points were identified that capture the changes leading to contemporary vernacular photography: (image) producer identity, (photographic) image value and (photographic) subject relevance. These nodal points structure the discourses of photographic change through the creation of a past and present, where, in the present, social relevance is attributed to certain photographic subjects and contexts (private and intimate sphere becoming public), which contribute to identification processes through which image-producers are expressing their personal identities (shift from memorialising to communicative usage) and which are valued for their performative aspects (value of photography shifts from object to process).

Analysing Discourses on the Selfie: Analytical and Methodological Approach

The privileged discursive signifiers outlined above present a starting point—a first stage, as Carpentier and De Cleen (2007) call it—for the qualitative textual analysis of a selection of mainstream news media articles. In addition to the main, two-staged, design of Carpentier and De Cleen's (2007) discourse-theoretical analysis, the analytical tools for qualitative textual analysis used in this article will be adapted from Teun van Dijk's discourse-analytical approach to analysing racism in the news (van Dijk 2000), due to the presence of a structurally similar antagonistic division between the majority (“general public”) and the minority (selfie-makers) being grounded in terms of deviance, curiosity and threat. As suggested by Jørgensen and Phillips (2002, 147–148), the “adopted” analytical tools will be used to identify the articulation of key signifiers (or nodal points) that structure the discourse in the analysed media texts. van Dijk (2000, 38–41) suggests a four-part analysis of media texts, focusing on topics, quotes/subjects, lexical choices and form, formulation and expression. While the analysis draws from the analytical toolbox of the discourse-analytical approach, a more detailed analysis of the lexical dimension will not be the focal point of this article, as the aim of discourse-theoretical analysis is to move beyond a linguistic analysis and to focus on the “macro-contextual and macro-textual” aspects of discourse (Carpentier and De Cleen 2007, 277–278).

The analysed media material, first of all, consists of 51 articles published between 30 November 2012 and 30 November 2014 in three Slovene mainstream media—two quality daily newspapers (Delo and Dnevnik) and the online news portal of the Slovene public service broadcaster RTV Slovenia.⁵ The sampling period covers the period of one year prior to and one year after the announcement of “selfie” becoming the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. The sampling was done through a keyword search of the online editions of the two newspapers and the news archive of RTV Slovenia.⁶ Two groups of articles were selected—the first being the specialised topical articles, analysing the selfie as a phenomenon in its own right, while the second, larger group consisted of articles where selfies were a prominent part of news items focusing on other topics.

The analysis of reports from these three Slovene media was complemented by an analysis of two quality UK daily newspapers (Guardian and Independent) and the online news portal of UK's public service broadcaster, the BBC.⁷ In total, 204 articles from these three UK media were selected,⁸ according to the same criteria as used for the Slovene media. Although the analysis will not remain blind to the specific cultural and organisational nuances that structure the news reporting of the six media outlets, the study is not intended as a cross-country comparison of news discourse. Rather, the articles from the Slovene media are complemented with those from the UK media to show the commonalities and the transnational character of the discourse on photographic change, given the generic homogeneity and the global nature of the selfie phenomenon.

Selfies: A Discourse-theoretical Analysis

Media reports from Slovene and UK media display a similar pattern of reporting on selfies. Given the topicality of selfie phenomenon, it is not surprising that its entry into the mainstream news has been triggered by its “eventualisation”—the announcement that “selfie” has become the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year 2013. Prior to November 2013, reports on selfies were scarce, both in Slovene and UK media, and they have proliferated only after being endorsed by a traditional linguistic institution and by traditionally newsworthy sources such as prominent politicians. The selfie taken on 10 December 2013 by Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt with US president Barrack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron during Nelson Mandela's funeral ceremony marked both the “mainstreamisation” of the practice as well as “mainstreamisation” of its contestations. As the practice of selfie-taking and sharing became increasingly widespread in 2014, the mainstream news media (and press agencies) routinised the reporting on selfie-related topics. In the process, news on selfies became part of the symbolic repertoire used to demarcate the shared norms and values of their respective audiences.

In the topical articles on the selfie-phenomenon, the selfie is defined in two contradictory ways, related to two discourses on photographic change. The first set of media narratives defines selfie-taking as a narcissistic practice (whose native domicile is contemporary teen culture and celebrity self-promotion), structured by a self-cantered gaze that signals both a disinterest and an incapability of perceiving reality. This narrative connects to a condemnatory discourse of photographic change, which regrets and condemns the changes, and uses (and defends) more traditional articulations of the three nodal points. The other media narrative on selfie-taking sees it as a normal practice, as a new idiom of youth culture, a preferred mode of communication through which the adolescents are playfully exploring their identities. Here, we can find a more affirmatory discourse on photographic change, with nodal points that have become rearticulated to encompass these changes. In the “routinised” articles, where selfie-related topics are part of the stories that fit the traditional criteria of newsworthiness, the two dominant discourses on photographic change remain in competition, but are complemented by another, much less prominent, affirmatory discourse, linking selfie-making to social activism and potential empowerment.

Topical Articles: Narcissistic Looking versus Identification Game

In the 11 topical articles from Slovene and UK news media, selfies are frequently described as a form of narcissistic looking. Here, the more traditional (articulations of the) nodal points are protected. The articles contest the public relevance of the private photographic subject—the public photographic display of embodied individuals—drawing on the notion of the improper public display and looking, thus articulating the nodal point of the subject relevance in reference to the past. Simultaneously, the image value nodal point is used to dismiss the performativity of the selfie, and the producer identity nodal point to reject the experiments with identification. Selfie-taking is described as a mindless act of self-indulgence, “a way to avoid our own thoughts”, a “mindless act available every time we would need to be mindful” (Independent, 19 November 2013). This condemnatory articulation of the selfie-making subject and the selfie image value establishes the necessity of public viewing for the rational production of (social) knowledge, whereas looking that is (only) driven by a desire for spectacle is labelled as improper or immoral and—in the case of selfies—presented as an infantile fascination with one's own image (one commentator describes it as “a mode of photographic masturbation”; BBC, 16 October 2014).

The nodal point of the producer identity is articulated from a perspective that negates multifaceted and dynamic personal identities, while the communicative value of the image is reduced to a desperate and excessive search for social approval. The increased investment into self-imaging is presented as a pathologic form of behaviour. Its denigration is evident in the topicalisation: authors of the articles frequently describe selfie-taking through the medical and psychiatric register, using phrases such as epidemics, mania, craze, obsession, perversion, compulsion or psychopathological behaviour. Excessive self-representation is regarded as unhealthy, linked to other behavioural disorders and frequently described as addictive. Moreover, the “poseurs of the 21^st century”—a label given to selfie-takers in Dnevnik (26 July 2014)—are presented as emotionally deficient, shameless, lacking self-esteem or empathy and are, by extension, incapable of forming “real” friendships and relationships.

To some, “selfie has become the ultimate symbol of the narcissistic age” (Guardian, 14 July 2014) as its instantaneity and standardisation are seen to encourage superficiality and a focus on appearances. Within these articulations, selfie-taking becomes interpreted as a failed use of the latest technological enhancement, where selfie-takers, instead of using it for exploration of reality, “turned it back to gaze in wonderment at the body to which it is remotely attached” (BBC, 16 October 2014). Thus, instead of becoming the prosthetic Vertovian “camera-eye”, the cameraphone taking a selfie becomes merely a mirror or, to use Oliver Wendel Holmes’ evocative phrase, a mirror with a memory.

In relation to the nodal point of the image value, the narrative on selfies as narcissistic confirms—but at the same time condemns—the replacement of the image with the practices of image-making. What is being criticised are not so much selfies as images (their content) but selfie-taking as practice. The gesture of holding up this new high-tech mirror, it is argued, distracts the selfie-takers from experiencing the moment, alienates them from the “actual reality”, a position that echoes the Baudrillarian postmodernist lament on the loss of the real. The democratisation of the photographic subject relevance in the age of ubiquitous photography is also deplored as certain locations or events, such as funerals and commemoration services, are being articulated as unsuitable and improper. The image value appears to be the most firmly policed, not in relation to the living but when it concerns the dead body.

Although breaches of etiquette are not “confined to the empty headed young” (BBC, 16 October 2014), the excessive self-presentation as a “vulgar metaphor of contemporary narcissistic times” (Dnevnik, 26 July 2014) is most often linked with adolescents, whose otherness from the “rest of society” is repeatedly evoked through the use of terms such as millennials, digital natives, Instagram or Facebook generation that assign them homogeneous collective traits, and differentiates them from older (and wiser) generations. Their alterity is presented as a totalising one, to the extent that selfie-taking is incomprehensible to anyone above the age of 40, according to the two Slovene dailies (Dnevnik, 26 July 2014 and Delo, 19 April 2014).⁹ This articulation again supports a condemnatory discourse of photographic change, using the nodal points of producer identity, image value and subject relevance to problematise and regret photographic change. Essentially, the narrative of selfies as narcissistic qualifies and evaluates the photographic present on the basis of the traditional (or “old”) articulation of the three nodal points.

The narrative of selfies as narcissistic, however, is not the dominant one in the topical articles. In the majority of the analysed articles, authors describe selfies as being a new idiom of communication and a way of exploring personal identities, which implies a more positive articulation of the discourse of the photographic change (and its three nodal points). Identity is being recognised as fragmented, constructed and relational, and dependent on communication with others. The nodal point of producer identity is articulated in the way that makes the visual exploration of oneself “normal” (Dnevnik, 26 July 2014) and “natural” (Delo, 19 April 2014). Much like the denigration of selfies, their normalisation depends, to a large extent, on a medical registry; statements of experts such as psychologists, psychiatrists or psychoanalysts are routinely used to reject the narcissism argument and to explain the self-centred gaze through the notion of exploration of one's own identity. The depsychopathologisation of the selfie emphasises the communicative aspect of identification processes, which, it is claimed, have become more and more visual. Thus selfies become “this generation's richest form of communication / … / a new visual language which is understood by both sender and recipient” (Independent, 12 May 2014). Communication through vernacular photographs is presented simply as “another way of communicating” (Delo, 19 April 2014), as “updating your status [on Facebook] through a picture” (Independent, 12 May 2014) rather than through words. When Slovene and UK selfie-makers are given voice, they describe it as a “natural way to communicate” (Dnevnik, 26 July 2014), even in times of personal distress or loss of their loved ones (Guardian, 14 July 2013).

The articulation of the nodal point of the image value in these media narratives is closely intertwined with that of the producer identity. Rather than being seen as fake, performances for the camera are described as experimental, drawing to the fore the notion of the changed purpose of image-making in the age of cameraphone: the selfie is no longer linked to production of permanent visual documents (which link to static identities), but to the notion of performance, play and experimentation. No longer grounded in a demand for authenticity, the selfie becomes seen as an object of potentiality and control—of gaining greater control over one's identities by being able to control one's photographic image. In relation to the nodal point of the subject relevance, the erosion of the strict division between public and private spheres is not problematised as such, since online identities are recognised as being an integral part of contemporary individuals’ identities. Even if “certain aspects of vanity” are admitted in the process of public display and looking at the embodied self, this vanity is not pathologised, but, at least for the adolescent generation, naturalised: “It is vain. But as teenagers it's natural to be obsessed with yourselves” (Independent, 12 May 2014).

This affirmative discourse on photographic change, however, does not imply a celebratory approach. Within the affirmative discourse, the notion of potential risk is repositioned from the act of image-taking to the act of its (public) communication. Once communicated through social networking sites, selfies become part of a “popularity contest” (Guardian, 14 July 2013) and approval-seeking practices that are not just empowering. An often-voiced danger is that the desire for social acceptance will lead to the emulation or internalisation of imposed norms and stereotypical representations, such as the sexualisation of the female body and the display of excessive nudity (Guardian, 14 July 2013). The question of pictorial representation of the female body and its sexuality, more characteristic for UK than Slovene topical reports on selfies, points to the evaluative aspect of the discourse that speaks “on behalf” of the other. One of the paradoxes of the affirmative discourse of photographic change is that it grants only a limited level of autonomy and agency to selfie users, in particular when it concerns young women. The locus of the paradox is the nodal point of subject relevance, in connecting with proper looking. Publicly displayed images of the female body articulate the struggles over the definition of proper looking (and proper display) with discursive positions that span from the pessimistic critique of the objectification of the female body by the male gaze to the celebratory accounts of the display of “natural beauty” and “small resistance” against the “barrage of perfect images we face each day” (Guardian, 14 July 2013), in which (ironically) young female selfie-makers are predominantly objects of and not subjects in the discursive struggles.

On the whole, both Slovene and UK topical articles on the selfie phenomenon do not side with the condemnatory discourse of photographic change, but argue for the depsychopathologisation of the practice. However, through their topical focus and expert quotations from the medical register, they are still articulating the nodal point of the producer identity in a way that perpetuates a psychological framework for the understanding of the selfie phenomenon. Put differently, the fundamental question regarding the meaning of selfies is still interpreted from the perspective of the individual's motivation for their making and sharing. Moreover, it should be recognised that even within the affirmatory discourse of photographic change, the destigmatisation of the selfie has its limits: it remains unproblematised as long as it is confined within the domain of youth culture and continues to be pejoratively addressed when it is situated in “adult” contexts, such as in the case of the infamous selfie at Nelson Mandela's memorial ceremony, which led to one critic asking if he is “the only grown up left?” (Independent, 11 December 2013). It appears that the naturalness of dynamic identities, of the experimental, performative and playful identity exploration of de-cantered subjects of late modernity, is recognised only for a certain age group.

Routine News Reports on Selfies: Odd, Natural or Empowering?

If topical articles represent intentional interventions into defining the selfie phenomenon through which condemnatory and affirmatory discourses of photographic change (and their nodal points) are articulated, the event-based news on selfies and selfie-related stories represent indirect articulations of the discourses of photographic change, through—to borrow Michael Billig's ([1995] 2001) phrase—mainstream media's “everyday flagging” of shared norms and values of given communities. This notion of “everyday flagging” does not necessarily rely on overt judgements but can result from practices such as routine placing of the phenomena in a certain category of news—in their topicalisation.

Although the adoption of selfie-making by politicians and other public figures led to selfie-related news items sporadically appearing under the heading of general news, the bulk of the analysed articles published in Slovene and UK news media were published in people, curiosity/entertainment and crime sections. There selfies become a parade of celebrity stories and oddities, as well as stories of human stupidity and animal ingenuity. The latter, for example, refers to stories on animal selfies—more or less successful self-portraits made by animals with cameras “stolen” from visitors to zoos or natural parks. When not focusing on “monkey business” (Independent, 22 August 2014) or celebrities, routine news reports on selfies appear to be delineating the boundary of proper social behaviour in relation to the nodal point of subject relevance, singling out, for example, the practices and locations of improper photographic looking. Both Slovene and UK news media reported on a study that indicated selfie-taking while driving to be a widespread hazardous form of behaviour among (young) drivers. Similarly, the nodal point of image value was indirectly articulated through news on accidental deaths during selfie-taking (tourists falling off a cliff, an accidental shooting while posing for a selfie with a pistol, a fatal car crash due to posting a selfie-status on Facebook, the suicidal tendencies of a selfie addict) or life-threatening situations (a runner photographing himself while being chased by bulls during the Pomplona bull run, a Russian youth photographing himself atop of tall buildings or selfie-taking spectators of the Tour de France trying to pose against the backdrop of the speeding peloton). These articles flag out the hazardous implications of prioritising image-taking over the content of the produced image. This kind of arguing in favour of the content of the image, in line with the condemnatory discourse of photographic change, is even more prominent in crime-related selfie news. These are stories of the arrests of burglars, robbers and murderers following their careless online publishing of selfies. Crime, as a form of deviant social behaviour, is sanctioned because the police still use the traditional discourse of photography, while social deviants are performing their identities for the camera, use their images for (public) communication rather than for recording personal visual documents and foolishly resist the consensus on what can and should be seen in public. The nodal points of subject relevance and producer identity are also articulated through reports on how the publishing of inappropriate selfies resulted in public flack from fans (e.g. a Slovene football player, a UK cyclist and a US basketball star), a career end (e.g. a UK politician and a Swiss secretary) or unwanted public exposure (e.g. naked selfies being recovered from second-hand mobile phones).

While routine news on selfie-taking also provided arguments in favour of the normalisation of the practice (e.g. continuous listing of celebrities including members of British royal family who have joined the selfie-taking community, or news on “selfie” becoming a legitimate word to use in the game Scrabble), these were outnumbered by the sporadic news items linking selfie-taking to the nodal point of subject relevance, and in particular to the notion of proper looking. Such news items ranged from taking selfies with wild or protected animals (e.g. the so-called tiger selfies), the public exposure of private (nude) images, the lack of empathy (e.g. taking a selfie rather than helping a distressed person), the taking of selfies at funerals or with dead bodies or the taking of selfies at commemorative sites such as extermination camps or holocaust memorials. Challenging the affirmatory discourse of photographic change, the notion of proper looking is activated through the public sanctioning (shaming) or the condemnation of transgressors. Apart from the dominance of narratives that challenge the affirmatory discourse of photographic change, the analysis of routine news reports on selfies also reveals a third—still rather marginalised—discourse of photographic change, which lies close to the affirmatory discourse. This third, transformative, discourse aims to “reclaim the power of the selfie and turn it into something good” (Independent, 12 May 2014), pointing to the socially desirable uses of selfies to raise social awareness and promote fundraising campaigns. It relies on the critical articulation of the nodal points of image value and subject relevance, in which the positive evaluation of the selfie phenomenon is achieved via the prioritisation of certain image content over the practices of image-making. Through this, the improper, narcissistic self-oriented looking is transformed in a “rationalised” version and the photographic representations of the embodied self are politicised. At present, this transformative discourse of change, grounded in the “potentially good selfie”, is still struggling for legitimacy, as a number of fundraising actions—especially the ones that prominently featured celebrities (such as the ice-bucket challenge, the no make-up selfie, the wake-up-call selfie)—have come under public criticism for providing guilt-free platforms for celebrity exhibitionism: “The only ‘awareness’ it seems to be promoting is self [awareness]”, wrote one of the commentators (Independent, 19 March 2014; author's insertion). One of the rare undisputed cases of the politically empowering uses of selfies (in the analysed sample) is the #kahkaha campaign, where Turkish women protested against Turkey's Deputy-Prime Minister's assertion that women should not laugh in public, as if siding with a cynical commentator who claimed that “selfies can have value and even virtue in cultures where individuals are expected to be uniformly faceless” (BBC, 16 October 2014)

Discussion and Conclusion

As presented above, the mainstream news media reporting on the selfie phenomenon has been dominated by two competing discourses, with different articulations of the three nodal points—producer identity, image value and subject relevance. In the first discourse, the goodness of photographic change is openly challenged by reinterpreting present practices through past norms and values. Through this logic, selfie-making is reduced to narcissistic self-gazing. The condemnatory discourse affirms photographic change by normalising the practice of selfie-making. This normalisation, however, is not unconditional but comes through the reduction of selfie-making to a practice specific to a certain age group. The condemnatory discourse can be seen as a “standard” response to yet another pictorial turn, since its articulation is markedly similar to other historical reactions to “picture crazes” such as the mid-nineteenth-century scorn of daguerotypomania, or the mid-twentieth-century critiques of television (see, for example, Stephens 1998). However, the discursive struggle regarding the meaning of selfies in the mainstream press can and should be read beyond the “story of suspicion and anxiety about vision” (Mitchell 2002, 169).

It is thus worth noting that the two dominant discourses not only share the three nodal points, but also a common trait—the underlying notion that selfie-taking and sharing is to be understood primarily as a psychological rather than as a sociological, communicational or photographic¹⁰ phenomenon. By reducing the selfie phenomenon, and by extension the discourses on photographic change, to their psychological dimension, both discourses on photographic change fail to address the economic dimension of the phenomenon in question and the structural conditionings and limitations of the practice that this economic dimension entails. It should be stressed that the theoretical discourse on photographic change prominently and critically evaluates the economic dimension, especially within the nodal point of the producer identity, where this theoretical discourse refers to the commodifying gaze of corporations, and when discussing the changing image value, where the data “mining” of non-pictorial information and the commercial structuring of platforms and their affordances are being addressed. But apart from two short sections in the topical articles on selfies, in Delo and Dnevnik, the analysed articles remain blind to the economic dimension of the phenomenon. Thus the dominant theme of the denigrating discourse of selfies—narcissism—is not linked to the functioning of the capitalist system, but presented as an individual's character trait and personal fault. Such individualisation of blame is symptomatic for the knowledge regime of neoliberal capitalism. Similarly, the two competing discourses are reluctant to treat selfies as merely another form of mass self-communication. Treating them as more or less as an isolated pictorial phenomenon, the two discourses fail to address the communicative aspect (of the selfie phenomenon) that is at the centre of the three nodal points of the discourse of photographic change. By failing to connect the discourses of photographic change with other forms of online activities within which the sharing of photographs generally takes place, the two discourses fail to show that selfie sharing is structured according to similar imperatives that limit the information exchange on social networking sites in general and lead to commodification of its producers (see, for example, Fuchs 2009). The psychopathologisation of selfie-making and the individualisation of blame it entails also fails to account for the centrality of the production and circulation of images in advanced capitalist societies, and fails to capture how current markets revolve around, and are consumed through and as, an image.

Walter Benjamin, a man who was notoriously reluctant to embrace the visual reproduction of his body, knew very well that circulation of images is the underlying logic for the formation of contemporary societies, not only for the formation of its publics but also for the formation of its markets. When Benjamin is evoked as a source of the proclamation that the illiterate of the future will be “he who is ignorant of photography”, the second part of his statement is frequently left out—the one in which he asks: “But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures?” (Benjamin 1999, 215).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Ilija Tomanić Trivundža is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Notes

1 This is especially present in the works on visual culture, such as, for example, Mirzoeff (1999), Sturken and Cartwright (2001) or Rose and Cartwright (2001) to give but a few examples.

2 Earlier debates on the value of photographic images focused on the medium's materiality and indexicality; an overview of these debates can be found in Lister (2013).

3 Even within photojournalism, a boundary is being contested between the insightful gaze and voyeurism—between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ looking (Taylor 2000).

4 A short list of the main selfie-related stories that received wide international press coverage were: the Papal selfie (August 2013), Kim Kardashian’s bikini selfie (October 2013), Nelson Mandela funeral ceremony selfie featuring Danish prime minister Helle Thorning Schmidt, US president Barrack Obama and UK prime minister David Cameron (December 2013), Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar selfie (March 2014), Breanna Mitchell’s Auschwitz selfie (June 2014) and the ruling in the copyright case of the Macaque monkey selfie (August 2014).

5 The Slovene sample consisted of 51 articles, of which 11 were published in Delo, 14 in Dnevnik, and 26 on www.rtvslo.si.

6 See www.rtvslo.si

7 See www.bbc.co.uk

8 The UK sample included 204 articles, of which 38 were published by the Guardian, 125 by the Independent and 41 by the BBC.

9 At the time of conducting the analysis, the author was still below the media-assigned age limit for the comprehension of the selfie phenomenon.

10 The selection of experts is a clear indicator of this—in the 255 analysed articles, only two expert opinions come from photography specialists.