The
Allure of the Selfie: Instagram
and the New Self Portrait. Brooke Wendt. Network Notebooks 08, Institute of
Network Cultures, Amsterdam. (50p) ISBN 978-90-822345-1-0
I’ll
just come right out and say it: Brooke Wendt’s The Allure of the Selfie was not what I expected. I mean, the title
has the word ‘selfie’ in it. The cover is stamped with silhouettes of a
bikini-clad woman. I think I was imagining something along the lines of an art
book filled with rows and rows of duck-faced teenagers and twenty-somethings. I
was expecting a spectacle.
Instead,
Wendt took me to a place I haven’t been since grad school. Her collection of
five essays, plus introduction and conclusion, are fully researched academic
pieces that will make you think. Think. On a topic that sounds seemingly
shallow, Wendt has produced a carefully thought-out, deeply analytical pop
culture investigation of self-obsession in the twenty-first century. At forty-five
pages, it is a short collection, but certainly not a quick read, and I’m not
ashamed to say that, yes, I had to look up some words.
The Allure of the Selfie is, at its
core, an exploration of how Instagram and our creation of selfies have changed
the landscape of self-portraiture and self-identity. The first essay in the
collection, “Message: Camera Ads and Smartphone Commercials” traces the
influence picture taking has had our psyches through the last hundred years. Wendt
analyzes Kodak print ads and smartphone commercials to arrive at the ultimate
conclusion that will steer her essay collection: “We use social networks to
elevate ourselves, and Instagram helps us to position selfies as the center of
our universe.” As Wendt reminds us several times throughout The Allure of the Selfie, we have become
more than narcissists. We have become complacently obsessed with ourselves and
the instant gratification of showcasing ourselves to the world on the platforms
of social media.
Wendt
continues her exploration of the selfie through a detailed analysis of
Instagram photos, hashtags, filters, photobombing and our need to garner
‘likes’ to have our images, and thus our identifies, validated. At times, her
theories made me slightly uncomfortable and most definitely self-conscious,
which I think should be considered an achievement. While reading “Aesthetic:
The Filter Function and Identity,” I had the nagging urge to check my own
Instagram to see what sort of message I was sending out to the world. Are my
pictures engaging in an aesthetic dialogue about my identity or are they just
endless photos of my dogs? What do all the close-ups of my chi-wienie and
terriers really say about me? What are people thinking?!
In
all seriousness, though, I found most of Wendt’s assertions both interesting
and correct. I am a high school teacher and so am surrounded by selfie-taking
teenagers all day, all the time. I have to tell them to quick taking selfies of
themselves while they write essays, for God’s sake. (#stupidessay #englishclasssucks)
When Wendt writes, “The notion of becoming greater through images may explain
our need to document and then stylize every second of our being: we want to
appear significant, and we look to our image to signify this fact to us,” I
have to think she is right. We seem to have become the shadow of our selfies,
not the other way around. (October 2014)
Reviewer bio: Steph Post is the author of the debut
novel A Tree Born Crooked. Her short fiction has most
recently appeared in Haunted Waters: From the Depths, The Round-Up
and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. She currently lives, writes
and teaches writing in St. Petersburg, Florida.
