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ABSTRACT
In this article, I combine theorizations of the selfie as an aesthetic and technological practice of digital self-representation with a theatrical conception of spectatorship, inspired by Adam Smith, in order to argue that the selfie has the potential to operate as a significant ethico-political spectacle in the spaces of Western publicity. I exemplify my argument by using the remediation of migrant and refugee selfies in mainstream news as a case study of “symbolic bordering”—as a technology of power that couples the geopolitical bordering of migrants in the outskirts of Europe with practices of “symbolic bordering” that appropriate, marginalize, or displace their digital testimonies in Western news media.
Notes
1 I draw on Bolter and Grusin’s “remediation” (1999) so as to extend the term to refer not only to the embeddedness of one medium into another but also to the resignifications of aesthetic content that occur in this process of technological embeddedness.
2 For a discussion of selfie authenticity see Senft (Citation2015).
3 On the celebrification of politicians, such as Merkel, see Wheeler (Citation2012); on the celebrification of religion, see Lofton (Citation2012).