Selfie Citizenship

Selfie Citizenship negar@duke.edu Adi Kuntsman Editor Selfie Citizenship negar@duke.edu Editor Adi Kuntsman Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester, United Kingdom ISBN 978-3-319-45269-2 DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8 ISBN 978-3-319-45270-8 (eBook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955854 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Modern building window © saulgranda/Getty Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland negar@duke.edu ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The discussion about selfie citizenship began at the Selfie Citizenship conference, held at Digital Innovation (http://diginnmmu.com/) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, in April 2015. I am grateful to my co-organisers, Simon Faulkner and Farida Vis, from the Visual Social Media Lab (https://twitter.com/VisSocMedLab), who made the event possible and stimulated the ongoing debate on the subject, on the day and beyond. A special thanks goes to Jim Henderson for his assistance with indexing; to Esperanza Miyake and Ruth Preser for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this introduction; and to N.C. for the many inspiring conversations on the politics and ethics of the digital, and on the responsibilities of writing about it, as an observer, a participant and a critic. But most of all, I am indebted to all the contributors, whose ideas, hard work and poignant writing and art made this book possible. v negar@duke.edu CONTENTS Prologue 1 Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination Raju Rage 2 Introduction: Whose Selfie Citizenship? Adi Kuntsman 3 13 Conversation I Acts of Selfie Citizenship 3 Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selfies by Pakistani Instagrammers Fatima Aziz 21 4 V-Day Selfies in Beijing: Media Events and User Practices as Micro-Acts of Citizenship Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell 29 5 Selfies for/of Nepal: Acts of Global Citizenship and Bearing Witness Catherine Hartung 39 vii negar@duke.edu viii CONTENTS 6 Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’ Catherine Bouko 7 The People: The #Selfie’s Urform Negar Mottahedeh 49 59 Conversation II The Selfie Genre and Its New Adaptations 8 Performative Intimacies and Political Celebritisation Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm 9 Vote for My Selfie: Politician Selfies as Charismatic Engagement Crystal Abidin 65 75 10 Biometric Citizens: Adapting Our Selfies to Machine Vision Jill Walker Rettberg 89 11 Dronie Citizenship? Maximilian Jablonowski 97 Conversation III Selfies and the Politics of In/visibility 12 Selfies, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital Citizen Mark Nunes 13 Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera Phone Practices Larissa Hjorth and Jung Moon 14 Like a Stone in Your Stomach: Articulating the Unspeakable in Rape Victim-Survivors’ Activist Selfies Debra Ferreday negar@duke.edu 109 119 127 CONTENTS 15 Selfless Selfie Citizenship: Chupacabras Selfie Project Silvia Rodriguez Vega 16 ‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’: Selfies, Surveillance and the Politics of Being Unseen Sanaz Raji ix 137 149 Epilogue 17 On the Ethics of Looking JB Brager 161 Index 165 negar@duke.edu LIST Fig. 1.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 15.1 OF FIGURES (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/ selfies from performance by Raju Rage, assisted by Rena Onat ‘The moment when I first saw Imran Khan’ – ‘street view’ selfie in Islamabad with Imran Khan in the background. Initially published on Instagram, this photograph was deleted and republished by the user on Facebook as his profile picture updated on 20 October 2014. Photo by Instagram user <mj_Hassan> ‘ . . . wish I could take a selfie for real’ – ‘indoors’ selfie Photo by Instagram user <tufmanbakali> ‘#runwithBYK’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram ‘Waiting’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram Make-up tutorial selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram Outfit of the day selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram ‘#NotYourChupacabras’ 5 25 26 79 80 82 83 139 xi negar@duke.edu Prologue negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 1 Inject/ed: Self(ie) Determination Raju Rage Abstract This set of selfies is staged and taken by the transgender queer of colour artist, Raju Rage, at a German exhibition that documents the history of ‘homosexual men and women’ in the country. The artist’s selfies, in(ter)jected into whiteness and homonormativity of the gallery, neither claim simplistic visibility nor aim to achieve a celebratory inclusion. Rather, they instil a haunting presence that simultaneously undoes racist and transphobic erasure and offers a form of presence for queerness of colour that is not about being displayed and objectified. Keywords Transgender
Queer of colour
Haunting
Whiteness
Homonormativity
Exclusion In response to ‘The Homosexualität_en’ exhibition at Schwules museum, Berlin 2015, that ‘documents 150 years of the history, politics and culture of homosexual women and men in Germany’ (from the pamphlet to the exhibition), I decided to spontaneously inject myself into the exhibition and art works by using selfies as a transgender queer of colour interruption and intervention. R. Rage (*) Independent Visual Artist, London and Berlin e-mail: info@rajurage.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_1 negar@duke.edu 3 4 R. RAGE As I walked through the guided tour of the art exhibition at the Schwules museum, it became apparent that most of the bodies being presented were white bodies or white passing bodies (since one cannot know for certain). The absence of black bodies and those of colour were also present and visible in not being there. Transbodies were also absent although I’m not sure if I wanted them to be visible either. What does it mean for transbodies to always be visible? Although it was clear that they were consciously absent as a silent T (with no reasons given). I read the pamphlet which stated ‘the exhibition shows how same sex sexuality and non-conformist gender identities have been criminalised through legislation, pathologised in medicine and excluded from society’. Nowhere did it mention the parallels of black bodies and bodies of colour who are/were also exposed to this same treatment, if not more, many in intersectional criminalisation, pathologisation and exclusion. For example, brown queer Muslim’s* (in Berlin context) deemed homophobic and thus their queer identity erased outright and the constant policing of black, usually migrant, people which also impacts black transmasculine folks. I recalled the last 10 years of visiting Berlin and witnessing this constant criminalisation, pathologisation and exclusion from the streets, the gay bars, queer clubs and elsewhere. Those stories told to me continuously by Cutiebpocs (queer and trans* black people and people of colour in Berlin). Where were these bodies and narratives in this exhibition? Were they not considered German enough to be included? Where they not Homo enough? I decided to in(ter)ject myself into the art works, to interact with them. I wanted to present a dark ghostly shadowy presence in direct contrast to the whiteness, the white-washedness being conveyed. A redirection of the whiteness of the briefs underwear that matches the white glow of the face of the model on the exhibition cover image (the model being Cassil’s, a trans Canadian visual artist, who later also took issue with the whiteness depicted and exclusion inherent in this exhibition). I wanted to interrupt and create an intervention into this whiteness, which felt persecuted, and explore what impact my brown often persecuted gender non-conforming hairy body had in blurring this work, as a shadowy figure, obscuring, invisible yet visible and yet devoid of objectification (which happens a lot in Germany and elsewhere) (Figure 1.1a–f). The process in itself was interesting as an experience. I was surrounded mostly by a white audience looking at the artworks, who totally ignored my taking selfies with the work. The staff also did not notice or ask me to negar@duke.edu 1 INJECT/ED: SELF(IE) DETERMINATION 5 a Fig. 1.1 (a–f) ‘Inject/ed: self(ie) determination’, selected images/selfies from performance by Raju Rage, assisted by Rena Onat. http://www.rajurage.com/2015/08/visual-activisms-residency-berlin-11-17th-july-2015/ negar@duke.edu 6 R. RAGE b Fig. 1.1 (continued) negar@duke.edu 1 INJECT/ED: SELF(IE) DETERMINATION c Fig. 1.1 (continued) negar@duke.edu 7 8 R. RAGE d Fig. 1.1 (continued) negar@duke.edu 1 INJECT/ED: SELF(IE) DETERMINATION e Fig. 1.1 (continued) negar@duke.edu 9 10 R. RAGE f Fig. 1.1 (continued) negar@duke.edu 1 INJECT/ED: SELF(IE) DETERMINATION 11 stop, but maybe that would’ve been different if I had walked into the gallery off the street and not been part of an expected guided tour. Part of me wondered if taking selfies has become such a non-threatening (yet annoying) part of everyday life that is better ignored than challenged. To be honest I was expecting to be told off by an older German citizen who would tell me where I was out of place in my behaviour and conduct, which is what usually happens as I try to navigate everyday life in Berlin on public transport, crossing the road or at public toilets (that I am usually using incorrectly?!) to affirm that I clearly do not belong. But maybe this gallery was full of more ‘clued up’ arty and activist types who smile and stare instead? Who include you whilst oppressing you at the same time! Maybe I should have got selfies with them as well! These selfie interventions are testiment to the belonging/not belonging that queer and trans people of colour are constantly faced with. We are either missing or taking up too much space. What does it mean to take up space whhilst we are missing? Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who is proactive about carving space and using art and activism to forge creative survival. They are focused on knowledge and creative production both inside and, mostly, outside of academia and institutions, within pro/active creative and activist communities. Raju Rage’s work interrogates the ways in which history and memory, in/visibility and the affect of politics, space, symbolism, stereotypes, ethnic codes, ideology and gazes impact the body, with a focus on race, class and gender. http://www.rajurage.com/ negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 2 Introduction: Whose Selfie Citizenship? Adi Kuntsman Abstract In the introductory chapter, Adi Kuntsman presents the concept of ‘selfie citizenship’: claims made by ordinary citizens via their networked self-portraits, created, distributed and consumed at the times of algorithmic visibility, large-scale dataisation, globalised participatory politics and biometric governance. Kuntsman argues that both ‘selfie’ and ‘citizenship’ need to be understood not as a given but as a field of potential violence and contestation. Approaching selfie citizenship as a visual, networked and social phenomenon, the introduction asks: What are the conditions in which a selfie can do political work? Who are the selfies made for? By whom? How are they consumed? Who, when and how has the ability – and the safety – to star in a selfie, and when is such ability impossible? Keywords Visibility
Intimate citizenship
Dataisation
Biometric governance
Selfie politics The book opens with a set of selfies, staged and taken by the transgender queer of colour artist, Raju Rage, at a German exhibition that documents A. Kuntsman (*) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom e-mail: a.kuntsman@mmu.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_2 negar@duke.edu 13 14 A. KUNTSMAN the history of ‘homosexual men and women’1 (the wording of the exhibition, Schwules museum) in the country. The selfies were part of Raju’s performative intervention into the whitewashed space of the exhibition where black, brown and transgender bodies were entirely absent. And as the artist notes in their commentary, such selfie ‘in(ter)jection’ (Rage, this volume) into whiteness and homonormativity neither claims simplistic visibility nor aims to achieve a celebratory inclusion; rather, it instils a haunting presence that simultaneously undoes racist and transphobic erasure and offers a form of presence for queerness of colour that is not about being displayed and objectified. Raju’s account of their experience during the intervention ends with a question as to why their process of taking selfies caused no objections from the almost exclusively white audience in the gallery – and in fact, was largely ignored, at a striking difference to the artist’s experience of navigating urban spaces, public transport or toilets, in Germany and elsewhere. Was that something to do with space of the gallery, the particular crowd that attended or the act of selfie-taking itself? Raju’s in(ter)jection and reflection foreground and inspire some of the key questions raised in this book. What are the conditions in which a selfie can do political work? What are the regimes of in/visibility in which such work operates? Who are the selfies made for? By whom? How are they consumed? Who has the ability – and the safety – to star in a selfie, how and in what context, and when is such ability impossible? *** In the recent years, we have become accustomed to politicised use of selfies: photographs of individuals with handwritten notes or banners, various selfie memes and hashtag actions, spread on social media as actions of protest and various social statements. Such mobilisation of the selfie genre – understood broadly as self-portraits in viral digital circulation – challenges the prevalent popular view of selfies as narcissistic, inherently apolitical and even antisocial. Instead, it invites us to think about what I propose to call ‘selfie citizenship’: claims made by ordinary citizens via the use of their own networked self-portraits. Such claims, as the contributors to this book demonstrate, often merge the individual and the collective, the deliberate and the spontaneous, the marketised and the grass roots. In that respect, citizenship itself is taken on here not as a given condition but as an entity in the making, whether we think of ‘affective citizenship’ (Fortier 2010) – a sense of citizen collectivity constituted through the negar@duke.edu 2 INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SELFIE CITIZENSHIP? 15 governance of intimacies and performed feelings, or ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin 2009), where citizenship is made, enacted, within and across geographical borders, cultural scripts and communication genres. Selfie citizenship, as visual scholars would remind us, needs to be analysed as a phenomenon of depicting and seeing (What kind of iconographies does selfie citizenship mobilise? What does a citizen selfie show? How is it seen?). Furthermore, as Farida Vis (2015) and Jill Walker Rettberg (2014) have recently argued, the visuality and visibility of selfies is a networked phenomenon, mediated by algorithms and computer visions (How and where are acts of selfie citizenship circulated? How and when they can become visible, and to whom? Who are their human and non-human audiences?). But perhaps most importantly, selfie citizenship is also a social phenomenon, and understanding it requires a focus on power, context, actions, effects and consequences. For despite citizen selfies’ global spread, and somewhat standardised iconography – person + face + sign – their causes and claims vary significantly. Some stand against police brutality or military occupation, while others promote corporate or governmental causes, or incite hatred and war; some act as witnesses against regimes of silence and erasure, while others capitalise on being bystanders to sensational tragedies; some claim humanity, rights and political selfhood – theirs or those they stand in solidarity with – while others proudly show off their own violent deeds as a means of viral selfpromotion. And while in many such selfie actions ordinary citizens put their faces into digital circulation freely and willingly, the phenomenon of selfie citizenship cannot be separated from the rise of biometric governance, and in particular the use of facial recognition in surveillance and policing of individuals and communities, in border control or military operations. This book therefore proposes that the mobilisation of selfies by citizens should be understood as a new techno-social practice that is embedded not only in new forms of agency, but also in new forms of governance and violence. Selfie citizenship, in other words, is about particular forms of spectatorial intimacies and performative effects that can create or disrupt the sense of citizen collectivity through illusory proximity, and capitalise on individual visibility, at the time when citizenship itself is increasingly governed through biometric recognition and large-scale dataisation (Blas 2013). Reading selfie citizenship this way requires a new set of critical questions, beyond and away from the argument about selfies as either a futile negar@duke.edu 16 A. KUNTSMAN gesture or a vital format of citizen political mobilisation. Contributors in this collection ask, instead: Can we/should we tie today’s increasingly digital practices of citizenship – from consumerism to voting to social protect locally and globally – to the ‘self’, the face and to various forms and regimes of visibility? Or should we, instead, take apart both the currency of the selfie as a globalised networked practice and the notion of citizenship itself? Asking these questions means that we approach citizenship neither as a positive value nor as a given condition. Instead, the contributors meditate on citizenship, and in particular, selfie-based citizenship actions, as contested, and contextual, practices and processes. These can include media events that tie the political to the familial, the patriotic to the everyday, the grandiose to the quotidian, as Fatima Aziz, Gabriele de Seta, Michelle Proksell and Negar Mottahedeh demonstrate in their discussion of collective citizen marches, captured in selfies and shared on various social networks. They can offer possibilities for global solidarity and witnessing, as Catherine Hartung suggests. And they can include ways of selfie-based gamified entertainment that seem to shape – or sometimes even replace – other forms of civic engagement, as Catherine Bouko shows in her discussion of millennia selfies. Indeed, current debates around selfie citizenship are increasingly linked to forms of entertainment and celebritisation that both reshape the face (pun intended) of politics and obscure its power. Politicians’ selfies, for example, is a phenomenon that no longer surprises us. As Crystal Abidin, Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm demonstrate, the intimate genre of the selfie is adapted by political leaders who take selfies routinely, purposefully and skilfully as part of their election campaigning and self-branding. But behind the move to popularise a politician’s persona by using the latest media trend – the selfie and its trafficking in the banal and the everyday – is a broader shift towards the playful myopia that is at the heart of today’s adaptation of ruthless digital technologies into the patina of everyday life. Such is the case of ‘biometric citizenship’, discussed by Jill Walker Rettberg who shows how we complacently adapt to machine visions of ourselves (and of our selfies); and that of Maximilian Jablonowski’s notion of ‘dronie citizenship’, where a drone – perhaps the sign of our technomilitarist times – is excitedly welcomed into casual selfphotoshoots. A light-hearted and eager engagement with such technologies, which is at the centre of the digital industry and its accompanying consumer culture, allows and encourages to continuously disregard both these negar@duke.edu 2 INTRODUCTION: WHOSE SELFIE CITIZENSHIP? 17 technologies’ violent origins and their current and future dangerous applications. But disregarding the violence of the digital, and embracing instead its promises and pleasures, is also a privilege and a capital – a socially constructed form of entitlement that is highly contested and policed, and unequally distributed while masquerading as universal. This is an entitlement that can be conditionally offered, or violently withdrawn, just as citizenship itself. Understanding the digital – and in this particular case, the use of selfies shared on social media– as a form of social capital invites us to rewire the often assumed connections between visibility, face/body and politics. Being able to be visible through a selfie can undoubtedly be a way of locating oneself in time and space, or a form of powerful witnessing that counters death, erasure and forgetting, as Mark Nunes, Larissa Hjorth and Jung Moon argue in their analyses of selfie witnessing. Becoming present through a selfie-based action, as Debra Ferreday claims, can also be a means of claiming speakability, agency and survivorhood in the face of violent silencing and stigmatisation. But selfie visibility can also be a form of privilege, frequently mobilised and capitalised on, yet rarely questioned. As Raju Rage’s powerful in(ter)jection reminds us, and as and Silvia Rodriguez Vega and Sanaz Raji poignantly demonstrate in their discussions of selfie activism without a face, for many the visibility ingrained in the genre of the selfie is neither always available nor desirable, and claiming it can have dire consequences. The refusal to show one’s face or to participate in social media photo-sharing entirely, or the alternatives deployed by some activists – wearing a mask (Vega), or refocusing the photo on the message instead of the face (Raji) – offers a powerful critique of the currency of visibility in today’s digital politics (and beyond). It also reminds us that acts of selfie citizenship are never solely about those starring in selfies, but always also about those looking at them. As JB Brager poignantly notes in the epilogue, looking at the selfie ‘one is forced to ask where we are looking from, as well as who we are looking at, within political frameworks of visibility, hyper-visibility, erasure and misrepresentation’ (Brager, this volume: 152). When both selfies and citizenship are understood as a privilege rather than a given, as a capital that can be gained, lost, appropriated or withdrawn, or as a right that needs to be fought for, our concerns about selfie citizenship begin to shift. Rather than claiming what selfie citizenship is, or should be, this volume hopes to offer an opening to a much needed conversation on selfies, citizenship and politics, as a field of potential violence negar@duke.edu 18 A. KUNTSMAN and contestation rather than that of playful celebration. By examining the contexts and conditions in which selfies do – or fail to do – political work, and by attending to metaphorical, visual and physical erasures within selfie citizenship, the book is an invitation to reflect on the possible meanings and costs of ‘selfie’ and ‘citizenship’ as they intersect today. NOTE 1. Schwules Museum, Berlin http://www.schwulesmuseum.de/en/exhibi tions/archives/2015/view/homosexuality-ies/. REFERENCES Blas, Z. (2013). Escaping the face: Biometric facial recognition and the facial weaponization suite. Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus. Retrieved from http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/ escaping-the-face-biometric-facial-recognition-and-the-facial-weaponizationsuite/. Fortier, A.-M. (2010). Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease. Citizenship Studies, 14(1): 17–30. Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29, 367–388. Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vis, F. (2015, April 16). Algorithmic visibility: Edgerank, selfies and the networked photograph. Paper Presented at the Selfie Citizenship Conference, Manchester. Adi Kuntsman is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, the author of Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Rebecca L. Stein), and the co-editor of Queer Necropolitics (with Jin Haritaworn and Silvia Posocco) and Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technologica Change (with Athina Karatzogianni). negar@duke.edu CONVERSATION I Acts of Selfie Citizenship negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 3 Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selfies by Pakistani Instagrammers Fatima Aziz Abstract Drawing on a close reading of ‘Freedom March’ selfies, published by Pakistani instagrammers in August–December 2014 under #azadimarch, Aziz discusses the relationship between selfies and civic participation offline and online. She offers a qualitative analysis of a shift in selfie practices from documenting media coverage to participation and citizenship performance by Pakistanis in a national freedom march organised in 2014. Focusing on photographs of participants published on Instagram, the chapter draws attention to selfie as a dialogical gesture and polemical representation of political identity performed on social media. Keywords Selfie
Citizenship
Performance
Instagram
#azadimarch FREEDOM MARCH In protest to systematic rigging of Pakistani election results in 2013, Imran Khan, leader of centrist, opposition party, Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI), called for a nationwide march on the country’s independence day, 14 August 2014 (Dunya News 2015). Initially launched as ‘tsunami’ movement to signify a wave of political change, the march was F. Aziz (*) École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France e-mail: fma2001@gmail.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_3 negar@duke.edu 21 22 F. AZIZ organised as final action following a series of smaller rallies. It was subsequently renamed ‘revolution’ and ‘azadi’ (‘freedom’) march. Beginning in Lahore, demonstrators joined en route and arrived in the country’s capital city, Islamabad, on 15 August to participate in a short peaceful sit-in, which lasted for a hundred days in front of the Parliament House. Fearing media censorship by the incumbent government, PTI launched a bilingual website, AZADI MARCH (http://azadimarch.insaf.pk) for party supporters to share rally activities online. On social media, PTI encouraged protestors to share photos and videos under #azadimarch hashtag.1 On Instagram 9,777 posts are accessible under this hashtag and most of the visuals still accessible showcase a variety of photographic and video selfies. Mainstream media ignored PTI’s social media campaign, and most of the visual content shared on their site was accessible only to Internet users. This chapter is based on empirical research of 200 selfies published on Instagram from 14 August to 17 December 2014 by Pakistani citizens under #azadimarch. Even though some photographs might have been deleted since initial publication,2 the following qualitative analysis demonstrates a shift in selfie usage from documenting media coverage of the march to participation and citizenship performance both offline and online which lasted for over a period of 5 months. SELFIES: A CITIZEN RIGHT AND A DIALOGICAL GESTURE Internet access and its unfiltered use are not democratic rights of Pakistani citizens. Foreign social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube are regularly monitored and censored for content deemed ‘anti-islamic’ by government authorities (OpenNet Initiative 2012). For a population of 193.2 million, only 20.1 million have Internet access, while active mobile subscriptions amount to 134.8 million (We Are Social 2014). Mobile technology and Internet access are increasing (Pew Research Center 2015). In Asia, Pakistan provides the fifth largest mobile phone market (We Are Social 2013). Smartphone sales are increasing as these are relatively cheaper than computers and digital cameras and can provide individual Internet access with average recording and viewing quality for domestic use. Under repressive technocultural affordances, only a relatively small part of the population, 16.2 million users, are connected to social media. In the absence of statistical evidence on Instagram use in Pakistan, based on observation it can be hypothesised that Instagram use is limited to sharing negar@duke.edu 3 PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP: FREEDOM MARCH SELFIES . . . 23 fashion and touristic content. Therefore, selfies published under #azadimarch on individual Instagram accounts of rally participants can be considered as outstanding acts, a creative break from a quotidian use (Farnell 2000). The prolonged publication duration of freedom march content on Instagram constitutes another important aspect of this dispersed online movement. Protestors from different cities regularly published and documented their participation during various rallies. The variety of visual content helps track its development from the time protesters started taking and posting selfies to subsequent changes in the visual content and its reception online. Selfies published by protestors provide an alternative source of information to mainstream media coverage, which contrary to demonstrators’ testimonials reported aggressive and violent crowd behaviour. Mediation via a street view of blockades and other impediments preventing rally participants from reaching Islamabad, the rally’s end point, illustrates the enactment of protestors as peaceful claimants visually voicing their demands for fair elections. In this regard, freedom march selfies can be viewed in relation to Engin Isin’s notion of citizenship. According to Isin, acts of citizenship are claims for rights intended to elicit recognition and redistribution by others, actions that constitute the ‘performative force’ of citizenship performance (Isin 2008). Moreover, selfies as photographic activity produce what Paul Frosh calls the ‘gestural image’, defining its intention as not only ‘see this, here, now’ but also ‘see me showing you me’ (Frosh 2015). André Gunthert, photography historian, also argues for selfies to be considered as a different type of self-portraiture, one that establishes a twofold role of the photographer, both as subject and operator of the image (Gunthert 2015). Performance of citizenship through selfies then becomes a dialogical gesture, transforming rally participants/photographers into claimants addressing their appeal to other protestors as well as government officials and foreign media. This transformation occurs first by using Instagram as a public broadcasting platform. Secondly, as a citizen, partaking in a collective political effort and conversation with other protestors. In political contexts, selfies may also act as visual signatures and when shared online ‘en masse can challenge power’ (Mottahedeh 2015). Publishing selfies under #azadimarch indicates an intention of political self-identification, a concept Senft has termed as ‘networked reflective solidarity’, linking people who share similar political sentiments and inviting response from fellow supporters who might mimic and/or redistribute negar@duke.edu 24 F. AZIZ the content (Senft 2008). These self-portraits are not showcasing social identity, but are about a polemical identification (Mirzoeff 2011) seeking social validation. #AZADIMARCH: FRIENDS, WOMEN AND FAMILY An analysis of recurring visual content in #azadimarch selfie dataset allows for its thematic organisation. During the analysis I identified four types of selfies: ‘on the move’, ‘indoors’, ‘street view’ and ‘family’. Selfies published earlier in the protest document various preparatory aspects and activities carried out with friends. Shot in cars or on motorbikes, ‘on the move’ selfies show mostly male protestors in groups3 or with friends posing in streets.4 Selfies shot indoors at restaurants or at home5 document indirect support and acknowledgement of the rally’s importance. Individuals unable to participate in situ displayed their support through t-shirts printed with slogans, PTI party colours (red and green) and badges of Imran Khan’s portrait. It must be noted that ‘indoor’ selfies are uploaded by privileged teens and mostly girls, a social category whose movement in public space is controlled by parents. Photographing and sharing different phases of the rally, completing a milestone with a group of friends or arriving at a key location and documenting these activities through ‘street view’ selfies also informed family members of protestors’ safety. Most ‘on the move’ and ‘street view’ selfies are shot and uploaded via male Instagram accounts, indicating a gender imbalance when it comes to physically participating in public political demonstrations. Although women actively participated in the freedom march, female presence is not as visible on Instagram as those of male protestors.6 While for some protestors selfies were a visual proof of their struggle in overcoming massive containers blocking the Parliament House, for those who successfully reached the rally destination, selfies were shot to include Imran Khan’s speech podium serving as visual rewards (Fig. 3.1).7 Many ‘indoor’ selfies also show photographers with Imran Khan’s image broadcasted on live television (Fig. 3.2). During the hundred days protest, selfie production and publication on Instagram increased considerably. In successive selfies shot at various rallies held across different cities in Pakistan, a shift can be observed in the visual content of ‘on the street’ selfies taken with friends which are replaced by selfies shot with political celebrities and family members. This change negar@duke.edu 3 PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP: FREEDOM MARCH SELFIES . . . 25 Fig. 3.1 ‘The moment when I first saw Imran Khan’ – ‘street view’ selfie in Islamabad with Imran Khan in the background. Initially published on Instagram, this photograph was deleted and republished by the user on Facebook as his profile picture updated on 20 October 2014. Photo by Instagram user <mj_Hassan>. Source: Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= 898416496850338&set=a.179429482082380.41143.100000459899270 &type=3&theater negar@duke.edu 26 F. AZIZ Fig. 3.2 ‘ . . . wish I could take a selfie for real’ – ‘indoors’ selfie. Photo by Instagram user <tufmanbakali>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/r2JPNEtBIY/?tagged= azadimarch documents a significant shift in attitude of Pakistani citizens towards democratic participation, selfies and photography. Family participation in freedom march also ensured an active representation and performance of women and girls as individual claimants.8 Although photographed by male family members, ‘family’ selfies indicate social acceptance of selfies as citizen journalism on a small scale. Inclusion of parents can reduce narcissistic rhetoric against selfies propagated by Pakistani press. Moreover, encouraging comments written online in response to these selfies on Instagram translate into a positive interpretation of these citizen acts. A crucial aspect of Isin’s concept of citizenship performance is the ‘performative force’ of an act, which is not limited to the moment of its performance, but includes its subsequent interpretation and description (Isin 2012). Social media affordances encourage performative force of citizenship negar@duke.edu 3 PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP: FREEDOM MARCH SELFIES . . . 27 acts to be developed in different ways. In this case, freedom march selfies helped Pakistani citizens to perform their civic identity individually, as well as collectively on Instagram, which was used as a site by new social actors, who represented themselves as claimants. In conclusion, freedom march selfies provide interesting examples of how selfie photographic practices, when aligned with political motivation, transforms banal activity into a citizen act, an active performance of political identity. In Pakistan, female participation in public demonstrations is limited to professionals such as lawyers and politicians. The visual shift observed in this case reflects an awakening of political awareness and responsibility in young women and families who live in a struggling democracy and maledominated culture. Selfie as a photographic practice gives visibility to previously invisible female citizens and reifies their claims to civic identity. NOTES 1. Other hashtags include #azadimarchpti (3,760 posts); azadimarch14 (8 posts). 2. Indicating what Senft and Baym (2015) note in the case of selfies the ‘politics of their assemblage (by human and nonhuman agents) is a constant reminder that once anything enters digital space, it instantly becomes part of the infrastructure of the digital superpublic, outliving the time and place in which it was originally produced, viewed or circulated’. However, in this case, in spite of Internet filtering, the #azadimarch visual content and selfies continue to be accessible online, most probably also because of their lowinterest value to print and broadcast media. 3. ‘On the move’ – selfie with friends on motorbikes. Photo by Instagram user <jawad__ahmed>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/rzq21uBK5h/. 4. ‘Street view’ – masked selfie with a friend, capturing the blockade in the background. Photo by Instagram user <wahab_ali72>. Source: https:// instagram.com/p/r5PGwDySMg/?tagged=azadimarch. 5. Composite of ‘indoor’ mirror selfie with media footage. Photo by Instagram user <ahmad.arif.31>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/rmoMLijuRd/? tagged=azadimarch. 6. Pakistani female social media accounts are mostly private, a strategy to avoid policing of their activities by family members. 7. ‘Street view’ Epic Selfie at the march, 15 August 2014. Photo by Instagram user <faizan.h.malik>. Source: https://instagram.com/p/r5JL1hK1pF/? tagged=azadimarch. 8. Family selfie. Photo by Instagram user <farrukhlak>. Source: https://insta gram.com/p/t2fm15N2_1/?taken-by=farrukhlak. negar@duke.edu 28 F. AZIZ REFERENCES Dunya News. (2015). Imran Khan accuses ECP of rigging general election. http://dunyanews.tv/en/Pakistan/284091-Imran-Khan-accuses-ECP-of-rig ging-general-election. Accessed 14 September 2015. Farnell, B. (2000). Getting out of the habitus: An alternative model of dynamically embodied social action. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(3), 397–418. Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1607–1628. Gunthert, A. (2015). La consécration du selfie. Une histoire culturelle. Etudes Photographiques, 32. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3495. Isin, E. F. (2008). Theorizing acts of citizenship. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.). Acts of citizenship. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Isin, E. F. (2012). Citizens without frontiers. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Mirzoeff, N. (2011). Occupy theory, For the Right to Look. http://nicholasmir zoeff.com/RTL/?p=314. Accessed 17 May 2016. Mottahedeh, N. (2015). #iranelection: Hashtag solidarity and the transformation of online life. California: Stanford University Press. OpenNet Initiative. (2012). Pakistan. https://opennet.net/research/profiles/ pakistan Accessed 10 August 2015. Pew Research Center. (2015). Communications technology in emerging and developing nations. http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/03/19/1-communicationstechnology-in-emerging-and-developing-nations/. Accessed: 10 August 2015 Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang. Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606. We Are Social. (2013). Social, digital and mobile in Pakistan. http://wearesocial. net/blog/2013/01/social-digital-mobile-pakistan/. Accessed 10 August 2015 We Are Social. (2014). Social, digital & mobile in 2014. http://wearesocial.sg/ blog/2014/08/social-digital-mobile-august-2014/. Accessed 10 August 2015. Fatima Aziz is a PhD candidate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her PhD project focuses on identity and sociality as co-constructed visual practices on social network sites. She has published on hook-up practices of French youth on Facebook and networked sociality and solidarity through image sharing in online communities. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 4 V-Day Selfies in Beijing: Media Events and User Practices as Micro-Acts of Citizenship Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell Abstract Zipai, or ‘taking a picture of oneself’, is an extremely popular practice across an increasingly digitally mediated China. The principal platforms through which Chinese digital media users share their zipai are mobile micro-messaging and social contact apps such as WeChat. This chapter follows a highly visible media event – the 2015 V-Day military parade in Beijing – and its representation across micro-media practices of spectatorship to rethink the role of zipai in the construction of contemporary forms of Chinese citizenship. Keywords China
Media events
Media practices
Micro-media
Military parade
Zipai
WeChat FROM SQUARE TO SCREEN I used to have a photograph of myself when I was fifteen, standing in the middle of Tiananmen Square with Mao’s huge portrait visible in the background. It was taken not in Beijing but in the photography studio of our town G. de Seta (*) Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: notsaved@live.com M. Proksell Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_4 negar@duke.edu 29 30 G. DE SETA AND M. PROKSELL a thousand miles away. The room in which I was standing cannot have been more than twenty feet wide, and the square was just a theatrical backdrop painted on the wall. When you looked at the photo, you might almost have believed I was really standing in Tiananmen Square – except for the complete absence of people in the acres of space behind me. (Yu 2012: 31) – ‘Did you watch the Beijing V-Day parade on TV?’ – ‘No, I didn’t watch it at all. I never follow any of those zhongda shijian [major events] happening in China.’ – ‘But did you follow what was going on through other media?’ – ‘I stopped watching television when I was in middle school. So I don’t get any news from the TV. But because this was a zhongda shijian, it’s inevitable, I’ve seen a lot of short clips of the military parade reposted by people in my WeChat pengyouquan [friend circle].’ (The authors in conversation with Yi, a 32-year-old freelance writer) On 3 September 2015, as it became immediately evident from the sudden thematic change in the zipai (selfies, literally ‘self-shot’) we were collecting on local social media platforms, Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was the ground of a historic event. Six years after the last grand military parade organised in the Chinese capital, thousands of troops and hundreds of military vehicles marched on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Japan’s 1945 surrender. Commonly referred to as ‘China’s V-Day’, the ‘Commemoration of 70th anniversary of Victory of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese aggression and World Anti-Fascist War’ (Xinhuanet 2015) was declared to be a public holiday by Chinese authorities four months in advance (Tang and Zhao 2015) and has been described as an occasion for China to flex its muscles in international relations (Page and Wong 2015) while reasserting its model of peaceful rise (Phillips 2015). The military parade, happening under the blue skies of Beijing – cleared of smog through weeks of reduced industrial production and tightly regulated street traffic (Lu and Chan 2015) – was evidently planned as a ‘media event’ in the sense described by Dayan and Katz (1992): the cheering on-site audience was mostly composed of veterans and Party members, while the national public was included in the celebration through televised broadcasts and allowed, if not encouraged, to document and share the spectacle through mobile phones and social media. As Pan Zhongdang argues, this sort of media events, from Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the military negar@duke.edu 4 V-DAY SELFIES IN BEIJING: MEDIA EVENTS AND USER PRACTICES . . . 31 review on National Day 2009, have been consistently engineered to support the ‘construction of collective memories’ and heighten ‘national identity and pride’ (2010: 521) among Chinese citizens. Yet in this case, even before the actual event and its broadcasting, the establishment of a new national holiday gave rise to extensive discussions across local social media platforms, many of which, as Wertime (2015) reports, were focused on the practical details of the upcoming vacation: how many days would people get off work, where could they go for a short trip and how the parade machinery would impact their mobility and activities in the capital. Moreover, besides discussions about the parade and its reverberations across national and international media, the recent popularisation of mobile devices and social contact apps in the country contributed to the emergence of a parallel experience of the national celebration, a form of participatory spectatorship shared through zipai, short video clips and comments across personal messaging, group chats and user profiles. The aim of this chapter is to rethink the role of these media practices in the construction of contemporary Chinese citizenship. By presenting an ethnographic snapshot of user activity on a mobile social media platform in the time around the 2015 V-Day parade in Beijing, we seek to highlight how media events are experienced and chronicled in extremely different ways by their target audiences: as inevitable, intrusive and somewhat disruptive ‘major events’, as occasions for patriotic pride to be displayed across friend circles or as positive moments in which national celebration intertwines with intimate self-reflections on citizenship. As blogger Li Yinuo summarises in a WeChat post widely shared around the days of the parade: I also found something profound in the 3 generations of my own family: from my grandparents, who lived through war and poverty [ . . . ] through my parents, who lived through the famine in the 60s and the dark ‘cultural revolution’ of the 70s, to me, sitting here now, with the best technology at my fingertips, writing a note like this to you all. (Li 2015) MAJOR EVENTS, MICRO-MEDIA This intervention is based on the findings of a larger research project that the authors have been working on since 2014, an interdisciplinary inquiry focused on the production and circulation of zipai on the negar@duke.edu 32 G. DE SETA AND M. PROKSELL messaging app WeChat (in Chinese, Weixin, literally ‘micro-letter’). Our research methods consist of long-term, active participation in the platform, the use of WeChat’s locational search function to collect visual media from public user profiles, and the triangulation of insights regarding trends or phenomena through interviews or focus group discussions with app users (de Seta and Proksell 2015). While our research project has been broadly concerned with the production and circulation of visual media in Chinese everyday life, the materials presented in this chapter were collected in Beijing over the course of just 1 month – from 23 August to 23 September 2015 – and illustrate how a zhongda shijian, the ‘major event’ of the V-Day parade, was spectated, interpreted and remediated locally through user practices already established on the popular mobile messaging platform. Nationalism has been a missing element in our long-term visual ethnography of WeChat. After collecting zipai at first, and then more broadly different kinds of vernacular visual media from the platform (status update photos, short video clips, animated GIFs, personalised stickers), we realised that although widely documented in academic literature (Chan 2006; Leibold 2010; Liu 2012; Qiu 2006), visual expressions of everyday patriotism and banal nationalism (Billig 1995) were largely absent from our archives. This changed drastically during the two weeks leading to the parade, when the public profiles of military personnel started appearing with increasing frequency among the nearby app users, along with a wealth of photos of Chinese flags being installed along Beijing’s hutong neighbourhoods, tank convoys being transported across the city and aircrafts rehearsing parade formations in the skies above. The V-Day parade had entered the everyday life of people in Beijing, and was being mediated, through the affordances of mobile devices and digital media platforms, by residents, visitors and even army members travelling to Beijing from different parts of China for the occasion. Nationalist and patriotic expressions of citizenship suddenly flooded the local visual landscape of WeChat, conjoining the exceptionality of the new holiday with the spatial reconfiguration brought by the much-touted media event. These few examples of personal mediation of a zhongda shijian already evidence the importance of individual articulations of citizenship. According to Peter Dahlgren, understanding contemporary articulations of citizenship and media requires a ‘cultural turn’ helping us to see citizenship ‘not just in formal terms but also in regard to meaning, practices, communication and identities’ (2006: 267). Dahlgren’s proposal for a negar@duke.edu 4 V-DAY SELFIES IN BEIJING: MEDIA EVENTS AND USER PRACTICES . . . 33 cultural turn is admittedly a reaction to essentialist and a priori notions of citizenship in liberal democracies (pp. 268–269), but it is equally valid when discussing Asian countries, often subjected to similarly essentialist and orientalist assumptions regarding civic participation (Isin 2002). A constructivist perspective on citizenship formation becomes necessary, especially in times when media play such a central role in the articulation of national imaginations and personal interpretations. According to Dahlgren, the focus of citizenship studies should shift towards ‘all kinds of horizontal “mini” media’ (Dahlgren 2006: 275) and beyond the public sphere towards ‘the terrain of the private’ (p. 276). Similar arguments, albeit more critical regarding the idea of cultural citizenship, are echoed by Nick Couldry, who suggests rather to study ‘studying the experiential dimensions of citizenship, studying what it actually feels like to be a citizen’ (2006: 323) by inquiring into how these dimensions intersect with media use ‘by listening closely to individuals’ reflexive accounts of their own practice’ (p. 328) without neglecting feelings of withdrawal, disinterest or indifference (p. 333). We collected evidence that people around us in Beijing were consistently aware of the parade, and involved in its unfolding with different degrees of interest, excitement, indifference or commitment. Whereas PRC flags captioned ‘Long live the motherland!’ and zipai of users among the crowds around Tiananmen Square or in front of passing military vehicles abounded in publicly shared WeChat posts, people we asked about the parade were largely disaffected and cynical about it. ‘The event has no meaning to me’, declares Yuanyuan, a 26-year-old local resident, then continuing to explain: ‘as a Beijinger I find it very annoying that many streets and transportations had to be closed in advance, it reminds me of the time before the 2008 Olympics . . . gigs and exhibitions were cancelled, and so on’. Zhen, another young Beijing resident, expresses similar feelings of inconvenience and recalls how the parade occupied very little space in discussions with her own friends: ‘We talked about it briefly. We were not very concerned with it’. The predominance of disaffected or cynical descriptions of the V-Day parade among the Beijing residents we talked to, in stark contrast to the generally positive and celebratory zipai participation observed on public WeChat profiles, might be explained by the limited demographics of our interviewees, mostly university-educated urban youth, generally more alienated from the patriotic sentiments shared by the previous generation, suspicious of active participation in media events, and distrustful of the state’s efforts of national representation (Wu 2012: 2223). negar@duke.edu 34 G. DE SETA AND M. PROKSELL MEDIA PRACTICES AS MICRO-ACTS OF CITIZENSHIP Nationalist imagery, expressions of patriotic pride and on-site chronicling of one’s own presence as audience of the parade were just one variety of the content we collected on WeChat during the month of research. In contrast to these ‘orderly’ mediations of on-site experience that conformed to the celebratory tone set by official media, other user practices resulted in the production and circulation of more ‘disorderly’ (Latham 2007: 295) self-representations. Some examples are group zipai taken in front of television screens by friends watching the parade together, digitally mediated drinking games based on the appearance of certain political leaders on screen or the humorous discussion of specific moments of the celebrations captured as photos or short video clips and shared in status updates and group chats. Here the interplay between the parade taking place on Tiananmen Square, its live broadcasting as a media event on national television and the possibilities of refracting it through individual acts of selective and participatory remediation evidence how the multiplication of media practices requires a more nuanced vocabulary to describe the articulation of citizenship in contemporary China. Sharing clips of remixed videos and taking close-up photos of political leaders with funny expressions to discuss them in a group chat with friends watching the parade in scattered places across the city (or the country) cannot neither be reduced, as Kevin Latham warns, to a simple act of resistance against state propaganda (2007: 296), nor to a Bordieusian habitus of acting out ‘already written scripts’ (Isin 2008: 38). The distinction that Engin Isin and Greg Nielsen propose between practices of citizenship and acts of citizenship, the former being ‘institutionally accumulated processes’ and the latter being the disruptive and confrontational ‘actual moments that shift established practices, status and order’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008: 10), has been widely adopted in recent discussions of the experience of citizenship – even with reference to the specific case of China (Hsu 2008) – but fails to encompass exceptional and ephemeral bouts of social media activity such as the sociable spectatorship of the V-Day parade described in this chapter. If, as Isin argues, a new vocabulary of citizenship is needed to describe ‘the emergence of new “sites”, “scales”’, and “acts” through which “actors” claim to transform themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as claimants of rights’ (2009: 368), then user practices of self-representation through disorderly micro-media during major events should be recognised as valuable cases in negar@duke.edu 4 V-DAY SELFIES IN BEIJING: MEDIA EVENTS AND USER PRACTICES . . . 35 which citizenship is articulated and rearticulated (Pan 2010) without necessarily falling on either end of the spectrum between habitus and act. After all, as Yu Haiqing reminds us, ‘Chinese audiences have always been active decoders of official messages’ (2006: 305), and as many of the WeChat status updates and publicly shared images we collected, digital media users are also very well-versed producers of personal interpretations of these messages, eager to include themselves and their own sociable spectating practices in the picture. Ultimately, from the Tiananmen Square backdrops in the photographic studio of Yu Hua’s town to the effervescent pengyouquan (friend circles) of Beijing residents during the 2015 V-Day parade, it is still the case that ‘the portrait must be authenticated by the public, for the elementary reason that otherwise it will not work’ (Dayan and Katz 1992: ix). What remains to be seen is what these portraits, augmented and reconfigured by micro-acts of citizenship, actually work for. REFERENCES Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Chan, B. (2006). Virtual communities and Chinese national identity. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2(1), 1–32. Couldry, N. (2006). Culture and citizenship: The missing link?. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(3), 321–339. Dahlgren, P. (2006). Doing citizenship: The cultural origins of civic agency in the public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(3), 267–286. Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Seta, G., & Proksell, M. (2015). The aesthetics of zipai: From WeChat selfies to self-representation in contemporary Chinese art and photography. Networking Knowledge, 8(6), 1–17. Hsu, Y. (2008). Acts of Chinese citizenship: The Tank Man and democracy-to-come. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. Isin, E. F. (2002). Citizenship after orientalism. In E. F. Isin & B. S. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of citizenship studies. London: Sage. Isin, E. F. (2009). Citizenship in flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29(1), 367–388. Isin, E. F. (2008). Theorizing acts of citizenship. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. Isin, E. F., & Nielsen, G. M. (2008). Introduction: Acts of citizenship. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. negar@duke.edu 36 G. DE SETA AND M. PROKSELL Latham, K. (2007). SMS, communication, and citizenship in China’s information society. Critical Asian Studies, 39(2), 295–314. Leibold, J. (2010). More than a category: Han supremacism on the Chinese internet. The China Quarterly, 203, 539–559. Li, Y. (2015). The 9.3 Beijing V-Day Parade - a Chinese perspective. Medium. https://medium.com/@yinuoli/the-9-3-beijing-v-day-parade-a-chinese-per spective-88f202f670b6. Accessed 7 October 2015. Liu, F. (2012). ‘Politically indifferent’ nationalists? Chinese youth negotiating political identity in the internet age. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(1), 53–69. Lu, S., & Chan, W. (2015). Blue sky vanishes immediately after Beijing’s massive parade. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/04/asia/china-beijing-bluesky-disappears-after-military-parade/index.html. Accessed 7 October 2015. Page, J., & Wong, C. H. (2015). China flexes its military muscle at World War II parade. The Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-flexesits-military-muscle-at-world-war-ii-parade-1441282579. Accessed 7 October 2015. Pan, Z. (2010). Articulation and re-articulation: Agendas for understanding media and communication in China. International Journal of Communication, 4, 517–530. Phillips, T. (2015). Chinese military parade’s main message is not peace but power. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/ chinese-military-parade-peace-power-xi-jinping. Accessed 7 October 2015. Qiu, J. L. (2006). The changing web of Chinese nationalism. Global Media and Communication, 2(1), 125–128. Tang, S., & Zhao, G. (2015). Guowuyuan: Jinnian 9 yue 3 ri kangzhan shengli 70 zhounian jinianri fangjia 1 tian [State Council: In occasion of the 70th anniversary of the victory of the war of resistance against Japan, this year’s September 3rd will be a one-day holiday]. Renminwang. http://politics.people.com.cn/ n/2015/0513/c1001-26993366.html. Accessed 7 October 2015. Wertime, D. (2015). A day to watch in China: September 3, 2015. Tea Leaf Nation. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/13/a-day-to-watch-in-chinaseptember-3-2015-japan-tension. Accessed 7 October 2015. Wu, A. X. (2012). Hail the independent thinker: The emergence of public debate culture on the Chinese Internet. International Journal of Communication, 6, 2220–2244. Xinhuanet. (2015). China holds V-Day parade. Xinhuawang. http://www.xin huanet.com/english/special/vday2015. Accessed 7 October 2015. Yu, H. (2006). From active audience to media citizenship: The case of post-Mao China. Social Semiotics, 16(2), 303–326. Yu, H. (2012). China in ten words. New York: Anchor Books. negar@duke.edu 4 V-DAY SELFIES IN BEIJING: MEDIA EVENTS AND USER PRACTICES . . . 37 Gabriele de Seta is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology in Taipei, Taiwan, and a media anthropologist studying digital folklore and media practices of vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He collects, curates and narrates the genres of user-generated content, local humour and platform-specific aesthetics circulating across Chinese post-digital media ecologies. His research work is chronicled on his website http://paranom.asia Michelle Proksell born in Saudi Arabia to expat American parents, is an independent researcher, curator and writer currently based in Beijing, China. Her work focuses on the emergence of digital, new media and Internet art in China. Information about her archival and curatorial work is available on her online gallery: http://netize.net. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 5 Selfies for/of Nepal: Acts of Global Citizenship and Bearing Witness Catherine Hartung Abstract This chapter examines two very different ways that selfies were used to bear witness to the earthquake that devastated Nepal in 2015: selfies taken by locals ‘on the ground’ and selfies taken by those overseas wanting to show solidarity with the Nepalese. The chapter argues that these selfies and their differing public receptions function as acts of citizenship, highlighting the underlying discourses of nationalism and global citizenship that dictate what is deemed a morally appropriate response to such devastation. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the selfies that are intended to promote global solidarity and connectedness may inadvertently reinforce nationalistic borders and inequalities, while the globally controversial selfies taken by locals to bear witness to the devastation challenge what is institutionally recognised as ‘legitimate’ journalism. Keywords Global citizenship
Selfies
Bearing witness
Acts of citizenship
Citizen journalism C. Hartung (*) University of Otago College of Education, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: catherine.hartung@otago.ac.nz © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_5 negar@duke.edu 39 40 C. HARTUNG INTRODUCTION On 25 April 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake brought mass devastation to Nepal, killing 9,000 people, injuring 23,000 and leaving hundreds of thousands more without homes. The United Nations estimated that a total of 8 million people were affected by the disaster, including 1.7 million children living in some of the worst-hit and most isolated areas in Nepal. The earthquake was the country’s worst natural disaster since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1932. The earthquake, and subsequent aftershocks, also caused immeasurable and irreparable damage to the environment and infrastructure, flattening whole villages and many UNESCO World Heritage sites. One such site was the nine-storey Dharahara Tower, built in 1832, which killed an estimated 180 people when it collapsed. The international response to the earthquake was widespread among governments, NGOs, news media and members of the public. Digital technology and social media played a significant role in mobilising these efforts and allowed a global audience to bear witness to the devastation, though not all use of social media during the aftermath of the earthquake was well received. This chapter juxtaposes two responses to the earthquake that involved selfies as a way of bearing witness to consider how selfies and their public reception can function as acts of citizenship. An ‘act of citizenship’, according to Isin and Nielsen (2008), is an event through which subjects are constituted as citizens. In this sense, citizenship is not restricted to rights and responsibilities but is a form of subjectivity that is performed. The first selfie ‘act’ under examination here involved online campaigns asking people to send a selfie holding a sign to show love for and solidarity with the people of Nepal. The second selfie act involved tourists in Nepal who took photos of themselves standing next to the collapsed Dharahara Tower and the subsequent media backlash. In examining these two very different acts of selfie citizenship, their global reception and effects, the chapter highlights the complex interplay between conceptions of the self(ie) and the ‘other’ and the underlying discourses of nationalism and global citizenship that shape what is considered an appropriate response to devastation of such magnitude. Ultimately, the chapter argues that selfies that are intended to promote global solidarity and connectedness may inadvertently work to reinforce rather than overcome nationalistic borders and related inequalities. negar@duke.edu 5 SELFIES FOR/OF NEPAL: ACTS OF GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP . . . REPOSITIONING THE SELFIE AS A 41 POLITICAL ACT The rise of the selfie in recent times, primarily attributed to mobile phone technology and the inclusion of a front camera on many smartphones (Mirzoeff 2015), has been popularly understood as an indulgent yet ultimately apolitical form of digitally enhanced narcissism. Rarely a week goes by without a media article declaring the disintegration of society due to an individual’s or group’s rampant interest in taking selfies. However, recent scholarship has challenged this moral panic, repositioning the selfie as a political and relational act that is constitutive of citizenship in new times. A special issue of the International Journal of Communication explores the selfie as a global phenomenon, an exploration that the editors, Senft and Baym (2015: 1601), describe as ‘a set of first steps toward building the deep, interdisciplinary, international, multilayered understandings of selfies and all that the discourses that surround them represent.’ In her contribution to this special issue, Jenna Brager (2015) explores the political potentials, limits and dangers of the selfie in the Western consumption of viral tragedy. Brager argues that Once the selfie is taken and goes viral, spectators must ask what to do with this Other self we face. This is increasingly urgent in a landscape in which social media is ascribed the power to topple governments, killing is increasingly remote, and a sense of shared humanity – the ability to grieve for a dead teenager, whether killed by a Hezbollah car bomb or a U.S. drone attack – seems increasingly distant as well. (2015: 1669) This chapter extends upon this recent selfie scholarship through a close examination of selfies used in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake to examine how selfies enable, challenge or extend Western notions of global citizenship. Global citizenship is a highly complex notion encompassing a range of dimensions from the political, moral and economic, to the social, critical, affective and spiritual. In the twenty-first century, the dominant view of global citizenship positions it as the ‘great white hope’ of international relations and a counterbalance to political and economic threats (Brysk 2002: 243). The ‘white’ in the quote is no accident – indeed, this view while seemingly universal is primarily driven by the political and economic interests of the global north that encourages people to see themselves as democratic members of a global community. This view of global citizenship emphasises individual responsibility to solve global negar@duke.edu 42 C. HARTUNG problems, whereby a privileged person can overcome distant inequalities simply by being the change they wish to see in the world (Hartung 2016). Popular understandings of global citizenship are simultaneously reinforced, extended and challenged by advancements in the digital world where people are inventing and sharing with others around the globe ‘different forms of co-laboring, co-thinking, co-mapping’ (Azoulay 2014: 56). Such digitised encounters present a range of ethical and political concerns when it comes to witnessing tragedy such as the Nepal earthquake. As Steel states, ‘one of the most potent promises of social media is that it can extend the eye of publics around the world, allowing us to bear witness to events as they occur’ (2015: 1270). BEARING WITNESS TO CATASTROPHE IN THE DIGITAL AGE ‘What happens to my citizenship in the encounter with this look? What happens to it in this encounter with their catastrophe, knowing that they are more vulnerable than I to catastrophe?’ asks Ariela Azoulay in her book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2012: 18). It is well established that bearing witness to catastrophe and representing the suffering of others is ethically and politically fraught, especially in a digital age that enables often immediate and extensive coverage of tragedy on a global scale. For some, digital witnessing democratises Western journalism and humanises tragedy, yet for others it dehumanises and depoliticises (Chouliaraki 2015). Here it is useful to acknowledge a growing field of research focused on photojournalism whereby traditional binaries between professional and amateur/citizen journalism are being destabilised (e.g. see Allan 2013, 2014; Allan and Peters 2015). This type of citizen journalism, involving images captured on smartphones and disseminated online, contrasts with a ‘conventional ethics of showing’ because it ‘invites unruly, disruptive ways of seeing, its impulsive materiality threatening to disobey tacit, codified rules of inclusion and exclusion consistent with mainstream journalism’s preferred framings’ (Allan and Peters 2015: 1357). Fundamental to these debates is our understanding of photography and the possibilities and limits of visual representation. Sloshower (2013: 11), following from Sontag (1977) and Didi-Huberman (2008), argues that photography can act as a phenomenological approach to bearing witness that ‘produces dynamic images, which although incomplete and imperfect, can represent ideas, themes, concepts and truths about the human condition’. Indeed, Azoulay (2014) argues that photography is inseparable from negar@duke.edu 5 SELFIES FOR/OF NEPAL: ACTS OF GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP . . . 43 such catastrophe; part of what she calls the ‘civil contract of photography’ whereby a visual space for citizen engagement with the political is made possible. Similarly, in her exploration of war and the lives that are ‘grievable’, Butler (2009: 29) argues that the materiality of death and conflict cannot be divorced from ‘those representational regimes through which it operates and which rationalize its own operation’. In light of the political and ethical complexities surrounding citizenship, selfies and bearing witness in the digital age, this chapter will now turn to an examination of two recent selfie-related responses to the Nepal earthquakes, their public reception and what this suggests about the possibilities and limitations of global citizenship. SELFIES FOR NEPAL: ACTS OF THE ‘GOOD’ GLOBAL CITIZEN In the aftermath of the earthquake, a number of small online campaigns emerged that encouraged the production and dissemination of selfies to demonstrate solidarity with the people of Nepal. For example, the Selfie for Nepal campaign by the non-government organisation, MySmallHelp, attempted to use the selfie to demonstrate compassion for the Nepalese, while also encouraging participants to donate money alongside their selfie. We started this campaign to unite and to bring peace and courage to all Nepalese. We are sad for our brothers and sisters who lost their lives during recent earthquake in Nepal, who are hurting and them who mourn. Selfie for Nepal encourages participants to take a selfie to show support Nepal with #selfiefornepal. (MySmallHelp 2015: n.p.) Similarly, an organisation called Creatives Without Borders ran a special project called ‘Projections from the World to Nepal’, asking people to send through selfies with signs of support and love. The selfies were then screened at an outdoor event at Naya Bazar in Kathmandu with the intention of lifting the morale of locals and aid-workers. Although small in scale and impact compared with many recent global selfie and hashtag-led campaigns (e.g. #blacklivesmatter, #bringbackourgirls, #wearethe99%), these well-meaning responses were not negatively received by the public. These campaigns did, however, draw on and reinforce a ‘white-saviour’ view of global citizenship that rests on the assumption that the Nepalese will gain courage and reassurance simply by virtue of seeing the faces of well-intentioned people from around the negar@duke.edu 44 C. HARTUNG world. This reinforces, rather than challenges, a popular view of the good global citizen who recognises and responds to injustice and tragedy around the world, with minimal critical thought and effort. The use of selfies allows individuals far removed from the earthquake to virtually and collectively acknowledge the earthquake. However, these images are selective and, unlike the news reports, pictures of the affected people and buildings are replaced with a sanitised view of the event, screens filled with positive messages and hopeful faces, reinforcing the self and other as distinct in accordance with national borders, further delineating between observer and observed. This is suggestive of Said’s (1978) classic analysis of Orientalism that reinforces a binary between the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, whereby the former is positioned as unable to represent itself. SELFIES OF NEPAL: ACTS OF THE ‘BAD’ GLOBAL CITIZEN In contrast to the selfie-led campaigns intended to show solidarity with the people of Nepal, there emerged another selfie response to the earthquake that arguably demonstrated much greater impact, albeit for all the ‘wrong reasons’. Shortly after the quake, major news outlets from around the world, from The Huffington Post to The Indian Times to The Independent in the UK, began circulating four photographs of people taking selfies in front of the collapsed Dharahara Tower. The most circulated photograph shows a man in a white tee and a casual jacket holding a classic selfie stance; arm outstretched and smartphone in hand. Behind the man are the remains of the Dharahara Tower and many solemn faces of others walking about the site. All four of the photographs can be traced back to the Associated Press (AP). The AP is an American corporation that is strongly involved in the production of news and images as a salable commodity and is often the sole source representing stories that go on to reach audiences around the world (Brager 2015). What is deceptive about the public outcry regarding these selfie-takers is that the commentary seems to indicate that there were many selfies being taken near the collapsed landmark by hoards of ‘disaster tourists’ (Allan and Peters 2015). For example, in a piece for news.com.au, journalist Rowena Ryan writes It is the worst earthquake to hit Nepal in 80 years. As the death toll passes 4000 you would think selfies would be far from people’s minds. But people are negar@duke.edu 5 SELFIES FOR/OF NEPAL: ACTS OF GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP . . . 45 flocking to the devastated scenes in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, posing and smiling for photographs in front of wreckage and rubble. (2015: n.p.) The implication here is that flocks of people were taking selfies at the site. Yet, the limited photographic evidence suggests that it was more likely only a handful of people taking photos of themselves at the site and that they were predominantly locals rather than tourists. Further, this outcry, in its preoccupation with intent, is underpinned by a moral double-standard between the professional reporter-to-camera and the local citizen, whereby only the former is granted authority to bear witness in a way that still inserts the ‘self’ within the representation. It is only in the case of the latter, however, that including the self in bearing witness is considered insensitive and callous. Of course, this is not the first time a selfie bearing witness to tragedy has caused moral outcry. In mid-2014, a photograph of a teenage girl taking a smiling selfie at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was widely circulated online and made international news for her insensitivity and poor taste (Koziol 2014). Similarly, selfies taken near the Lindt Store involved in the Sydney Siege that year were also criticised by the public and media. It is easy to see how these reports constitute a citizen that fits the template of a ‘disaster tourist’. Yet to conclude an analysis there is problematic, especially in light of other selfie acts that do not receive such bad press but also present ethical limitations. A more nuanced understanding of how we come to make meaning of selfies can be achieved by going beyond perceived or actual intentions of the selfie-taker and positing selfies as potential acts of citizenship, made possible through the complex context in which they are taken and received. CONCLUSION: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE SELFIE To be a ‘good’ citizen while bearing witness to tragedy is an increasingly complex task in today’s interconnected world. As Jean-François Lyotard (1997: 245) notes, ‘[T]here is no poetics for regulating the manner of bearing witness, nor an aesthetics to tell how it should be received’. Although 20 years old, Lyotard’s words capture some of the difficulty, and perhaps even the impossibility, of bearing witness to the suffering of others in an ethically agreeable manner. This is no more evident than in recent examples of bearing witness that utilise social media and selfies to connect to others. negar@duke.edu 46 C. HARTUNG Far from frivolous and apolitical, the selfies for and of Nepal, and their reception, demonstrate significant political power. While the response to such selfies is often focused on the perceived intentions of the photographer, this chapter has shifted the focus away from a normative framework to consider the discourses that underpin these acts. This shift in focus is not intended to excuse or celebrate offensive or insensitive behaviour, nor is it an attempt to moralise and shame those who take selfies in their response to tragic events. Rather, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of the different and often hidden ways in which selfies enact forms of global citizenship that have the potential to challenge or reinforce nationalistic borders and existing power structures. From this perspective, the purportedly ‘good’ selfies, those well-meaning images taken by nonNepalese wanting to raise awareness, empower and show solidarity with the people of Nepal, might be seen as acts of ‘saviour citizenship’ reminiscent of the white saviour complex that underpins dominant and corporate understandings of global citizenship. Conversely, the purportedly ‘bad’ selfies, those ‘insensitive’ images taken by Nepalese locals at the remains of the Dharahara Tower and consequently circulated via outraged news outlets thanks to one of America’s largest news corporations, might be positioned as a kind of ‘citizen journalism’ that subverts and engages on a global scale. It is easy, and common, to dismiss the selfie as an example of self-involved citizens who are intent on trivialising tragedy. This chapter has sought to challenge this knee-jerk reaction, highlighting how selfies, as a relational practice, carry strong political resonance with intended and unintended effects. It is crucial that we continue to revise and challenge how we recognise and foster acts of global citizenship in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. REFERENCES Allan, S. (2013). Citizen witnessing: Revisioning journalism in times of crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Allan, S. (2014). Witnessing in crisis: Photo-reportage of terror attacks in Boston and London. Media, War & Conflict, 7(2), 133–151. Allan, S., & Peters, C. (2015). The ‘public eye’ or ‘disaster tourists’: Investigating public perceptions of citizen smartphone imagery. Digital Journalism, 3(4), 477–494. Azoulay, A. (2012). The civil contract of photography. New York: Zone Books. Azoulay, A. (2014). Photography and its citizens. Aperture, 214, 52–57. negar@duke.edu 5 SELFIES FOR/OF NEPAL: ACTS OF GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP . . . 47 Brager, J. (2015). The selfie and the other: Consuming viral tragedy and social media (after)lives. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1660–1671. Brysk, A. (2002). Conclusion: From rights to realities. In A. Brysk (Ed.), Globalisation and human rights. California: University of California Press. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Chouliaraki, L. (2015). Digital witnessing in conflict zones: The politics of remediation. Information, Communication & Society, 18(11), 1362–1377. Didi-Huberman, G. (2008). Images in spite of all. Trans S. Lillis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hartung, C. (2016). Global citizenship incorporated: Competing responsibilities in the education of global citizens. Discourse: Cultural Politics of Education, 1–14, in press. DOI:10.1080/01596306.2015.1104849. Isin, E., & Nielsen, G. (Eds.) (2008). Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. Koziol, M. (2014). Smiling selfie at Auschwitz leaves a poor taste. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July. http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/smil ing-selfie-at-auschwitz-leaves-a-poor-taste-20140722-zvjo1.html. Accessed 21 March 2016. Lyotard, J. F. (1997). Postmodern fables. Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mirzoeff, N. (2015). How to see the world. London: Penguin Random House. MySmallHelp (2015). #SelfieforNepal. http://www.selfiefornepal.com. Accessed 21 March 2016. Ryan, R. (2015). Nepal earthquake: Damaged landmarks selfies spark outrage. news.com.au, 28 April. http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/ selfies-in-earthquake-ravaged-nepal-cause-outrage/news-story/ c21cd0391be8426516a55a1219dc3d75. Accessed 21 March 2016. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Random House. Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606. Sloshower, J. (2013). Capturing suffering: Ethical considerations of bearing witness and the use of photography. The International Journal of the Image, 3, 11–22. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York: Picador. Steel, H. (2015). Streets to screens: Mediating conflict through digital networks. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 1269–1274. Catherine Hartung is a lecturer at the University of Otago College of Education. Her work draws on feminist poststructural theory to explore notions of participation, citizenship and diversity, particularly as used to understand and govern young people. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 6 Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’ Catherine Bouko Abstract Can we raise the youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This is the bet that several non-profit organisations aiming at raising the youth’s civic awareness have made. In injecting a fun dimension to civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies place the young participants’ performance as a constitutive element of their civic action. This chapter analyses six youth campaigns based on selfies (#DiversifyMyEmoji, #SuperStressFace, #UpdateYour Status, #WeAreAble, #MakeItHappy, #ShowYourSelfie) and shows that they privilege awareness techniques that fall under the ‘actualizing citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. Journal of Communication 6:835–856, 2011), in which self-expression and ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5):739–768, 2012) are favoured, instead of more traditional collective actions. Keywords Youth
Civic awareness
Fun
Performance
Actualising citizenship
Connective action C. Bouko (*) Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: cbouko@ulb.ac.be © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_6 negar@duke.edu 49 50 C. BOUKO ‘The Me me me generation’: this is the title of the now famous cover of the 20 May 2013 issue of Time Magazine, illustrated by a teenager taking a selfie. In the accompanying article, Joël Stein immediately shows his colours: ‘I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow’ (Stein 2013: 28). The practice of taking selfies might particularly strengthen this propensity to narcissism disengaged from the world. Against this tide, can we raise the youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This is the bet that several non-profit organisations aiming at raising the youth’s civic awareness have made. The American association Dosomething.org particularly exploits the selfie as a mode of action. Its slogan ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ demonstrates this tendency to transform civic awareness into a performative act which gains value through its visibility on social media. The hypothesis that I wish to explore in this chapter is the following: in injecting a fun dimension to civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies place the young participants’ performance as a constitutive element of their civic action. Thus, like voices before them, self-mediation through selfies becomes ‘a characteristic property of the performative view of publicness, in the sense that, unlike mainstream views of citizenship as ends-oriented political activism, it thematises the importance of simply “speaking out” ‘in the knowledge that you will have the ear of the community’ (Stevenson 2007: 256) as a ‘sovereign act of citizenship’ (Chouliaraki 2010: 228). If this focus on performance can also concern adults’ actions, it is particularly stimulated in youth campaigns, which, we will see, privilege awareness techniques that fall under the ‘actualising citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. 2011), in which self-expression and ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) are favoured, instead of more traditional collective actions. I have chosen to examine this hypothesis in relation to a corpus of six youth campaigns based on selfies. Five of them were created on Dosomething.org (www.dosomething.org). This association is exclusively intended for young people aged between 13 and 25 years old. • #DiversifyMyEmoji (summer 2014) is a campaign for which the Dosomething members were asked to transform themselves into emojis by using the ‘no-good gesture’ in order to call for more ethnic diversity among Apple’s emojis. • As stress and anxiety are directly linked with young people’s suicide, #SuperStressFace, still ongoing in April 2016 with no specific end negar@duke.edu 6 YOUTH’S CIVIC AWARENESS THROUGH SELFIES: FUN PERFORMANCES . . . 51 date, proposes to share a selfie with one’s worst face when stressed on Instagram, accompanied with tips proven to help de-stress. • The members who participate in the #UpdateYourStatus campaign (still ongoing in April 2016 without a specific end date) get HIV tested and Instagram a picture of their hand with the word ‘tested’ written on it. • #WeAreAble, still ongoing in April 2016 without a specific end date, aims to help stop violence and abuse against disabled children by reducing the stigma around disability. The selfie is a template in which the participant has written his/her own ability (such as ‘My best ability is storytelling’) published on Instagram. Three friends are challenged to do the same. • #MakeItHappy was organised in February 2015 in collaboration with the Coca-Cola Company to battle harassment on the Internet by sending compliments to friends via social media. #ShowYourSelfie (December 2014–September 2015) is the sixth campaign of my corpus. It was laid on by the non-profit organisation The Global Poverty Project. It was also reserved for young people, although without any age precision. The aim was to gather the largest possible amount of selfies from young people, accompanied by a short text explaining why they thought it crucial to invest in youth, and to send them to the world leaders’ meeting for the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. These six campaigns can be categorised according to their mode of action: 1. Protest ‘petitions’ in which selfies replace names and ask a designated interlocutor for change: UN world leaders for #ShowYourSelfie and Apple CEO Tim Cook for #DiversifyMyEmoji. 2. Preventative action to make my friends’ and my own health better with #UpdateYourStatus. 3. Chains to raise awareness in order to improve my online environment for #MakeItHappy; members of my community who suffer from disabilities for #WeAreAble. In the first part of this chapter, I examine how these campaigns intensify the ‘logic of connective action’ (Bennet and Segerberg 2012). In the second part, I analyse how these non-profit organisations concretise the connective logic in strategies that fall under the ‘actualising citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. 2011). negar@duke.edu 52 C. BOUKO ‘CONNECTIVE ACTIONS’ IN FAVOUR OF ‘SOCIAL AND MEDIA’ CITIZENSHIP Bennett and Segerberg remind us how structural fragmentation (decreasing membership of ideological groups and increasingly (online) weak ties, notably) leads to the construction of identity and citizenship from a more personal angle: ‘People may still join actions in large numbers, but the identity reference is more derived through inclusive and diverse large-scale personal expression rather than through common group or ideological identification’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012: 744). In this context, the connective logic does not strive towards the construction of a ‘united we’ (748) but instead creates a temporary aggregation of individualities around easily personalised ideas or large-scale personal concerns rather than around established ideologies. #ShowYourSelfie exemplifies such a choice for a general topic that needs little to convince, as vague action frames can encompass the different personal reasons for which the young Web surfers want to protest or fight. The Global Poverty Project presents the cause in the following way: ‘NOW is the time to invest in youth’. Such a rallying slogan can easily gather the multiple and varied visions of the reasons to invest in youth, while the Global Poverty Project works on youth in developing countries. On its side, Dosomething favours large-scale personal concerns, which are part of the young people’s communities’ daily life. In our fragmented social context, where the distinctions between private and public as well as between entertainment and power are breaking apart, citizenship can materialise in a tendency to ‘citizenship as consumption’ (Hartley 2010: 238): especially thanks to the visibility and sharing possibilities of social media, one can express one’s opinion as a citizen, take part in a civic action or in collective decisions through global (media) consumer culture. While Hartley illustrates such young people’s citizenship as consumption with the very process of consumption and amateur production of commercial pop culture, in which fun is a central element, it seems it can also be applied to the selfie campaigns. More precisely, such campaigns seem to lie at the crossroads between Marshall’s social citizenship (1963), linked to citizens’ rights (in education, employment, etc.), and media citizenship (Hartley 2010: 242), based on consumer productivity and loose choice-based temporary affiliations. Indeed, these selfie campaigns articulate awareness and (sometimes) protest for a better social life with funny performance acts shared on social networks, which themselves are private companies whose products we consume every day. negar@duke.edu 6 YOUTH’S CIVIC AWARENESS THROUGH SELFIES: FUN PERFORMANCES . . . 53 Besides, Dosomething, like other associations like Taking It Global, sends a weekly campaign digest to its members, who are invited to browse and consume actions like they would do for articles gathered in other typical newsletters. #MakeItHappy, for example, shows clearly the blurring between the public and the private, and citizenship as the consumption it can involve. With The Coca Cola Company as a partner, #MakeItHappy is also a truly corporate marketing campaign. These selfies perfectly illustrate the philosophical shift in marketing management identified by Kotler and Lee, ‘from building brands through advertising to building brands through performance and integrated communications’ (Kotler and Lee 2008: 33). #MakeItHappy evokes brand feelings – a corporate societal marketing strategy – more than it defends any citizen cause. For Hoeffler et al., evoking brand feelings notably allows for the generation of self-respect: ‘Self-respect occurs when the brand makes consumers feel better about themselves, for example, when consumers feel a sense of pride, accomplishment, or fulfilment’ (Hoeffler et al. 2002: 81). #MakeItHappy creates a certain illusion of empowerment through citizen actions with a rather limited potential for reflection and agency. Moreover, as the participation in #MakeItHappy gives the chance to win a $10,000 scholarship, the difference between civic awareness and a brand contest is evaporating even more. This social and media citizenship among young people is not mere coincidence. For Hartley, this combination is even constitutive of teens’ identity: The ‘tipping point’ between [ . . . ] ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ citizenship, where ‘social’ rights connected with family security and education transmogrify into ‘cultural’ rights connected with identity and participation in sociallynetworked meaning-formation – this tipping point is also the transitionphase between childhood and adulthood. In short, it is the place of the teenager. (Hartley 2010: 242) By uniting a social cause which enables easy rallying and a mode of action specific to new media, these selfie campaigns highlight a double approach to citizenship, both social and media, which suits the connective logic of action. In the next part, I will examine how this connective logic concretises in awareness strategies that fall under the actualising citizenship paradigm. negar@duke.edu 54 C. BOUKO WHEN SOCIAL MEDIA CITIZENSHIP BECOMES ‘ACTUALISED’ NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS AND BY Bennett et al. (2011) show how the growing importance of participatory media has particularly favoured the emergence of a new paradigm of education to citizenship: for decades, the dutiful citizenship paradigm was the norm. Based on the citizen’s sense of duty regarding the government’s and public institutions’ modes of work, the dutiful citizenship paradigm primarily consists of one-way consumption of civic information. Here, civic action is managed by the institutions, which leave little room for personal initiative. Conversely, the actualising citizenship paradigm blurs the lines between production and consumption of information. The citizens’ autonomy and creativity is favoured, notably in sharing over peer networks. Activism is rooted in self-expression that connects engagement with personal identity, which is facilitated by the fact that most causes are based on lifestyle concerns. Firstly, let us look at the distinction between information provided oneway by the association and opportunities for peer knowledge sharing, respectively in connection with the dutiful and actualising citizenship paradigms (Bennett et al. 2011: 846). The information provided for #ShowYourSelfie mainly consists of the following rallying sentence ‘1.8 billion people, or 1 in 4 worldwide, are between 15 and 25. That’s too many to ignore’ and six key statistics about youth’s situation worldwide. #ShowYourSelfie does not offer the possibility for sharing information. Dosomething’s campaigns do not offer interfaces to share knowledge either, except personal tips against stress in #SuperStressFace. In all of their campaigns, the information provided is limited to one or two general sentences. Helped by the fact that these causes are connected to the young people’s familiar environment, Dosomething does not aim to inform its members beyond basic facts but aims to put them directly in action. These campaigns are all based on awareness through friends: via the created chains and the proposed challenges, the young citizens are invited to convince their friends in a ludic way, and by doing so become the ambassadors of the defended cause. The aim of such campaigns is to move away from hierarchical persuasion, from adults to young people, and to stimulate horizontal persuasion thanks to a snowball effect. To reach it, Dosomething utilises familiar, striking and enthusiastic language to motivate its members to join, such as for #SuperStressFace: ‘Got a face? Got a negar@duke.edu 6 YOUTH’S CIVIC AWARENESS THROUGH SELFIES: FUN PERFORMANCES . . . 55 phone? Great! You’re good to go. Here’s everything else you’ll need to post your #SuperStressFace’. #ShowYourSelfie goes even further. Just as in famous military recruitment drives, it uses imperatives to encourage action: ‘In order to show the need to uphold young people’s rights and needs, we need YOU to inspire your friends to take action’. #ShowYourSelfie insists on the importance of the challenge to be undertaken: We’re showing world leaders the faces of the millions who support the 6 measures we’re fighting for. The pure volume of images we deliver will make the statement. When faced with the true number of young people in the world – and the millions speaking out for their rights with a simple photo – they won’t be able to ignore us any more. (showyourselfie.org) Secondly, let us examine how the young citizens are invited to express themselves via their selfies. The communication skills are divided into traditional communication forms (letters, petitions, etc.) relating to the dutiful citizenship paradigm and self-produced and shared-on-media forms (blogs, videos, etc.), typical of the actualising citizenship paradigm (Bennett et al. 2011: 386). As practices anchored in social media, selfies fall under the second category. However, they show a specific tension between autonomy and formatting. Indeed, the meme implied by the selfie leaves less room for personal creativity than other campaigns where artistic talents are exploited. However, as they can be defined as ‘pieces of cultural information that pass along from person to person but gradually scale into a shared social phenomenon’ (Shifman 2013: 18), the memes are used as an effective tool to create a feeling of belonging to a virtual community and the impression of taking part in a phenomenon that goes beyond their sphere. In order to enhance the fun element of taking a selfie, the campaigns suggest a specific pose, which acts as a rallying sign of recognition. Each campaign shows a gallery of selfies which strengthens the impression of belonging to a virtual community. In a mix between autonomy and guidance, each campaign provides practical tips to prepare the selfie (needed material, suggested time and place). #ShowYourSelfie went pretty far with this guidance, as it provided a three-page user’s manual to make and share it, with suggested messaging for Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, beyond this selfie, this campaign tried to encourage a second, more substantial, level of engagement, which resulted in the organisation negar@duke.edu 56 C. BOUKO of local micro-campaigns by the young citizens themselves, for which The Global Project provides a plentiful package of communication material (user’s manuals, posters, badges, etc.). In the latter case, the authoritative figure ruled much of the action, which then fell under the dutiful citizenship paradigm. Personal autonomy and spontaneity typical of selfies are exploited from the angle of the funny dimension the participant gives to his/her selfie: an upside-down selfie for #ShowYourSelfie, a funny, stressed face for #SuperStressFace and an emoji for #DiversifyMyEmoji. The three other selfies from my corpus exploit the funny character of taking a selfie as such, without adding extra funny features; they simply enable to embody a civic message through a photograph rather than via an impersonal text or signature. #UpdateYourStatus exploits the indexical function of the selfie (as a trace of an event) in order to use it as a proof for the HIV test which is aimed to convince one’s friends to get tested as well. Between altruism and narcissism, we see how these campaigns exploit the selfie to bring the cause back to the young citizen’s personal life. This is even more obvious in #MakeItHappy and #WeAreAble. In both cases, the defended cause concerns the Other: the Other to whom one writes compliments, as well as the Other who suffers from bullying. In #MakeItHappy, while the compliment turns the spotlight on the complimented person, the selfie enables some visibility to be given to the one who writes the kind message. In a similar way, #WeAreAble wants to draw attention towards disabled children but focuses on the participants’ abilities via selfies in which they carry a template mentioning their own ability. In these campaigns, the awareness of the Other’s situation paradoxically concretises in self-centred spotlight. CONCLUSION Bennett et al. (2011: 844) underline the existence of a continuum between the dutiful and actualising citizenship paradigms; civic campaigns for youth rarely fall under one exclusively. The six campaigns of my corpus also show a continuum between the two, tipping the scales in favour of the actualising paradigm. In the tension between autonomy and institutionalised formatting, the selfie as a tool for civic awareness exploits its performative assets thanks to humour and/or self-centred emphasis. This way, altruism and narcissism are never far from each other. Intended to be shared on social media, these negar@duke.edu 6 YOUTH’S CIVIC AWARENESS THROUGH SELFIES: FUN PERFORMANCES . . . 57 selfies perfectly exemplify both social and media citizenship, at the heart of young people’s cultural consumption, to the extent that the missions of non-profit organisations and private companies (like Coca Cola) sometimes tend to blur. Given the limited engagement and information they imply in favour of fun performances, do such campaigns simply reinforce youth’s supposed laziness, selfishness and shallowness, so often criticised, as mentioned in the introduction of this chapter? For some like Hartley, fun and citizenship are not incompatible. On the contrary, he observes that media citizenship is becoming ‘sillier’, but ‘silly citizenship’ must be considered as a constitutive element of young people’s ways of engaging in the world: Still more weirdly for social theory, [ . . . ] the stage for citizenship is [ . . . ] as much dramatic and performative as it is deliberative. The play’s the thing. [ . . . ] For too long, educated taste has refused to admit that the civic and the silly are in intimate physical contact. [ . . . ] Here is a new model of citizenship based on self-representation of, by and for ‘ordinary’ people, using ‘new’ media to produce discursive associative relations, superseding the modernist ‘man with a gun’. (Hartley 2010: 241–245) These selfie campaigns truly exemplify it. REFERENCES Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. Bennett, W. L., Wells, C., & Freelon, D. (2011). Communicating civic engagement: Contrasting models of citizenship in the youth web sphere. Journal of Communication, 6, 835–856. Chouliaraki, L. (2010). Self-mediation: New media and citizenship. Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4), 227–232. Hartley, J. (2010). Silly citizenship. Critical Discourse Studies 7(4), 233–248. Hoeffler, S., & Lane Keller, K. (2002). Building brand equity through corporate societal marketing. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 21(1), 78–89. Kotler, P., & Lee, N. (2008). Social marketing: Influencing behaviours for good. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Marshall, T. H. (1963). Sociology at the crossroads and other essays. London: Heinemann. negar@duke.edu 58 C. BOUKO Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stein, J. (2013). The Me me me generation. Time Magazine, 20 May. Stevenson, N. (2007). Cultural citizenship. In T. Edwards (Ed.), Cultural theory. Classical and contemporary positions (pp. 254–270). London: Sage. Catherine Bouko is an adjunct professor and full-time postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Information and Communication Sciences at the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles). She mainly studies social media from a semiotic and discourse analysis perspective. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 7 The People: The #Selfie’s Urform Negar Mottahedeh Abstract The chapter considers the ways in which the selfie is connected, in its quotidianness, to private life. In its daily co-articulation and its challenge to objects invested with power, it upends contemporary notions of the state, of government, of capital, of art and urban design, of copyright and of privacy. As such, the selfie aligns with the quotidian body of the collective, indeed, ‘the people’ comprised of both flesh and data – an amorphous sensing body, articulated with and networked to others across national boundaries at a distance away. Keywords Networked contagion
Quotidianness
‘The people’
Iran
Revolution the people [pee-puh l] verb, noun: networked contagion. related forms: #selfie Associated with the ephemeral, the trivial, the routine, the everyday, the unconscious, the unremarkable, as the exact antithesis of what has routinely been called ‘history’, the selfie is connected, in its quotidianness, to private life. In its daily co-articulation with objects invested with power, it N. Mottahedeh (*) Duke University, Durham, USA e-mail: negar@duke.edu © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_7 negar@duke.edu 59 60 N. MOTTAHEDEH stands to challenge all contemporary notions of the state, of government, of capital, of art and urban design, of copyright and of privacy. In this, it confronts ideas of the beautiful and the presentable as well. It is in this sense that the selfie aligns with the quotidian body of the collective, as opposed to, say, the body of the monarch (a double body which, as Foucault significantly points out, is the traditional subject of historical chronicles), and indeed with the emergence on the global stage of ‘the people’ as the selfie’s urform. In #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Mottahedeh 2015), I discuss how ‘the people’ occupied the streets and boulevards of the city to reclaim their votes after a fraudulent presidential election in 2009. In these city streets, ‘the people’ attempted to distinguish themselves from the ‘riff raff’, the ‘soccer fans’, the ‘thugs’ and ‘the hooligans’. These were the designators of the state’s rhetoric about them. Instead, ‘the people’ spoke of themselves as ‘Iranians’, ‘workers’, ‘students’. They were brothers, and sisters. Together they were unafraid. They were ‘the people’. ‘The relevance of the people has endured for thirty years’, writes Sertag Manoukian, since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. ‘[Y]ears of disciplinary exercise, the war against Iraq, and an intensive project of technological and infrastructural development continuously turned the crowds of the revolution into the people of the Islamic Republic’. Yet, and this is crucial: During the presidential campaign of 2009, all candidates claimed to be the true representatives of the people. In televised debates, [the sitting President] Ahmadinejad argued that he always acted ‘in service to the people,’ while his opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi argued that Ahmadinejad’s cabinet was a ‘shame for the people.’ In the aftermath of the fraudulent election, political figures and religious ones too, made reference to the people and claimed allegiance to them, while condemning their enemies, despite different identifications of what ‘the people’ were. Ahmadinejad defined crowds as either ‘foreign agents’ or ‘rabble,’ praising security forces for reestablishing order for the people. (Manoukian 2010: 243–245) The opposition defended ‘the people’ on the streets; ‘the people’, its colour (an iridescent green, the colour of the familial line of the Prophet Mohammad), its voice (Neda – the name of the first female martyr of the uprising). It did so in the slogans that rang loudly on every square: ‘Rang-e negar@duke.edu 7 THE PEOPLE: THE #SELFIE’S URFORM 61 ma, rang-e Ma! Neda-ye Ziba-ye ma’ (Our colour, our colour! Our beautiful voice/Neda). The people worked diligently to identify the police, the security forces, the ‘paid agents’, the basij or militia (often referring to them as the ‘plainclothes’). They identified them in texts, videos and images, which were uploaded to blogs and circulated in tweets. They – the plainclothes – were the enemy of the people who were occupying the boulevards, the streets and the squares of the Revolution. As the first social revolt to be catapulted onto the global stage by social media, the Iranian election crisis of 2009 came to define ‘the people’ less by a particular socio-economic or ideological category, and more by the mimetic gestures and viral composition of which it was constituted. For the first time, during the course of the crisis, ‘the people’ appeared as a collective, comprised of both flesh and data, an amorphous sensing body, articulated with and networked to others who were at a distance elsewhere. It was in this context too that the term ‘the people’ could be thought anew: as a kind of contagion that survived online as well as offline; a contagion that perpetuated itself through mimetic practices that combined the corporeal sensing body with the materiality of the digital body. Through acts of listening and recording, seeing and screen grabbing, tweeting and retweeting, posting and reposting, of content creation and repurposing, ‘the people’ became something akin to a collective digital flesh, a shared sensorium that saw and heard the world together and at the same time. In this way, the term ‘the people’ emerged for the first time during the crisis as a networked term. Its slogan, a hashtag; the hashtag #iranelection. The selfie is closely associated with this networked term. It is an image captured of some part of a person’s body (not just the face). That body also touches the technology that captures it and posts it as a selfie along with a hashtag on a social platform. Here, the function of the hashtag is to connect the selfie to other selfies, as well as other textual and visual content on social platforms. The selfie thus simultaneously points to an embodied form (the actual body that touches the technology that captures it) and to a collective life online that spreads it and that also pulses through its networked appearance as viral content. The actual physical body in time and space, the digital body on a social platform and the collective body that spreads the selfie online, all these are indexed by the networked object of the selfie simultaneously. Little wonder then that political figures co-opt the selfie when they attempt to align their voices with the collective and everyday voice of the negar@duke.edu 62 N. MOTTAHEDEH people. As part flesh and part data, the selfie embodies this virality of the people’s networked presence both online and offline. REFERENCES Manoukian, S. (2010). Where is this place? Crowds, audio-vision, and poetry in postelection Iran. Public Culture, 22(2), 237–263. Mottahedeh, N. (2015). #iranelection: Hashtag solidarity and the transformation of online life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Negar Mottahedeh is a professor of film and media studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University, USA. She’s the author of #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford University Press, 2015). negar@duke.edu CONVERSATION II The Selfie Genre and Its New Adaptations negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 8 Performative Intimacies and Political Celebritisation Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm Abstract Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm provide fresh insights into an ongoing performative turn in political communication, arguing that the incorporation of selfies into the daily communication strategies of individual politicians entails a popularisation and celebration of political discourse. Against the background of Swedish politicians’ self-imagery on Instagram, they show that ‘performed connectivity’ has become increasingly central for political identity making online, paralleling the celebrity management of actors in the global entertainment industry. This development is problematised in terms of three performative styles that disclose strategic choices in which politicians act and interact across the increasingly blurring boundaries of the professional and the private and where symbolic connections between politicians and citizens are staged through new mediatised performances. Keywords Celebrity politics
Political communication
Performativity
Instagram
Selfies M. Ekman (*) Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden e-mail: Mattias.Ekman@oru.se A. Widholm Södertörn University, Södertörn, Sweden e-mail: andreas.widholm@sh.se © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_8 negar@duke.edu 65 66 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM In the new and increasingly fragmented media landscape, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become influential platforms for political communication (Ekman and Widholm 2015). As online spaces enable new forms of social interaction between politicians and citizens, they have also become increasingly central for political performativity and identity making, paralleling the ‘celebrity management’ that characterises the communicative strategies of large actors in the global entertainment industry (Marwick and boyd 2011). In this chapter, we analyse what we define as a digital performative turn in online political communication. We argue that politicians’ use of selfies is part of a broader process of political celebritisation where performed connectivity plays a substantial role (Ekman and Widholm 2014). The analysis draws on a strategic selection of selfies derived from the Instagram accounts of six well-known Swedish politicians.1 Thereby it sets the focus on politicians’ everyday visual communication rather than organised and centralised election campaigns. Politicians’ use of selfies merges the personal and the professional realm of politicians’ lives, articulating different modes of audience address (Van Zoonen et al. 2010). In what follows, we trace these communicative practices to new forms of celebrity formations which, we argue, are emanating from broader societal changes related to the current era of mass-self communication (Castells 2013). CELEBRITY POLITICS ON INSTAGRAM Instagram is one of the world’s largest social networks specifically devoted to visual imagery. The platform, which has over 300 million users, leans on a mobile-specific logic, meaning that the images that are published there reflect a central change in the way people communicate with their family, friends, colleagues and broader social networks. The popularity of Instagram emanates from everyday social needs of sharing experiences and ideas of who we are in a visual form and in real time. The massive flow of images published on Instagram also enables people coming closer to those they know and admire as well as those they dislike or even abhor. It has, to put it differently, become a significant resource for the production and cultivation of identity and fandom in the digital era. At the centre of social media such as Instagram is the constant circulation of mediated images of the self. The ‘selfie’, a form of self-portrait which occurred in tandem with the technological advancement of mobile phone cameras, is an expression of the growing performative individualism negar@duke.edu 8 PERFORMATIVE INTIMACIES AND POLITICAL CELEBRITISATION 67 that characterises much of the communication that takes place in digital social networks. Performativity is an inherent feature of the selfie since it can be seen as a reflexive behaviour, where individuals publically stage their own identities in relation to surrounding symbols, codes and broader social structures (cf. Turner 1986). The Instagram selfie is both a photographic ‘gesture’ (cf. Becker 2015), for example, the act of holding and looking into a high-held camera, and a subject position (look at me and the situation I am in!). However, as a cultural practice, the selfie cannot be seen as a universal signifier. On the contrary, its meaning differs greatly depending on the social and cultural status of the actual actor behind the selfie. Celebrities, as opposed to ‘common people’, are attractive objects in themselves. The celebrity selfie can therefore move across various social settings and still provide a strong symbolic value among social media consumers. Celebrity is here understood as an ‘ever-changing performative practice’ (Marwick and boyd 2011), meaning that it is a discursive category rather than any fixed characteristics of a person. Thus, celebrity is continuously shaped by practices and rituals within contemporary culture in general, and within the mass media, in particular. Furthermore, this implies that performing celebrity is contingent with the development of a variety of representational media techniques. Prior to the rise of Internet and digital social media, the production of stardom was almost solely located in the entertainment industry and the mass media. For politicians, it meant that in order to appear outside the field of politics, staged performances – especially on television – established politicians as ‘person[s] of qualities within the public space of demonstrable representativeness’ (Street 2010: 256). Within contemporary media culture, the tangible presence of politicians in the visual culture of celebrity is facilitated by the rise of social media. It opens up for new ways in which politicians can be observed and consumed by others – but also commented, circulated and remediated in other public (mediated) settings. No longer depended on the traditional process of photo opportunities, politician’s use of online selfies evades the traditional communication channels (such as news media) to citizens. However, the popularisation of online selfies is not foremost about a self-managed photo opportunity – our argument is that politicians’ selfies is about performing a (ostensive) connectedness with the (imaginary) citizen. The selfie ‘is linked to phatic communion . . . whose primary purpose is the production, expression, and negar@duke.edu 68 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM maintenance of sociability’ (Frosh 2015: 1623). The production and maintenance of sociability is fundamental to celebrity culture. Sociability is organised around the very notion of the spectator’s ability to identify with the celebrity, yet at the same time recognising the extraordinariness, that is, the ‘specific’ qualities that characterise celebrities. The capability to, simultaneously appear as ‘one of us’ and as ‘special’ (Van Zoonen 2005: 82) is enabled by the premeditated managing of selfies on social media platforms. Platforms such as Instagram and Twitter facilitate a (superficial) connectedness between the politician and the citizen observer, in which the performed intimacy, authenticity and access (Marwick and boyd 2011) of politicians are strategically organised. In that way, the selfie often involves a form of ‘backstage’ access to the personal everyday lives of celebrities, while it also can provide insights into the professional life. In the following section, we assess selfies of six Swedish politicians, analysing how celebrity is performed through political communication on Instagram. The six politicians included in the analysis are all high profile and represent five different political parties in the Swedish parliament; two of them are ministers of the current government. The politicians were chosen on the basis of party affiliation, gender and social media prominence (e.g. they use Instagram on a daily basis, their account is open and public, and they have relatively a large amount of followers). The selected politicians are Gustav Fridolin, minister of education and a member of the Green Party; Alice Bah Kuhnke, minister of culture and a member of the Green Party; Rosanna Dinamarca, MP and a member of the Left Party; Fredrick Federley, MP and a member of the Center Party; Veronica Palm, MP and a member of the Social Democratic Party; and Linus Bylund, MP and a member of the Sweden Democrats (a nationalist right-wing party). THREE STYLES OF CELEBRITY PERFORMANCES We have identified three frequent performative styles, demonstrated in the selfies of the five Swedish politicians: the politician as a celebrity, inter-celebrity connectivity and the everyday life selfie. These styles encompass a sociotechnical practice of political performance, that is, they disclose strategic choices in which the politician acts and interacts within the increasingly blurring boundaries of the professional and the private. The infrastructure of Instagram also implies that the negar@duke.edu 8 PERFORMATIVE INTIMACIES AND POLITICAL CELEBRITISATION 69 production and public distribution of selfies create an incessant visual narrative of politician’s day-to-day practices. The politician as celebrity includes selfies of the politicians together with ordinary citizens. These (group) selfies exhibit the politician in various sociogeographical locations, such as schools, workplaces and public spaces. The politician often appears in a casual, in the moment manner accentuating a sense of immediacy in the publication process. At the same time, these selfies showcase the palpable presence of celebrity, which is demonstrated by the regularly enchanted subjects. Swedish minister of education, Gustav Fridolin, often publishes selfies portraying himself together with schoolchildren where he appears as a laidback and easy-to-like politician far from a formal and arid political representative. Bah Kuhnke publishes more expressive images of this type. Here, celebrity is accentuated partly through connections with the public and partly by constructing a self-image that is reminiscent of a classical pop star. An interesting example was published in July 2015 during Sweden’s biggest annual event for political debate, the Almedalen week. During this week, the political elite, the news media industry and thousands of lobbyists come together for a festival style gathering. In a collage selfie constituted by two images, Bah Kuhnke is seen dancing on a stage located in front of a big crowd and she is waving what appears to be a blouse in the air. In the second image, she looks straight into the camera in a more traditional selfie, puckering her lips in a pose together with two party colleagues. The images are accompanied with the following status: ‘Gosh! We represented the government and “DJ battled” the opposition. They offered beautiful resistance BUT – we came, we saw, we CONQUERED! In a couple of hours, Thursday’s first meeting . . . #dancedancedance #djbattle’ (English translation by the authors).2 By combining the visual features of pop culture and conventional social media aesthetics (‘duck face’), the selfie discloses celebrity performance outside the traditional field of politics. Performing celebrity is about staging public interaction in which the politician can be observed, admired and celebrated. Performing inter-celebrity connectivity includes selfies of politicians with other prominent figures in society such as sports celebrities, famous people from the entertainment industry as well as other prominent politicians. This style typically deploys the composition of a group selfie– or more often, a friend selfie – in which the politician pairs up with the (other) celebrity. Sometimes inter-celebrity connectivity also includes images of political rituals such as handshaking and mingling with negar@duke.edu 70 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM prominent political leaders or other ‘distinguished’ members of society. Through performing significant interactions with other celebrities, the selfies become evidence of ‘celebrity moments’ and they establish symbolic value, in which the politician portrays himself/herself as an important and connected actor. Let us take a look at one illustrating example of this category. On 25 September 2015, Veronica Palm visited the Gothenburg book and library fair, an annual event organised by the publishing industry that gathers the Swedish cultural elite, hundreds of journalists and a long row of politicians. The Swedish parliament had a stand there, from which Palm published a selfie of herself together with Sofia Arkelsten, also an MP and member of the conservative moderate party. The two politicians, who belong to two completely different sides of the political spectrum, smile directly into the camera accompanied with the following status: ‘The two happy, beautiful and competent politicians that now is in charge of the parliament’s stand. #bookfair’ (English translation by the authors).3 Palm’s selfie is interesting in the sense that it reflects how ‘serious’ political events are de-politicised when reduced to moments of immediate visual consumption. Palm does not mention Arkelsten by name, but her ‘knownness’ (e.g. her beauty and competence) clearly operates as a discursive substitute. As noted earlier, celebrity politics, in general, and the inter-celebrity selfie, in particular, are often connected to distinguished events. Less common is the communication of political ideals and values as the focus seems to be on the branding of personal rather than political identities. This is also evident in Bah Kunkhe’s Instagram account where she explicitly writes in the bio that ‘Questions and requests are not answered here’4 and refers instead to the official web page of the cultural ministry. Few of the politicians studied here actively interact with their ‘audiences’ and comments are mostly restricted to a handful example. More broadly, the inter-celerity selfie can therefore be seen as intimately connected to broader processes of individualisation, while also ignoring one of the key features of mass-self communication, namely interactivity with others (Castells 2013). Portraying yourself in everyday situations is one of the most common visual practice on Instagram, and it is also relatively common in the politicians’ Instagram profiles. The everyday selfie deviates from the styles of politician as a celebrity and inter-celebrity connectivity since it is foremost about staging ordinariness rather than extraordinariness. However, the everyday selfie also becomes a way of expressing personal and ethical negar@duke.edu 8 PERFORMATIVE INTIMACIES AND POLITICAL CELEBRITISATION 71 responsibility both within and outside professional life. It can therefore be seen as a key performance in which personal values and attributes are expressed in the context of lifestyle politics (Bennett 2004). Everyday selfies from the professional realm of politicians’ life include imagery of traditional work practices in parliament or in the office – but often within the context of contributing with something extraordinary in a legislative procedure or proposing a policy change, attending important meetings, etc. These selfies are about performing respectability in relation the public – showing that you are executing the duties which the citizens elected you for. In that way, they become visual evidence of reliability and a professional working capacity. This is also by far the most common selfie in all the Instagram profiles. The everyday selfies from the private life are more diverse and they are strategically managed to fit the particular image of the politician and his/ her party profile. There are a variety of selfies depicting politicians in festive situations, sometimes in private settings. Bylund, for example, published several selfies in which he is drinking alcohol (suitable to a right-wing populist image), and there are selfies from traditional Swedish crayfish parties (Palm), family barbecues (Fridolin) and gatherings at various dining establishments, etc. Everyday selfies also include imagery from outdoor activities such as mushroom picking in the forest (Bylund), boat riding in the archipelago (Palm), beach-hanging (Dinamarca and Federley) and farm life (Federley). Basically, these types of images establish the politician in the context of familiarity, outside his/her professional political role. Thus, the everyday selfie in private settings is first and foremost about performing ordinariness. There are plenty of selfies including the politicians cuddling with their toddlers or doing meaningful things with their older children. Depicting parenthood is frequent in several of the profiles regardless of political affiliation and the gender of the politician. The performance of family respectability (look at me, I’m both hardworking and a good parent!) needs to be addressed in relation to the specific societal context. Gender equality as well as spending much time with your family are cherished values in the Swedish society. Portraying yourself as an active and caring parent therefore becomes an important element in the image making of a contemporary modern politician. In some respects, the parent-child selfie mirrors the classical (and infamous) politician-kissing-a-baby-in-the-crowd image. The vast difference is of course the embedded legitimacy of the selfie; it is portraying ‘authentic family love’. negar@duke.edu 72 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has argued that the incorporation of selfies into the daily communication strategies of politicians, in Sweden, is strongly related to an ongoing popularisation of political discourse where symbolic connections between politicians and citizens are staged through new mediatised political rituals. The selfie opens up new avenues for promoting the personal/private sphere of a politician, and as our analysis suggests, this often involves performances that are strongly related to the way public personas appear as celebrities. Politicians’ selfies signify various ideas of a successful life and key to these performances is also the construction of what we might call ‘networked ties’ between politicians, followers and other prominent social media actors who actively redistribute images to a wider audience. This redistribution operates across old and new media, and selfie images are constantly appearing in the news flows of large newspapers in Sweden, offline and online (Ekman and Widholm 2014, 2015). Politicians’ selfies produce an illusion of intimacy – when politicians’ professional and private life is visually performed on social media platforms (cf. Holmes and Redmond 2006). These performances mirror politicians’ paradoxical ability to simultaneously appear as ordinary and extraordinary (Van Zoonen 2005) which also adheres to celebrity discourse in general. Since lifestyle choices and values are becoming increasingly important in establishing the politician as a trustworthy person, managing the life outside the professional realm is imperative on platforms such as Instagram. For the lifestyle politician, there is a necessity to appear trustworthy, both as an elected professional and as a private person. In contrast to celebrities in the entertainment industry, the politicians need to produce ordinariness in numerous ways. Rather than showcasing a glamorous private life, the more common everyday selfie is about constructing down-to-earth moments, in which the politician establishes connectivity based on mutual life experiences with the spectator citizen. If entertainment celebrities often produce a distant admiration of a lavish lifestyle, the politicians produce identification based on resemblances in the life of the regular viewer – the politician needs to appear as a ‘regular’ citizen, with family duties and other types of private engagements. However, the selfies become part of a strategic management in which a successful private life is established alongside the professional life as an elected politician. negar@duke.edu 8 PERFORMATIVE INTIMACIES AND POLITICAL CELEBRITISATION 73 NOTES 1. The accounts are Gustav Fridolin: https://www.instagram.com/gustav_frido lin/Alice Bah Kuhnke: https://www.instagram.com/alicebahkuhnke/ Rosanna Dinamarca: https://www.instagram.com/rossanadinamarca/ Fredrick Federley: https://www.instagram.com/federley/Veronica Palm: https://www.instagram.com/palmveronica/Linus Bylund: https://www. instagram.com/linusbylunds/ 2. Posted on 2 July 2015 by Alice Bah Kuhnke https://www.instagram.com/ p/4nJO1TJOE3/?taken-by=alicebahkuhnke Original text: Åh jisses! Vi representerade regeringen och ‘DJ battlade’ mot alliansen. Dom bjöd på vackert motstånd MEN - vi kom, vi såg, vi SEGRADE! Om några timmar torsdagens första möte . . . #dansadansadansa #djbattle. 3. Posted on 25 September 2015 by Veronica Palm https://www.instagram. com/p/8DcWr2jQrw/?taken-by=palmveronica&hl=sv Original text: De två glada, snygga och kompetenta politiker som just nu bemannar riksdagens monter. #bokmässan 4. Posted on the account homepage by Alice Bah Kuhnke https://www.insta gram.com/alicebahkuhnke/ Original text: Frågor besvaras via regeringen.se. REFERENCES Becker, K. (2015). Gestures of seeing: Amateur photographers in the news. Journalism, 16(4), 451–469. Bennett, W. L. (2004). Branded political communication: Lifestyle politics, logo campaigns, and the rise of global citizenship. In M. Micheletti & D. Stolle (Eds.), Politics, products, and markets: Exploring political consumerism past and present. New Brunswick: Transaction publishers. Castells, M. (2013). Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ekman, M., & Widholm, A. (2014). Twitter and the celebritisation of politics. Celebrity Studies, 5(4), 518–520. Ekman, M., & Widholm, A. (2015). Politicians as media producers: Current trajectories in the relation between journalists and politicians in the age of social media. Journalism Practice, 9(1), 78–91. Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image. The selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1607–1628. Holmes, S., & Redmond, S. (2006). Framing celebrity: New directions in celebrity culture. London and New York: Routledge. Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2011). To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter. Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 17(2), 139–158. negar@duke.edu 74 M. EKMAN AND A. WIDHOLM Street, J. (2010). Mass media, politics and democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, V. (1986). The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ. Van Zoonen, L. (2005). Entertaining the citizen: When politics and popular culture converge. Lanham/MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Van Zoonen, L., Vis, F., & Mihelj, S. (2010). Performing citizenship on YouTube: Activism, satire and online debate around the anti-Islam video Fitna. Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4), 249–262. Mattias Ekman is a senior lecturer of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University, Sweden. His current research focuses on online political communication and political mobilisation in social media. Andreas Widholm is associate professor of journalism at Södertörn University, Sweden. His research addresses the relationship between media, politics and culture with a particular focus on the role of new media technologies. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 9 Vote for My Selfie: Politician Selfies as Charismatic Engagement Crystal Abidin Abstract Taking Singaporean Member of Parliament (MP) Baey Yam Keng as a case study, this chapter analyses how charismatic engagement can be mediated through social media and selfie tropes. In the wake of online campaigns since the General Elections 2011, and with the ruling party garnering its lowest share of electoral votes since state independence, MP Baey, aged 47, has emerged as a press-branded ‘selfie king’, ‘social media celebrity’ and ‘Twitter influencer’ for engaging with the online citizenry since publishing his first selfie in March 2013. Drawing on his Instagram and Twitter feed and selfie-related engagements up till 2015, this chapter demonstrates how politician selfies can be exercised to solicit affect and mobilise public sentiment among voters. Keywords Selfies
Politician
Charisma
Singapore
Twitter
Instagram C. Abidin (*) National University of Singapore, Queenstown, Singapore Media Management and Transformation Center, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden e-mail: crystalabidin@gmail.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_9 negar@duke.edu 75 76 C. ABIDIN Politicians taking selfies have received their fair share of praise for connecting with voters during campaign trails and flak for inappropriate displays à la the widely publicised Cameron-Thorning-Obama selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013. But what happens when politicians take to regularly publishing self-curated selfie streams on their personal social media accounts? When selfies are the new political photo op, the everyday and mundane can become a spectacle and a site for naturalised vernacular campaigning. This chapter looks at Singaporean Member of Parliament (MP) Baey Yam Keng as a case study in investigating how charismatic engagement can be mediated through the repertoire of social media and popular selfie tropes. In the wake of voting campaigns taking to online ground in the most recent General Elections 2011, and with the ruling party having garnered its lowest share of electoral votes since state independence, MP Baey, who despite being 47 years old at the time of writing, has emerged as a press-branded ‘selfie king’, ‘social media celebrity’ and ‘Twitter influencer’ for engaging with the online citizenry since publishing his first selfie in March 2013, with a fan base to boot. Drawing on his Instagram and Twitter feed and selfie-related engagements up till 2015, this chapter demonstrates how politician selfies can be exercised to solicit affect and mobilise public sentiment among voters. MEDIA CLIMATE IN SINGAPORE Singapore has unswervingly been operated as a ‘soft authoritarian’ (Nasir and Turner 2011) or ‘semi-authoritarian’ regime (Wang and Tan 2012) with a partly free media (Freedom House 2010) due to the ruling partyʼs draconian action against political opposition (Salimat 2013) and tight rein over the media (George 2007; Rodan 2003; Sussman 2012). Freedom House (2010) lists Singaporeʼs ‘Freedom Rating’ as 4.5 (with the score of 1 being the best and 7 being the worst) while Reporters Without Borders (2013) ranks Singaporeʼs ‘Press Freedom Index’ 149 out of 179 countries. In the 2011 General Elections (GE2011), the incumbent party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), received its lowest vote share since Singapore gained independence from the British in 1965. Surveying 2,000 Singaporeans including 447 youth between the ages of 21 and 34 through national telephone interviews conducted in May 2011, Lin and Hong (2013) report that youth voters’ perceived credibility of media outlets in Singapore greatly affected political consciousness. New media had ‘more negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 77 pull factors to engage young citizens’ (2013: 5), with 28.2 % of youth posting about GE2011 on blogs, Facebook and Twitter compared to just 9.3 % in the whole sample, and 20.2 % of youth forwarding GE2011 content via email, Facebook or Twitter compared to just 9.9 % in the whole sample (2013: 5). While youth ‘still trusted mass media and used them more’ during the campaigning period, their ‘impact on voting are decreasing’ (2013: 13). New media was breaking new ground for alternative and contentious journalism: of the youth who perceived ‘new media as important’, 54.8 % expressed that they would vote for the opposition while only 39.8 % indicated they would vote for the PAP; of the youth who perceived ‘new media as trustworthy’, 52.5 % expressed that they would vote for the opposition while only 38.6 % indicated they would vote for the PAP (2013: 9). The authors concluded that ‘new media will become even more vital for political parties’ campaigning in future’ (2013: 13) Simultaneously, under the government’s long-term initiatives to shape Singapore into an ‘Intelligent Island’ (Cordeiro and Al-Hawamdeh 2001), users in Singapore report an 87 % smartphone penetration rate (Media Research Asia 2013) and 123 % mobile Internet penetration rate (Singh 2014). Social media use and selfie-taking is proliferating, led by Influencers who are micro-celebrities (Senft 2008) on the Internet, and who accumulate and monetise their relatively large followings on platforms such as Instagram (Abidin 2014). Since he debut his Instagram account in December 2012, Singaporean MP Baey Yam Keng appears to be borrowing from the vernacular of Influencers to engage with voters on digital media. DIGITAL PRESENCE As an MP, Baey Yam Keng’s official digital presence is foremost his profile on the Parliament of Singapore website (Parliament of Singapore 2015). However, Google autocomplete prompts for ‘Baey Yam Keng’ reveal popular searches to include the MP’s ‘wife’, ‘Instagram’, ‘profile’ and ‘selfie’. A Google image search for ‘Baey Yam Keng Instagram’ brings up primarily selfies. In early 2015, Baey posted a screenshot on Instagram announcing that his Twitter account had been ‘verified’ to assure voters that his digital platforms were genuine. This was also an important signal that he was personally managing his social media instead of using ghostwriters. negar@duke.edu 78 C. ABIDIN All screenshots in this paper were taken on 1 April 2015, when the MP boasted over 8,000 followers on his Instagram account, @baeyyamkeng, and over 14,000 followers on his Twitter account, @YamKeng. As of April 2016, these figures have risen to over 14,000 and 28,000 respectively. STRATEGIC SELFIES On Twitter, Baey curates several hashtags in which he uses selfies to engage with voters across platforms. ‘#FBchatwithBYK’ advertises his ‘monthly chat’ with voters on Facebook, while ‘#BYKcolumn’ promotes his newspaper columns in mainstream press. On a lighter note and in expression of his grasp of Internet vernacular – specifically, the ‘look alike’ meme – Baey uses ‘#BYKlookalike’ on Instagram to collate voter-submitted images of men who bear an uncanny resemblance to him. Perhaps the initiative that has received the most engaging response from voters is ‘#runwithBYK’ on Twitter. On this channel, Baey announces the date, time and venue of his next run, inviting voters to join him (Fig. 9.1). He makes the effort to rotate locations around Singapore and usually posts brief profiles of the voters who come down, usually comprising men in their early 1920s to late 1940s. Some are even regular running companions. On days when no one shows up for #runwithBYK, Baey appropriates the moment to display his social media savvy. Mimicking the pose of the Sir Stanford Raffles statue in the background (Fig. 9.2), Baey captions his photograph – albeit not a selfie – in the style of hashtags as a paralanguage for linguistic humour and metacommentary. Shifting away from plainly hashtagging his Tweets with ‘#runwithBYK’ as a form of ‘searchable talk’ (Zappavigna 2012: 1), he uses five hashtags to construct a narrative. While his first two hashtags ‘#keepingfit #ownresponsibility’ may come across as didactic especially when read in the vein of the PAP’s paternalism, his subsequent hashtags ‘#noone #runwithBYK #runbymyself’ reveal a playful self-satire on his failed efforts. CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT In his study of forms of legitimate rule, Sociologist Max Weber (1962) describes charismatic authority as situated in a leader’s right to lead out of followers’ personal devotion to unique qualities or exemplary behaviour. This is unlike legal authority in which leadership is enshrined through a system of rules applied administratively and judicially, nor traditional negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 79 Fig. 9.1 ‘#runwithBYK’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: twitter.com/ YamKeng negar@duke.edu 80 C. ABIDIN Fig. 9.2 ‘Waiting’ – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: twitter.com/ YamKeng negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 81 authority in which leadership is inherited. Baey takes on charismatic leadership, conveyed through a personal branding strategy that relies on selfies to give the impression of accessibility and relatability, premised on how he visibilises the backstage (Goffman 1956) of his daily work to voters. Selfies featuring Baey in the office, at home preparing for a work day, with voters during ministerial sessions, with other politicians during state visits, at press interviews and with mainstream media celebrities at functions where he is an official guest have a levelling effect as Baey appears to forgo the privacy and distance usually adopted by politicians for a ‘perceived interconnectedness’ (Abidin 2015) – an aesthetic he adopts from Influencers who continuously stream their personal lives in a bid for followers to feel emotionally connected to them. So central are selfies to Baey’s personal branding as a politician – the highest circulating English newspaper The Straits Times (2014) described the MP as being ‘known for his frequent selfies and strong presence on social media’ – that he was invited to star as ‘a romantic blogger’ in a Mandarin play ‘centred around society’s obsession with social media’ in December 2014 (Robert 2015). Unfortunately, on the Monday before opening night, Baey announced on Facebook that he was hospitalised for dengue fever, but eventually ‘mustered the strength to return to the stage just in time for the show’ (Ng 2014). However, unlike the widely publicised Cameron-Thorning-Obama selfie faux pas at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, Baey instead chose to announce his situation via a Facebook text post and a photo of his intravenous drip in hospital. REACTIONS Based on comments on Baey’s Instagram, voter reactions to his strategic selfies have largely been positive, with many users complimenting his looks, thanking him for his work and expressing their support during the election campaigning period. An anonymous Tumblr, http://baeyyam kengselfies.tumblr.com/, reposting Baey’s selfies also circulated on social media. Most notably, user-generated content viral sites such as mustshar enews.com began curating Baey’s ‘best of’ selfies (Ang 2015). Several of such listicles highlight Baey’s confident perception of Influencer selfie tropes and youth voters’ selfie vernacular, including humorous selfies, make-up tutorial selfies (Fig. 9.3), #OOTD or Outfit Of The Day selfies (Fig. 9.4) and ‘Hot Dog Legs’ meme selfies. negar@duke.edu 82 C. ABIDIN Fig. 9.3 Make-up tutorial selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: Instagram.com/baeyyamkeng negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 83 Fig. 9.4 Outfit of the day selfie – Baey Yam Keng on Instagram. Source: Instagram.com/baeyyamkeng negar@duke.edu 84 C. ABIDIN Perhaps in anticipation of the potential backlash from older voters who may not understand youth digital vernaculars, the PAP reposted an op-ed from The New Paper titled ‘Who are you calling narcissistic’ (Ong, S. M. 2013), in which a reporter muses about Baey’s selfies and added a caption to assure voters that Baey was ‘on the job’: ‘So what do you think of MP Baey Yam Keng’s series of selfies? P.S. You should check out his facebook page to see his other posts. He doesn’t just do selfies all day long!’ VOTE FOR MY SELFIE In interviews to the press, Baey reveals that he posts selfies about three times a week but is aware that not everyone takes to them: ‘When I first took a selfie, I was quite cautious and not sure about how the public would react’ (Ong, Y. 2013). However, he sees the value of selfies in relating to his voters: ‘I hear it is popular now. It could be useful as a channel of engagement with the public’ (Ong, Y. 2013). In the wake of Singapore’s soft authoritarianism to weed out the opposition (Nasir and Turner 2011) and new media’s usurp of traditional media’s credibility and influence (Lin and Hong 2013), Baey’s strategic use of selfies to manage his personal brand as a politician speaks to Postman’s (1984: 4) notion that ‘cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control’. Where President Richard Nixon and Senator Edward Kennedy depended on ‘the cosmetician’s art’ to ‘significantly enhance[e]’ (1984: 4) their appearances, Baey conscientiously self-presents through relatable selfie tropes and digital media vernacular. In response, voters interviewed also expressed that the ‘human touch’ is ‘refreshing’ when ‘an MP uses social media like any other normal person would’ (Ong, Y. 2013). Baey also admitted that while some voters have threatened to unfollow him because of his selfies, others have jumped to his defence: ‘I was very heartened when another netizen say: “It’s his own Instagram account. Of course if you don’t like it, you don’t follow. I mean, no one is forcing you to follow Baey Yam Keng”’ (RazorTV 2013). Baey intentionally uses selfies to manage his personal brand as a politician: ‘I think these are aspects of our personal life that members of the public are quite keen. Sometimes they have this perception that politicians are not real people. They don’t have a life or they’re all very stuffy, you negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 85 know, very serious’ (RazorTV 2013). It is precisely this relatability that constitutes Baey’s charisma (Weber 1962), in contrast to other incumbent MPs who have yet to shed their image of authoritarianism, paternalism, hierarchy and distance. Additionally, through his hyper-visibilising of the ‘backstage’ (Goffman 1956) in his daily work, Baey constructs an autobiography and narrative through which he is able to invite voters to identify and connect with him (Lilleker 2014: 130) through parasocial relations (Horton & Wohl 1956) as a political figure, personal brand, but above all, an ordinary person. REFERENCES Abidin, C. (2014). #In$tagLam: Instagram as a repository of taste, a brimming marketplace, a war of eyeballs. In M. Berry & M. Schleser (Eds.), Mobile media making in the age of smartphones. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Abidin, C. (2015). Communicative intimacies: Influencers and perceived interconnectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology, 8. http://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/. Ang, C. (2015, February 2) The best of Baey Yam Keng’s Instagram. mustshar enews.com. http://mustsharenews.com/best-of-baey-yam-keng-ig/. Accessed 1 April 2015. Cordeiro, C. M., & Al-Hawamdeh, S. (2001). National information infrastructure and the realization of Singapore IT2000 initiative. Information Research, 6(2), 1–25. Freedom House. (2010) Singapore. Freedom house. http://www.freedom house.org/report/freedom-world/2010/singapore#.Uwy4avSSxi4. Accessed 20 December 2013. George, C. (2007). Consolidating authoritarian rule: Calibrated coercion in Singapore. The Pacific Review, 20(2), 127–145. Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin Books. Horton, D., & Richard, W. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. Republished in Particip@tions 3(1). http:// www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/horton_and_wohl_1956.html. Lilleker, D. G. (2014). Autobiography and political marketing: Narrative and the Obama Brand. In T. Bronwen & J. Roundeds (Eds.), Real lives, celebrity stories: Narratives of ordinary and extraordinary people across media. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Lin, T. T. C., & Hong, A. Y.-H. (2013). Youth, new media and political participation in the election. Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. http://lkyspp. nus.edu.sg/ips/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/06/S4_1_Trisha-Lin_ 0410.pdf. Accessed 1 April 2015. negar@duke.edu 86 C. ABIDIN Media Research Asia (2013). 87% Smartphone penetration in Hong Kong, Singapore. Media Research Asia. http://www.mediaresearchasia.com/view. php?type=press&id=3184. Accessed 5 January 2014. Nasir, K. M., & Turner, B. T. (2011). Governing as gardening: Reflections on soft authoritarianism in Singapore. Citizenship Studies, 17(3–4), 339–352. Ng, Y.-S. (2014, December 6). Theatre review: An anticlimatic drama starring MP Baey Yam Keng,’ Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/ entertainment/theatre-review-an-anticlimactic-drama-starring-mp-baey-yamkeng. Accessed 1 April 2015. Ong, S. M. (2013). Who are you calling narcissistic? The New Paper, 13 August. http://news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/who-are-you-calling-narcissistic. Accessed: 1 April 2015. Ong, Y. (2013, August 14). MP Baey Yam Keng: I am surprised and flattered by the interest in my ‘selfies’. Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/singa pore/mp-baey-yam-keng-i-am-surprised-and-flattered-by-the-interest-in-myselfies. Accessed 1 April 2015. Parliament of Singapore (2015). Member’s Profile: Mr Baey Yam Keng. http:// www.parliament.gov.sg/mp/baey-yam-keng. Accessed 1 April 2015. Postman, N. (1984). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. London: Heinemann. RazorTV. (2013, August 15). Baey Yam Keng’s Many Selfies. RazorTV. http:// www.razor.tv/video/463216/baey-yam-kengs-many-selfies. Accessed 1 January 2015. Reporters Without Borders. (2013). 2013 World press freedom index: Dashed hopes after spring. Reporters Without Borders. http://en.rsf.org/press-free dom-index-2013,1054.html. Accessed 25 February 2014. Robert, C. (2015, September 30). MP Baey Yam Keng set to take stage in social media play. The New Paper. http://www.tnp.sg/entertainment/mp-baeyyam-keng-set-take-stage-social-media-play. Accessed 1 January 2015. Rodan, G. (2003). Embracing electronic media but suppressing civil society: Authoritarian consolidation in Singapore. The Pacific Review, 16(4), 503–524. Salimat, S. (2013) Singapore falls to record-low place in press freedom ranking. Yahoo News. http://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-falls-to-record-low-placein-press-freedom-ranking-035131531.html. Accessed 20 December 2013. Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang. Singh, S. (2014, January 12). Mobile internet boom coming, but challenges remain. The Times of India. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/article show/28703982.cms Accessed 5 January 2014. Sussman, G. (2012). The Tao of Singaporeʼs Internet politics. Journal of International Communication, 9(1), 35–51. negar@duke.edu 9 VOTE FOR MY SELFIE: POLITICIAN SELFIES AS CHARISMATIC ENGAGEMENT 87 Times, S. (2014, September 30). MP Baey Yam Keng to star in play about social media obsession. Straits Times. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/thea tre-dance/story/mp-baey-yam-keng-star-play-about-social-media-obsession20140930. Accessed 1 April 2015. Wang, Z., & Tan, E. S. (2012). The conundrum of authoritarian resiliency: Hybrid regimes and non-democratic regimes in East Asia. ABS Working Paper Series 65. http://www.asianbarometer.org/newenglish/publications/ workingpapers/no.65.pdf. Weber, M. (1962). Basic concepts in sociology. New York: Philosophical Library. Zappavigna, M. (2012). The discourse of Twitter and social media. London: Continuum. Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist who researches Internet culture, including people’s relationships with social media, technology and devices. Her current projects focus on self-branding, vernacular Internet cultures and social media commerce. Crystal has a PhD in Anthropology and Sociology, and Communication and Media Studies from the University of Western Australia. She is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the National University of Singapore and an affiliated researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Center at Jönköping University. Reach her at https://wishcrys.com/. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 10 Biometric Citizens: Adapting Our Selfies to Machine Vision Jill Walker Rettberg Abstract Machines are an important audience for any selfie today. This chapter discusses how our selfies are treated as data rather than as human communication. Rettberg looks at how facial recognition algorithms analyse our selfies for surveillance, authentication of identity and better-customised commercial services, and relates this to understandings of machine vision as post-optical and non-representational. Through examples ranging from Erica Scourti’s video art to Snapchat’s selfie lenses, the chapter explores how our expectation of machine vision affects the selfies we take, and how it may be locking down our identity as biometric citizens. Keywords Biometric citizenship
Machine vision
Time-lapse selfies
Snapchat Machines don’t see as humans do. Machines convert that which humans can see into data that can be analysed by algorithms. Light, dark and contrast are analysed and computed. Eyes, nose and mouth are identified, converted and stored. The curves and features of a face are condensed into J.W. Rettberg (*) University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: Jill.Walker.Rettberg@uib.no © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_10 negar@duke.edu 89 90 J.W. RETTBERG 3D grids, allowing the machine to recognise another picture of that same face even if it is tilted to the side or shown from another angle. Machines are good at this kind of vision. iPhoto uses facial recognition to sort our personal photos so we can easily find all our photos of each of our friends. Facebook’s DeepFace algorithm can recognise individual faces in a crowd almost as well as a human can (Taigman et al. 2014). But the way in which the machine identifies that face has little to do with our human way of recognising a familiar face. Machine vision is about data, not about the visual or optical. Carolyn L. Kane sees this as such a fundamental aspect of today’s society that she, building upon Kittler (2009), calls our time post-optical, arguing that we no longer use colour or sight itself as an end in itself but as a means to another end (Kane 2014). The military paints pixelated patterns on the tops of drones, not because humans will see the patterns but to fool the machines watching from satellites above us. Makeup like CV Dazzle is specifically designed not to make humans appear more beautiful to each other but to fool surveillance cameras trying to identify human faces in a crowd. With chromakey video, producers use a coloured background to let a machine know to replace that colour with something else. ‘Colour is not exclusively about vision’, Kane writes. ‘Rather, it is a system of control used to manage and discipline perception and thus reality’ (Kane 2014: 211). We could say much the same thing of selfies. Much has been written about the ways in which selfies can be seen as a form of discipline, where we learn to shape ourselves in ways permitted by our visual culture (Burns 2015; Rettberg 2014; Senft and Baym 2015). But we can also see selfies as post-optical, post-visual and post-human. When we post selfies online, our audience will not only be other humans. Our audience is also, and perhaps primarily, machines. In an excellent article discussing selfies in the context of photography, Paul Frosch argues that it is the non-representational aspects that are new in selfies: the ‘distinctiveness from older forms of self-depiction seems to derive from nonrepresentational changes: innovations in distribution, storage, and metadata that are not directly concerned with the production or aesthetic design of images’ (Frosh 2015: 1607). This is true as far as it goes, but it neglects the ways in which machines analyse our selfies. In this chapter, my aim is to show you how the machines that will read our selfies actually affect and control the way that we create them. Machine vision is changing the way we see ourselves. negar@duke.edu 10 BIOMETRIC CITIZENS: ADAPTING OUR SELFIES TO MACHINE VISION 91 The development of photography as a technology was in many ways decided by our society’s desire to control citizens by identifying them. Photographs in identification documents and police mugshots are among the earliest uses of photographic portraits. Today it is impossible or at least extremely difficult to cross a border, buy alcohol, vote or, in some cases, pick up medication or a parcel addressed to you without being able to prove your identity with a driver’s licence, passport or other photographic identification. For many decades, these photographs were intended to identify us to other human beings, but now they are designed to be machine readable. In many countries, we can no longer smile for a passport photograph because the smile makes it harder for a machine to match the image to a fixed identity. This changes the way we think about faces. Paul Frosh argues that the selfie’s indexicality is more deixic, pointing towards the social gesture of communication, and in fact, machines can also read this social quality of the selfie by counting people who like or comment on each other’s selfies. Yet it is the fixing of the face to a unique body that is the main goal of facial recognition, whether it is used by the government to control the movements and actions of citizens or by Facebook to provide relevant content to users and relevant users to advertisers. New security systems are skipping the intermediary of the ID card and are instead running facial recognition directly on the image of our face. Refugees in Jordan are given cash assistance from the UN which they withdraw from an ATM without a bankcard or a PIN: instead, the ATM scans their iris to identify them (Dunmore 2015). Soon MasterCard customers will be able to prove their identity when making purchases online by blinking at the camera in their smartphones. In reading press reports of MasterCard’s payment-by-selfie system, it is interesting to note the emphasis on the face’s conversion to data: The facial recognition scan will map out your face, convert it to 1s and 0s and transmit that over the Internet to MasterCard. Bhalla [the spokesperson for MasterCard] promised that MasterCard won’t be able to reconstruct your face – and that the information would transmit securely and remain safe on the company’s computer servers. (Pagliery 2015: n.p.) There is an underlying assumption here that the customer would not want her selfie to be uploaded to MasterCard. This discomfort points to the difference between seeing a selfie as an end in itself and as a means to an negar@duke.edu 92 J.W. RETTBERG end. Technically, looking at a camera that records an image of my face is the same as taking a selfie, but it is not a selfie that is intended to be published or to be seen by any other human, or even by myself. This is a selfie that is being used as something else. Kelly Gates writes that facial recognition technology ‘treats the face as an index of identity, disregarding its expressive capacity and communicative role in social interaction’ (Gates 2011: 251). There are other modes of machine vision that can interpret selfies more broadly though, such as emotion analysis software. Companies offer systems with names like Emotient, Real Eyes and Affectiva where the webcam on a test subject’s computer captures video of their face as they watch an advertisement or other material on their computer. Their face is instantly analysed for emotions and the marketer or content creator who is paying for the service receives a report pinpointing the exact moments of their video that elicit joy, tears, boredom or frustration. Expression analysis is used in other situations, too. The marketing video for Affectiva shows a young boy using expression analysis with his Google glasses to interpret his older sister’s responses to what he is saying (Affectiva 2014). A video made for Emotient shows a smart car with a camera trained on the driver’s face. When she frowns, the screen on the dashboard is shown to read ‘Driver frustrated. Suggest alternate route’ (Voltage Advertising + Design for Emotient 2014). Some of the early versions of expression analysis software were designed to help people with autism to understand emotions, but current marketing assumes that all humans would find this useful, especially if they are trying to sell something. Machines constantly watching us and our homes are also posited as helpful in the marketing of home surveillance and communication devices like the Withings Home, a camera that alerts absent parents when a person comes near the device. In the marketing video, a child arrives home after school, and the mother, who is at work, receives a message on her phone and is able to start a video conversation with her son (Withings 2014). Most consumer-oriented machine vision systems, such as Facebook’s facial recognition algorithms, Affectiva’s emotion-sensing car and the Withings Home, are intended to feel helpful and to improve our lives. However, they are not neutral. In her study of users’ experiences with heart rate variability monitors, Minna Ruckenstein (2014) found that users told the story of their day differently before and after seeing the data from the heart rate variability monitor, which indicates stress levels. negar@duke.edu 10 BIOMETRIC CITIZENS: ADAPTING OUR SELFIES TO MACHINE VISION 93 The users negotiated with the data, adjusting their lived experience to match the story the data was telling. The more we outsource our emotions and social communication to machines, the less likely we are to trust ourselves. Most machine vision strategies rely on the assumption that selfies can be broken down into individual parts. Faces become 3D grids, emotions are reduced to certain muscular movements and a child arriving home is simply motion in a quiet living room. These machine vision techniques are also easily used by humans, especially when we try to use machines to understand more about a phenomenon such as selfies. Elizabeth Losh discusses the ways in which Lev Manovich’s Selfiecity projects ‘depicts human individuals as discrete elemental particles’: Yet applying an atomistic social physics to selfie culture perpetuates the stereotype of the independent and autonomous self as isolated media creator and media subject in the cultural imaginary of personal consumer electronics and ignores how people are embedded in complex rhetorical situations. (Losh 2015: 1649) For digital machines to ‘see’ selfies, this atomism is necessary. Digital algorithms rely on 0s and 1s. But what does this do to the ways we see ourselves? How does machine vision influence human vision? One genre of selfies that illustrates such influence is the ‘time-lapse selfie’ (Rettberg 2014: 36–40), where people take a photo of themselves every day and generate a time-lapse video showing their face changing day by day and year by year. The app Everyday automates this process in a way that makes the algorithm very visible. When you take a photo, you are asked to align your face on the screen with the selfie you took the day before. By aligning your eyes and mouth to the grid the app provides, you ensure that the video produced will be as smooth as possible. Snapchat’s popular selfie lenses similarly mark our faces as machinereadable. To activate the lenses, you use the front-facing camera so you see your own face and then touch the image of your face on the screen until a biometric grid pops up on your face. You can now swipe between different lenses that apply various special effects to your face, mapping them to the grid so that the effects follow the movements of your face. Some distort your face, removing your nose or twisting your chin, while others add makeup and accessories or make rainbows gush out of your mouth. Like funhouse mirrors that show us distorted versions of ourselves, Snapchat’s negar@duke.edu 94 J.W. RETTBERG lenses allow us to play with our visual identity, and of course to send silly selfies to our friends. They also normalise biometrics and automated image manipulation. They make us more used to having our faces read by machines (Rettberg 2016). Artists have of course experimented with the many ways in which we use machines to see ourselves and our surroundings. CamFind is an app that will search the Internet to find images the user captures with the phone’s camera. The app is aimed at shoppers, so, for instance, if you point the camera at a crayon, the app will identify the object as a crayon and point the user to a range of websites where they can purchase crayons. CamFind can identify a surprisingly broad range of objects, including parts of the human body. Artist Erica Scourti has made use of this feature to create Bodyscan, a short video composed of images she has taken of her body using CamFind and the results it finds in response to her images. I saw the full video at the Transmediale exhibition in Berlin in January 2015, and an excerpt is also available online (Scourti 2015). The video is in portrait layout, like the screen of an iPhone, and is an edited recording of a session using the CamFind app, where Scourti reads the descriptions of items identified by the app as a voiceover. Sometimes she also narrates beyond the terms provided by the app, blending her human voice with the words of the machine. The video moves faster than the app, cutting away all the lag and cutting between search results at a frenetic pace while reading aloud the identification text the app produces. A photo of breasts fills the mobile phone-shaped screen for a moment, quickly followed by CamFind’s result: ‘woman breast’, then quickly moving on to the search results: breast enlargement, fast enlargement. A quick montage of various male and female body parts follows. ‘Identifying human, human armpit, human feet’. The merging of the personal, the human and the consumerist machine algorithm in CamFind is skilfully mocked. A picture of a foot returns the search result ‘Baby’ and the voiceover reads ‘Baby, I can’t wait forever 21’, shifting from the human emotion of ‘I can’t wait forever’ to shopping as ‘forever’ is coupled to ‘21’, thus becoming the women’s clothing store chain Forever 21. Selfies are of course not wholly defined by the machines that read them. There is resistance against the machines, for instance, in nude or sexually provocative selfies that are deliberately taken in ways that make any kind of automated facial recognition or other identity-fixing strategies difficult or impossible (Van Der Nagel 2013). I remain optimistic and believe selfies serve an important communicative purpose for humans. But it is negar@duke.edu 10 BIOMETRIC CITIZENS: ADAPTING OUR SELFIES TO MACHINE VISION 95 important to also be aware of the ways in which our machines are steering and controlling the ways in which we can see ourselves. In many ways, we are becoming biometric citizens, identified and shaped by the digital images of our faces. REFERENCES Affectiva. (2014). Affectiva overview. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mFrSFMnskI4&feature=youtu.be. Accessed 30 March 2016. Burns, A. (2015). Self(ie)-discipline: Social regulation as enacted through the discussion of photographic practice. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1716–1733. Dunmore, C. (2015). Iris scan system provides cash lifeline to Syrian refugees in Jordan. http://www.unhcr.org/550fe6ab9.html. Accessed 7 October 2015. Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9(22), 1607–1628. Gates, K. (2011). Our biometric future: Facial recognition technology and our culture of surveillance. New York: New York University Press. Kane, C. L. (2014). Chromatic algorithms: Synthetic color, computer art, and aesthetics after code. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kittler, F. (2009). Optical media. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Losh, E. (2015). Feminism reads big data: ‘Social Physics,’ atomism, and selfiecity. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1647–1659. Pagliery, J. (2015). MasterCard will approve purchases by scanning your face. http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/01/technology/mastercard-facial-scan/ index.html. Accessed 7 October 2015. Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rettberg, J. W. (2016). How Snapchat uses your face (A Snapchat research story). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XOd-rc7r98&list= PL46Xs2itPIMlDBL0tPfg-2WzXwZrnTePh&index=1. Accessed 19 May 2016. Ruckenstein, M. 2014. Visualized and interacted life: Personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. Societies, 4(1), 68–84. Scourti, E. (2015) Body scan (excerpt). https://vimeo.com/111503640 Senft, T. M., & Baym, N. K. (2015). Introduction: What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606. Taigman, Y., Yang, M., Ranzato, M., & Wolf, L. (2014). DeepFace: Closing the gap to human-level performance in face verification. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 1701–1708. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2680208. negar@duke.edu 96 J.W. RETTBERG Van Der Nagel, E. (2013). Faceless bodies: Negotiating technological and cultural codes on Reddit Gonewild. Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10(2). http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number2/Emily-van-der-Nagel.html. Voltage Advertising + Design for Emotient. (2014) Emotient - Emotional awareness for devices. https://vimeo.com/70048902 Withings. (2014) Meet Withings Home. Connect. Sense protect. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=qUydD9ycSWQ. Accessed 1 March 2016. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research is on how storytelling and self-representation evolve in online environments, and she has published on hypertext fiction, digital art, social media, games and selfies. Rettberg is also the author of Blogging (Polity Press 2014) and Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, and Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Palgrave 2014). She discusses her research on Twitter and Snapchat as jilltxt. More details on her work can be found at http://jilltxt.net/. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 11 Dronie Citizenship? Maximilian Jablonowski Abstract The chapter draws attention to a new digital media practice: the dronie. This recently coined term designates short videos people take of themselves with the help of consumer drones in order to share them via social media platforms such as Vimeo, Twitter or Instagram. Jablonowski departs from the dronie’s aesthetic genealogies, the selfie and aerial videography, and describes the dronie’s distinct aesthetics of verticality. He discusses how these are related to the epistemological and political dispositifs of the aerial view and the vertical politics of drone warfare and aerial surveillance. The chapter concludes with a case for ‘dronie citizenship’ that does not fear drones, but explores their ambiguous powers and pleasures. Keywords Drones
Unmanned aerial vehicles
Surveillance
Creativity
Verticality
Aerial view In a 2011 blog post, Zygmunt Bauman observed an unexpected liaison, which in his eyes augurs ‘the end of invisibility and autonomy, the two defining attributes of privacy’ (Bauman 2011: n.p.). By comparing two M. Jablonowski (*) Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: jablonowski@isek.uzh.ch © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_11 negar@duke.edu 97 98 M. JABLONOWSKI pieces of news published on the same date – one on the increasing miniaturisation of drones, another on the carefree compliance of social media users in giving away their private data to companies – Bauman makes out an uncanny ‘meeting between the drone operators and the Facebook account operators’. According to Bauman, they meet in a general orientation towards ‘social sorting’ – the gathering of personal data in order to predict people’s behaviour via algorithms for commercial or security purposes (Bauman and Lyon 2013: 23). This secret meeting might have begot an illegitimate but popular child: the dronie – a word composite of drone and selfie. These are videos people take of themselves with the help of consumer drones. Since the beginning of 2014, they have been numerously published on video-sharing platforms. The gadget-affine blogosphere, but also some traditional feuilletons celebrated the dronie as the ‘new evolutionary step of the selfie’ (Zeit Online 2014; translation mine). But which political implications does this ‘evolution’ from the selfie to the dronie entail in the context of military and intelligence drone uses for surveillance purposes? Do they share in, as Bauman suggests, the practice of social sorting and the consequential demise of personal privacy and autonomy? Or, to the contrary, could the dronie engender representations and practices of citizenship and political or counter-surveillance engagement? To explore these questions, I start with a short discussion of the dronies’ aesthetic genealogies; these are the selfie and aerial videography. Secondly, I briefly outline how the view from above is related to epistemological and political dispositifs. Consequently, I discuss the ambiguous involvement of the dronie in these practices. I conclude with a proposal of what dronie citizenship might be and why we might need it. My arguments draw on the concept of ethnography of media-worlds (Holfelder and Ritter 2013), which analyses the image aesthetics of media artefacts in their complex interrelations with the users’ particular media practices, their contexts of use in everyday lifeworlds and the material affordances and constraints of media technologies. GENEALOGIES Drones are not only devices for remote-controlled or autonomous flying; they also are synesthetic media technologies. Filming and remote sensing are essential parts of almost all drone applications. Taking dronies is just negar@duke.edu 11 DRONIE CITIZENSHIP? 99 one of many realisations of drones’ media technological potential. Its popularity has been enabled by the increasing availability of relatively low-cost, easy-to-handle and ready-to-buy consumer drones with video cameras. As a media practice, dronies combine aesthetic characteristics of the selfie and of aerial videography. Since aesthetics always reflect modes of (self-)representation, they are inherently political. Tracking the aesthetic genealogies of the dronie thus might be insightful for exploring its political dimension. Similar to the selfie, dronies are representations of a self with the purpose of sharing it with others via social media platforms as Vimeo or instant messengers as Twitter.1 They can be characterised as an ‘ego-technical device’ (Sloterdijk 2011) in the sense that they actively constitute a self in a distinct social, technological and media setting. But dronies, as a German news show has pointedly put it, rather focus on ‘panoramas than noses’ (Tagesschau 2015; my own translation). Despite its relatively recent appearance, a common aesthetics of dronies has already been established. Usually the drone is ascending away from the depicted person(s), creating an effect of zooming out. In many videos, especially in ‘group dronies’, the depicted persons are waving at the drone before it soars up. In a notably smaller number of dronies, the drone descends towards the persons. This effect of zooming in is almost exclusively used in so-called ‘space selfies’,2 where a Google Earth sequence is montaged before a dronie shot in order to create the impression that the drone nosedives from space. The videos seldom are longer than 30 seconds and sometimes contain slow-motion or other post-production effects. These formal aspects have the result that the actual depiction of the person(s) usually lasts just a few seconds and is not detailed enough to really recognise their facial expressions. The focus is on landscape, not on persons. This also seems to influence the attitude of reception since dronies with spectacular landscape shots generally get the best ratings. Of course, the aesthetic qualities of the location are also of importance in the reception of other types of images, such as selfie shots or vacation snaps. But other than these, the image aesthetics of the dronie – as opposed to that of a selfie – seems to have no interest at all in the gestures, facial expressions and appearance of the depicted person(s). It reverses the relationship between person and landscape. By introducing an aspect of verticality to the image aesthetics of the selfie, the dronie abstracts from the individual. Its aesthetics purposefully foregrounds this verticality and orients towards aerial videography and negar@duke.edu 100 M. JABLONOWSKI cinematic landscape takes. The dronie explicitly wants its image practices be judged in an aesthetic register. Thus, taking dronies is primarily perceived as an ‘aesthetic practice’, which means it wants to be ‘an end in itself, self-referential, and oriented to its own realisation at this particular moment in time’ (Reckwitz 2014: 27). THE CITIZEN UNDER THE DRONE The aesthetic qualities of the view from above are undeniable. But it is important to note that ‘for all its spectacle and beauty, we must be careful not to celebrate it. . . . The aerial view has been complicit with militarism, security and geopolitical pursuit’ (Adey et al. 2013: 2–3). Throughout its history, the view from above has simultaneously been interpreted in aesthetic, epistemological and political registers, constantly oscillating between oversight and surveillance, between knowledge and reconnaissance. Both science and the military rely on a ‘god’s eye view’; this is a disembodied, detached view from an imaginary nowhere. The view from above ‘has traditionally been associated with the empowerment of the elevated viewer’ (Adey et al. 2013: 8). These ‘vertical visualities’ (Weizman 2002) have been and still are a powerful device for the modern state’s scrutinising and policing dispositifs, projecting its force on the people below and thereby shaping their spaces and practices of everyday life. The privileged aerial perspective also affects the way the people below are represented since ‘the view from above is connected to enhanced forms of legibility, in and through which nature, peoples and settlements can be dislocated from their everyday complexities and seen (and governed) in the abstract’ (Adey et al. 2013: 8). Andreas Hackl (2014) named this practice, in contrast to the selfie, an ‘otherie’ because it prohibits every mode of autonomous self-representation. In this sense, the view from above could be called a xeno-technical device as opposed to Sloterdijk’s notion of ego-technical devices; it does not establish a particular self through media technologies, but destabilises its individuality and particularity. In the last years, drones have become the next big thing for the state’s ‘politics of verticality’ (Weizman 2002). Long-endurance military drones can loiter in the air for up to 24 hours or even more, persistently keeping their cameras and other sensor arrays directed at the people on the ground. Thereby it does not surveil single individuals, but dissolves them in abstract ‘patterns of life’, which are the new ‘epistemic bases of armed negar@duke.edu 11 DRONIE CITIZENSHIP? 101 surveillance’ (Chamayou 2015: 42). In this ‘analysis of behaviour patterns rather than the recognition of nominal identities’ (Chamayou 2015: 42), the epistemic and the policing powers of the aerial view concur, trying to predict ‘suspicious subjects’ based on their ‘deviant’ behaviour patterns. Thus Chamayou considers military drones as a means of a pre-emptive ‘social defence’ (Chamayou 2015: 35), a notion closely linked to Bauman’s above-mentioned idea of ‘social sorting’. These aerial methods of tracking and locating are not just an epistemological issue; it has become a matter of life and death. In the ‘cynegetic war’ (Chamayou 2011: 2) with its invasive practices of targeted killings, the enemy is no longer an equal adversary with guaranteed rights. S/he is rather turned into prey, which is stripped down to its bare life and thereby made, as Giorgio Agamben has it, incapable of any political or legal articulation. At this extreme point of explication of the drone war’s rationale, the ‘citizen under the drone’ ceases to be a citizen at all. The constant stare from above dissolves him into a readable and governable ‘pattern of life’, which is deprived of its basic civil rights and can be hunted down at any time. These practices inevitably address questions to the dronie, despite its explicitly playful and aesthetic purpose. Even though ‘not every drone carries a missile . . . all drones carry the burden that comes with being an instrument of tremendous power’ (McNeil and Burrington 2014: 57). Since its not only ‘the Hellfire missile that makes the drones so powerful [but] the vantage point they offer’ (McNeil and Burrington 2014: 59), the dronie’s aesthetics of vertically are both symbolically and materially involved with the military’s politics of verticality and the ambivalent powers of the aerial gaze. What does this involvement mean with regard to the dronie’s ego-technical function? THE CITIZEN WITH THE DRONE ‘The view from above has always been dialectically entwined with the struggle to be concealed from below’ (Adey et al. 2013: 7). The strategies to evade the aerial view have generally been linked to practices of camouflage and making oneself invisible (Robinson 2013). Dronies seem to perform the very antithesis: they embrace the state of being seen from above. The people taking dronies could be seen as not only being complicit in their aerial surveillance, but even perceiving it as pleasurable. As with other digital images shared via social media, dronies rely on voluntarily giving negar@duke.edu 102 M. JABLONOWSKI away personal data. The happily surveilled self is turning the ‘condition of being watched and seen . . . from a menace into a temptation’ (Bauman and Lyon 2013: 23). But do they really give in to the constant stare from above and the deprivation of privacy and invisibility? In my research on the uses of dronies, I could not find explicitly political uses. Taking dronies was primarily understood as an aesthetic practice with an attitude that can be pointedly described as le drone pour le drone. It is the alleged coolness and innovativeness of the artefact that makes the practice pleasurable. The journalist Sam Mutter criticises this ‘recurrent portrayal of drones as playthings’ and argues that this view of ‘gadgetry is one of the most insidious forms of normalisation’ infecting the drone ‘with the cancer of apolitical indifference’ (Mutter 2015: n.p.). Conversely (and not surprisingly), the drone-minded DIY maker culture from which most of the dronies originate tends to see in this gadgetry a move to ‘demilitarise and democratise [drones] so they can find their full potential’ (Anderson 2012: n.p.). Making out a sense of empowerment in the popular appropriation of new and powerful technologies is a widespread argument not only among the members of the DIY community but also in parts of the cultural studies. Yet, all too often this rather indulges in wishful thinking than empirical reality (Löfgren 2000). Just as the proliferation of blogs and consumer media technology did not automatically challenge the hegemonic position of media corporations (Buckingham 2009), the technology and skills which enable the media practice of dronies will not necessarily contest the state’s vertical politics of surveillance. The creative appropriation of a new technology ‘from below’ (in the case of drones, this is to be taken quite literally) is ambiguous and remains embedded in dominant power relations. Nonetheless, it is all too simplistic to discard the idea of empowerment through appropriation completely. Whether military or civilian, drones certainly are devices deeply entangled in the epistemic and violent powers of vertical visibility. But their power does not only stem from their threatening, but also from their playful and pleasurable characteristics. This tension is deeply rooted in the decentred and contradicting meanings and practices of drones, being both a feared and desired object (Jablonowski 2015). In this sense, dronies are a practice of ‘hijacking surveillance’ where people use ‘surveillance equipment for producing visual material for their own purposes’. Even though this ‘does not necessarily form any critical or other statements’, the dronie’s vertical aesthetics are simultaneously reinforcing and problematising negar@duke.edu 11 DRONIE CITIZENSHIP? 103 the drone’s aerial gaze by implicitly unfolding its contradictory relations to aesthetics and politics (Koskela 2009: 162–163). By participating in the tempting pleasures and powers of the view from above, dronies facilitate the ‘ability of those below to think and see like those above’ (Adey et al. 2013: 11). Thereby, they retain a certain agency in the face of the aerial gaze. Even though the people taking dronies do not yet explicate this agency for actively contesting the ‘politics of verticality’, they appropriate the drone’s view from above for their own egotechnical purposes, constituting themselves as selves involved in the ambiguous powers of this media technology. Unlike the numerous ‘patterns of life’ populating the drone state’s video feeds, they at least maintain some sort of ego-technical sovereignty. However, the question remains whether dronie citizenship could be a universal position or whether it is confined to a privileged social group. Even a superficial look makes obvious that dronies show a highly gendered stratification of users; these are predominantly young or middle-aged males. The drone-minded maker culture where dronies and other recreational drone uses are foremost employed could indeed serve as a particularly striking example of Löfgren’s observation that creative cultures often represent themselves in ‘military (and masculine) metaphors’ (2000: 159). At the same time it should not be forgotten that the drone community is not homogeneous. There are other, yet marginal ways to use and represent drones that go beyond their ‘boys with toys’ image and thus are potential challenges to the gendered and militarised representations that come along with Technoscience’s objects and signifying practices (Jablonowski 2015). A CASE FOR DRONIE CITIZENSHIP Peter Adey et al. highlight an often-neglected fact, namely that ‘to look up at the sky today will probably involve staring – unknowingly – in the direction of numerous aerial vehicles and satellites whose eyes and sensors are pointed right back at us’ (2013: 15). Certainly it would be overly farfetched to understand dronies as a subversive ‘look back’ of the surveilled. Its practices are not part of the ‘process whereby “ordinary” citizen-publics expose the visual vulnerabilities of those above to surveillance from below’ (Adey et al. 2013: 12), thereby reclaiming their authority over the aerial view on themselves. negar@duke.edu 104 M. JABLONOWSKI The dronie’s politics are more clandestine and in need of a closer look. They evoke an understanding that drones are not one-dimensional. Also they show that there is no technological solution to the challenges society is facing with the drone. Appropriation of technology ‘from below’ alone is not enough, it needs deliberate aesthetic, epistemological and political strategies to counter contemporary politics of verticality and surveillance practices. The dronie hints at both the technological potential and the need for a critical practice to use this potential in other ways. Drones are often attributed with an époche-making potential. If the widely prophesied ‘Drone Age’ (Anderson 2012) is really about to come, it might be necessary for us to become dronie citizens that not only fear drones, but explore their pleasures and powers. Acknowledgements I thank Julia Fleischhack, Adi Kuntsman, Christian Ritter and Christian Schönholz for their many helpful comments and annotations on this chapter. NOTES 1. Both Vimeo and Twitter have channels designated to dronies. The term dronie has been coined in a Vimeo comments section, https://vimeo.com/ 91898486 (accessed 24 September 2015). 2. These ‘space selfies’ originally were a publicity stunt for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, https://twitter.com/dronie?lang=de (accessed 24 September 2015). REFERENCES Adey, P., Whitehead, M., Alison, J., & Williams, A. J. (2013). Introduction: Visual culture and verticality. In P. Adey, M. Whitehead, J. Alison, & A. J. Williams (Eds.), From above. War, violence, and verticality. Hurst: London. Anderson, C. (2012, 22 June). How I accidentally kickstarted the domestic drone boom. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/2012/06/ff_drones/all/. Accessed 10 May 2014. Bauman, Z. (2011, 28 June). On never being alone again. Social Europe. http:// www.socialeurope.eu/2011/06/on-never-being-alone-again/. Accessed 11 August 2015. Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance: A conversation. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. negar@duke.edu 11 DRONIE CITIZENSHIP? 105 Buckingham, D. (2009). Speaking back? In search of the citizen journalist. In D. Buckingham & R. Willett (Eds.), Video cultures: Media technology and everyday creativity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chamayou, G. (2011). The Manhunt doctrine. Radical Philosophy, 169, 2–6 Chamayou, G. (2015). Drone theory. London: Penguin Books. Hackl, A. (2014, 30 June). Who cares about selfies? It’s the #otherie, stupid!. Transformation-blog.com. http://transformations-blog.com/who-caresabout-selfies-its-the-otherie-stupid/. Accessed 24 September 2015. Holfelder, U., & Ritter, C. (2013). Filmen im Alltag: Handyfilme in der Perspektive einer medienweltlichen Ethnografie. kommunikation@gesellschaft, 14. http:// nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-361878. Accessed 12 September 2014. Jablonowski, M. (2015). Drone it yourself: On the decentring of “Drone Stories”. Culture Machine, 16. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/arti cle/view/589/594. Accessed 27 September 2015. Koskela, H. (2009). Hijacking surveillance: The new moral landscape of Amateur photography. In K. F. Aas, H. O. Gundhus, & H. M. Lomell (Eds.), Technologies of InSecurity. Milton Part: Routledge. Löfgren, O. (2000). The cult of creativity. In Institute of European ethnology at the University of Vienna (Ed.), Volkskultur und Moderne: Europäische Ethnologie zur Jahrtausendwende. Vienna: Institute of European Ethnology. McNeil, J., & Burrington, I. (2014). Droneism. Dissent, 61, 57–60 Mutter, S. (2015, 17 March). The doublespeak of drones. Opendemocracy. net. https://www.opendemocracy.net/sam-mutter/doublespeak-ofdrones. Accessed 27 September 2015. Online, Z. (2014, 18 June.). Dronies sind die neuen Selfies. Die Zeit. http:// www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2014-06/dronies-die-neuen-selfies. Accessed 13 August 2015. Reckwitz, A. (2014). Creativity as dispositif. In H. Knoblauch, M. Jacobs, & R. Tuma (Eds.), Culture, communication, and creativity: Reframing the relations of media, knowledge and innovation in society. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Robinson, J. (2013). Concealing the crude: Airmindedness and the Camouflaging of Britain’s oil installations, 1936-9. In P. Adey, M. Whitehead, J. Alison, & A. J. Williams (Eds.), From above. War, violence, and verticality. Hurst: London. Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles: Spheres Volume. I: Microspherology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Tagesschau (2015, 20 April). Nach dem Selfie kommt das Dronie. Tagesschau.de. https://www.tagesschau.de/schlusslicht/dronies-101. html. Accessed 21 September 2015. Weizman, E. (2002, 24 April). The politics of verticality. Opendemocracy.net. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801. jsp. Accessed 21 September 2015. negar@duke.edu 106 M. JABLONOWSKI Maximilian Jablonowski is a teaching assistant and PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently conducting ethnographic research for his PhD project Drone Stories: Meanings and Practices of Civil Drone Uses. His fields of research are Anthropology of Technology/Science & Technology Studies and Visual Anthropology. negar@duke.edu CONVERSATION III Selfies and the Politics of In/visibility negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 12 Selfies, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’ Digital Citizen Mark Nunes Abstract The placemaking selfie documents a complex relationship between embodied social context and networked social media presence. The complexity of these placemaking selfies is particularly apparent in the ‘out-of-place’ selfie, taken at a location considered too austere for what is often cast as a frivolous act. Rather than moving to quickly condemn these out-of-place selfies, this chapter explores how we might read such gestures as attempts to negotiate two overlapping frames – one embodied and physically situated, and the other circulating within an affective imagined community. This act of ‘self-witnessing’ serves as a form of parasocial civic engagement that attempts to communicate one’s own place within interpenetrating social spaces, no matter how gawking or disengaged they may appear at first analysis. Keywords Placemaking
Self-witnessing
Platform vernacular
Affective networks
Parasocial civic engagement To start with the obvious: every selfie must take place somewhere. While the lens may focus on the face, quite often selfies will, in effect, foreground M. Nunes (*) Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, USA e-mail: nunesm@appstate.edu © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_12 negar@duke.edu 109 110 M. NUNES the background, performing what Losh (2014) has called a placemaking function that locates its subject within a specific physical and social context. This placemaking function plays well with the affordances of the alwayspresent, always-networked mobile device, offering a set of everyday photographic practices enacted at the intersection of embodied presence in physical space and digital identity in circulation (Gibbs et al. 2015: 258). By placing oneself within this recording of place, the selfie also documents its own documentary moment, situating its subject in two simultaneous contexts – as an embodied presence, posed before the lens, and as a digital image, distributed across social networks. As a result, the placemaking selfie does more than broadcast (or narrowcast) one’s location to the world; rather, it asserts an identity that borrows from the social and cultural encoding of a place as part of an evolving performance of a networked ‘spatial self’, while simultaneously foregrounding one’s own understanding of that space through the documentary act of framing oneself within that particular location (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014: 1647–1649). The placemaking selfie responds to the ‘power of place’ (Hayden 1997); in doing so, it both performs and documents the subject’s affective experience of place. It should be no surprise, then, when we encounter critiques of selfies taken in contexts where that power of place is most austere, and in seeming contradiction to the mainstream encoding of selfies as a lighthearted affair. But as Deblinger notes, while mass media and social media commenters alike are quick to condemn selfies at Holocaust sites, for example, as ‘frivolous and self-indulgent’ acts, such attempts to document one’s presence at a memorial site, while seemingly out of place, might also suggest an attempt to ‘wrestle with this history while we continue to live our lives’ (2014: n.p.). So when we encounter San Antonio Spurs player Danny Green’s selfie at the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe, accompanied by commentary that many found patently offensive (‘You know I had to do it one time lol #Holocaust’), the question we might ask is: What was the imperative of place to which Green had to respond, and why respond through a selfie (Deblinger 2014; Moses 2014)? As Mullins (2014) notes, selfies at Auschwitz are in many ways no different from other versions of tourist photography at Holocaust landmarks. What perhaps makes these selfies worthy of commentary beyond a quick condemnation is not that they duplicate the tourist’s attempt to capture the horrors of the Holocaust through iconic images of the camp, but rather that they attempt to articulate in photographic form one’s own embodied experience of the power of place (Mullins 2014). The challenge, negar@duke.edu 12 SELFIES, SELF-WITNESSING AND THE ‘OUT-OF-PLACE’ DIGITAL CITIZEN 111 then, is to think through these documentary acts of emplacement, even if they express themselves through apparently out-of-place smiles, poses and hashtagged comments. By documenting its own documentary moment, the selfie forces us to confront, comment on and critique the recorded disjunction between the power of place and the subject’s attempts at emplacement. But as Brook (2009) notes in his comments on Roger Cremers’s photographs of tourists taking photographs at Auschwitz, these images of the seemingly out-of-place tourist offer something more than a cynical commentary on the banality of the photographic impulse; rather, these images capture individuals absorbed in ‘creating their own visual memories of the site’ in an attempt to document their own affective experience of place (Brook 2009: n.p.). The mass media critique of the out-of-place selfie presents a version of that older tension in documentary photography between ‘aestheticised’ and ‘authentic’ images of suffering, struggle and social conflict. But as Strauss (2003: 108) notes, ‘aestheticisation is one of the ways that disparate peoples recognise themselves in one another. . . . What [photographs] do most persistently is to register the relation of photographer to subject – the distance from one to the other – and this undertaking is a profoundly important political process.’ The selfie marks a distance between its subject and the place at hand, but also between the subject’s own experience of place and – to borrow from Anderson (1991) – an imagined community of social media onlookers receiving this image. Thus one finds critiques against selfies on pilgrimage to Mecca that focus not on a lack of connection to place, but rather an over-proximity to the power of place (Blumberg 2014; Quraishi 2014). As Rutledge (2014) suggests, placemaking selfies provide a form of parasocial interaction, creating an image that signals both the power of place and the desire to share that experience of place with others. The placemaking selfie, then, serves as a double-register, documenting both the distance between subject and place, as well as the distance between emplaced subject and a networked community. Or to consider another example: while mass media and social media critiques point to #funeral selfies as a failure to show emotional depth, we might likewise see in these acts a kind of negotiation of distance between everyday practices of mediated social engagement and embodied experience – an attempt to perform a parasocial act within a wider affective network (Meese et al. 2015). The #funeral selfie, then, would serve to document an affective experience of place not for oneself, but for an imagined networked community – and would do so within the negar@duke.edu 112 M. NUNES multivalent registers that support and sustain circulation within these social networks. Gibbs et al. (2015: 257), for example, take up the #funeral hashtag on Instagram through the lens of what they term the ‘platform vernacular’ of the photo-sharing app – the ‘unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics. . . . which emerge from the ongoing interactions between platforms and users’ (see also: Meese et al. 2015). They note that the mobility assumed by the material practices accompanying social media applications such as Instagram – in other words, that photos are uploaded through mobile devices, coupled with the multiple registers of hashtagging – creates ‘performative assemblages’ that are simultaneously embodied and mediated experiences (Gibbs et al. 2015: 258). In the context of #funeral selfies, then, one might ask, as Gibbs et al. (2015: 261) do, not how such ‘out-of-place’ pictures could circulate, but rather how is it that the ‘formal, sacred, and institutionalised rituals commingle with the individualised profane, subjective, and sometimes improvised events in the platform vernacular’ for the digital citizen. What we see at work in the placemaking selfie is an orientation towards both embodied experience within a place-specific event and a mediated experience of networked co-presence. The selfie, so easily critiqued as a sign of self-absorbed disengagement, may well serve, in multiple registers, as an engaged articulation of one’s place within an increasingly complex networked social space. In documenting its own documentary moment, the placemaking selfie can also function as a form of ‘mobile witnessing . . . journalism with a POV combining self-presentation and the presentation of visual proof of a witnessed event’ (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1675). Drawing upon Goffman (1959), Koliska and Roberts (2015: 1676) suggest that selfies ‘create context-bound identities that simultaneously visually verify the existence of this presented identity in relation to a specific time and space’. This ‘sign of proof’ inscribes both event and self in a relationship that is simultaneously highly personal, yet at the same time meant for circulation (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1676). What’s more, the ‘tension between the “event” that is witnessed and the “self” that is represented’ in all its contradictory encodings need not undermine the selfie’s role as journalistic witnessing and may, in fact, help constitute journalistic point of view (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1677). For example, Koliska and Roberts analyse an image that we might well categorise as an ‘out-of-place’ selfie: that of a smiling woman in sunglasses, posing for a selfie in front of a soldier and jeep in the midst of the 2014 Thai military takeover. While mass media and social media alike have used this and negar@duke.edu 12 SELFIES, SELF-WITNESSING AND THE ‘OUT-OF-PLACE’ DIGITAL CITIZEN 113 similar images from the Thai military takeover as examples of misplaced selfies, from their analysis, this image is both an ‘act of witnessing’ and a ‘public performance indicating point of view’ that operates on multiple registers to emplace the subject on the scene and at the same time circulate that documented moment to a wider, imagined community (Koliska and Roberts 2015: 1678). Given this double-register, we might think of this act of ‘witnessing’ as performed simultaneously for oneself as well as others – in other words, an act of ‘self-witnessing’ that blurs the line between the banal act of tourist photography and civic or social action. While less clearly the sort of ‘rights claim’ that Isin and Ruppert (2015) associate with witnessing, these ambiguously coded documentary acts serve as a form of parasocial civic engagement that attempts to communicate one’s own place within interpenetrating social spaces. Isin and Ruppert (2015: 131) discuss ‘openings’ as ‘moments and spaces when and where thinking, speaking, and acting differently become possible by resisting and resignifying conventions’. They discuss social media ‘witnessing’ as both submissive and subversive acts – submissive to the extent that they enact existing codes or conventions, but subversive as well to the extent that the subject has the capacity to judge how these conventions are deployed (Isin and Ruppert 2015: 133–139). Given the performative aspects of these ‘digital acts’, we might then want to examine the apparently out-of-place selfie in a different light, and with an eye toward ‘the felicity or infelicity of such acts, whether speaking subjects have understood adequately the appropriateness of the situation in which they have spoken, and whether there were misfires’ (Isin and Ruppert 2015: 65). The conflict in registers is less apparent when the felicity conditions of the selfie-as-self-witness are met – for example, in another image analysed by Koliska and Roberts (2015): slain journalist Molhem Barakat, reflected in a mirror, with the wreckage of a bombed-out Syrian street in the background. Koliska and Roberts (2015: 1680) argue that Barakat’s selfie announces that ‘he is not simply witnessing the events transparently, acting as a lens for the viewer to see the war, but rather staking a claim to his own importance and presence there as the witness’. And is it not the legible seriousness of the image that allows this message to communicate so clearly? It becomes less clear, it would seem, the extent to which someone is ‘staking a claim’ when place marks a scene of social and political upheaval, but the smiling selfie would seem to indicate disengagement or a failure to read the performative situation in which this photographer chooses to engage in this digital act. The selfie-as-self-witness becomes a complicated matter to the extent that negar@duke.edu 114 M. NUNES the platform vernacular blurs the line between parasocial interaction and the conventions of reportage. While the photograph might always mark the distance between photographer and subject, as Strauss (2003) notes, the selfie documents that distance in a profoundly foregrounded manner, marking the individual as both photographer and subject, and marking one’s relationship to the location and events captured as both recorder of events and subject within the event. That marking of distance, perhaps more than anything else, is apparent in both the ‘authentic’ witnessing of the Barakat selfie and the ‘disengaged’ tourist selfie posed before a military vehicle. In the context of citizenry, however, we might pause to acknowledge that in both instances we see a register at work in which an individual is, through this moment of encoding of self within a social and political context, likewise encoding an engagement with these events. And of course let us remember that the selfie does not ‘intrude’ on these social spaces, but is rather very much caught up in the same practices that make possible the ‘networks of outrage and hope’ that mark political action in an age of social media (Castells 2012). If we understand social space, following Lefebvre (1991), as a product of material, conceptual and experiential forces, and if we are to maintain that multiple, interpenetrating social spaces are possible, then we must acknowledge in the placemaking selfie a set of new media practices that run a full spectrum of what it means to place oneself within the scene of digital citizenship. Tourist selfies at OccupyHK, then, are by no means ‘out of place’, no matter how gawking or disengaged they may appear at first analysis (Hong 2014; Wei 2015). They are likewise positioning themselves within this scene, mediating a sense of what it means to be a part of this moment in history, if not an active participant in the protest itself. One gains a kind of political agency not by making an overt rights claim, then, but by situating oneself, in a highly personal way – situating one’s selfie – as a node of circulation within a movement that expresses itself equally through actions and imagery. Part of the hesitation to think through these acts as articulations of digital citizenship comes from our hesitancy to think ‘citizen’ in that broader context. As Couldry et al. (2014: 616) note, extending Dahlgren’s (2009) concept of ‘civic culture’, digital citizenship may map itself through practices that are fundamentally about a ‘circuit’ for ‘enabling and deepening mutual recognition’. While critiques of ‘out-ofplace’ selfies are common, consider the circuit opened by – and the positive media response to – the 2014 Turkish protest selfies, in which negar@duke.edu 12 SELFIES, SELF-WITNESSING AND THE ‘OUT-OF-PLACE’ DIGITAL CITIZEN 115 it is precisely the discontinuity of context that marks a moment of political and civic engagement. With the military present in the background, it is the riot shields and body armour that seem ‘out of place’, not the jovial, highly recognisable coding of the selfie pose. And let us remember that it is precisely this disjunction of contexts that marks a moment of civic conflict – that military force and tourists occupy the same, interpenetrating social spaces, and that in many ways marking these spaces in conflict is very much an act of digital citizenship. As one commentator noted in the English-language Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman (2014): The message of today’s selfies is multifaceted. In one sense: Protesters are ordinary people, just like you and me, facing extraordinary action by the police. In another: Protesters are determined to maintain their spirit and goodwill in the face of violent police action. In yet another: While police are old-school agents of the repressive state, protesters are young, hip and interconnected to viral cultural phenomena. (‘Selfie’ spoof points mocking lens at Turkish police 2014) In this light, then, the emplacement denoted by these self-witnessing selfies produces a social space that is both located in a specific, experienced moment, but at the same time networks this moment within a larger context of circulating images. For the tourist visiting OccupyHK, this moment is something more than a snapshot at a landmark; rather, it documents the subject’s own place within a particular historical moment, and the subject’s own attempt to perform a parasocial relation between a site of social conflict and a wider social network. In a similar fashion, the disjunction of images in the Turkish protest meme suggests a complex relation to social space, one that does not reduce merely to an earnest staging of ‘outrage and hope’, but is likewise expressed in a language entirely native to the discursive framework of the selfie and its platform vernacular. In each instance, the selfie marks a moment of complex negotiation, even in its most banal form. In part, what we witness in the selfie, and the critique of its ‘out-of-place’ nature, is an apparent conflict between the platform vernacular of networked photo sharing and the inscribed set of social behaviours deemed appropriate for a particular context. But we can at the same time read these approximations at emplacement as attempts to create a proximal relationship between the network and the embodied negar@duke.edu 116 M. NUNES context of the photographic subject. To take the tourist shot in the midst of political upheaval is not to degrade or debase the struggle and rights claims of activists, but rather to acknowledge the interpenetrating spaces that operate as a context for citizenship in the digital age. REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities. New York: Verso. Blumberg, A. (2014, 1 October). Infamous Hajj selfie is one more thing transforming Mecca, and not everyone is happy about it. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/hajj-selfie_n_5915054. html. Accessed 1 January 2016. Brook, P. (2009, 13 February). Roger Cremers: Auschwitz tourist photography. Prison Photography. http://prisonphotography.org/2009/02/13/roger-cre mers-auschwitz-tourist-photography/. Accessed 1 January 2016. Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet age. Malden, MA: Polity. Couldry, N., Stephansen, H., Fotopoulou, A., MacDonald, R., Clark, W., & Dickens, L. (2014). Digital citizenship? Narrative exchange and the changing terms of civic culture. Citizenship Studies, 18(6–7), 615–629. Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and political engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deblinger, R. (2014, 9 October). Selfies, memory sites, & ‘appropriate’ forms of commemoration. MemoriesMotifs. http://memoriesmotifs.tumblr.com/post/ 99572572274/selfies-memory-sites-appropriate-forms-of. Accessed 1 January 2016. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015). #Funeral and Instagram: Death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 255–268. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Hayden, D. (1997). The power of place: Urban landscapes as public history. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hong, B. (2014, 23 October). Chinese tourists are taking Hong Kong protest selfies. The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/23/chinesetourists-are-taking-hong-kong-protest-selfies.html. Accessed 1 January 2016. Isin, E., & Ruppert, E. (2015). Being digital citizens. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Koliska, M., & Roberts, J. (2015). Selfies: Witnessing and participatory journalism with a point of view. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1672–1685. negar@duke.edu 12 SELFIES, SELF-WITNESSING AND THE ‘OUT-OF-PLACE’ DIGITAL CITIZEN 117 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Losh, L. (2014). Beyond biometrics: Feminist media theory looks at selfiecity. Selfiecity. http://d25rsf93iwlmgu.cloudfront.net/downloads/Liz_Losh_ BeyondBiometrics.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2016. Meese, J., Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2015). Selfies at funerals: Mourning and presencing on social media platforms. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1818–1831. Moses, T. (2014, 8 October). San Antonio Spurs Danny Green provokes outrage with ‘Holocaust selfie.’ The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/ sport/2014/oct/08/san-antonio-spurs-danny-green-holocaust-selfie. Accessed 1 January 2016. Mullins, P. (2014, 30 June). Imagining heritage: Selfies and visual placemaking at historic sites. Archaeology and Material Culture. https://paulmullins.word press.com/2014/06/30/imagining-heritage-selfies-and-visual-placemakingat-historic-sites/. Accessed 1 January 2016. Quraishi, A. (2014, 30 September). Say no to Haj selfie!. Arab News. http://www. arabnews.com/islam-perspective/news/637771. Accessed 1 January 2016. Rutledge, P. (2014, 14 July). The psychology of the selfie. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201407/the-psy chology-the-selfie. Accessed 1 January 2016. Schwartz, R., & Halegoua, G. (2014). The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media. New Media and Society, 17(10), 1643–1660. ‘Selfie’ spoof points mocking lens at Turkish police (2014, 14 March). Today’s Zaman. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-342111-selfie-spoof-pointsmocking-lens-at-turkish-police.html. Accessed 1 January 2016. Strauss, D. L. (2003). The documentary debate: Aesthetic or anesthetic?. In D. L. Strauss & J. Berger (Eds.), Between the eyes: Essays on photography and politics. New York: Aperture. Wei, H. (2015, 30 August). #Me, #I, #selfie: The seduction of protest selfies. Open!. http://www.onlineopen.org/download.php?id=478. Accessed 1 January 2016. Mark Nunes is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair for the Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (Minnesota UP, 2006) and editor of Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2010). negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 13 Visual Afterlife: Posthumous Camera Phone Practices Larissa Hjorth and Jung Moon Abstract At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the social, camera phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital media. This phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer for changing relationships between media, memory and death. This relationship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the South Korean MV Sewol boat disaster on 16 April 2014 (known as ‘Sewol disaster’) whereby selfies operated as self-designated eulogies for the 246 high-school children who were tragically killed. Through this tragic disaster, this chapter recalibrates the role of selfies as lenses into understanding affect as a texture with both deep emotional and political rhythms. Keywords Camera phone
Disaster
Grief
Memorialisation
Posthumous practices
South Korea L. Hjorth (*) School of Media & Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au J. Moon Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: happymissmoon@gmail.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_13 negar@duke.edu 119 120 L. HJORTH AND J. MOON PICTURE THIS: THE EFFECT OF CAMERA PHONE AGENCY Camera phone practices are entangled within the rhythms of everyday life in a variety of ways. They entangle play, work, politics and affect. Magnifying the intimate nature of mobile media, camera phone practices also play a key role in changing the way memory and image is experienced and shared. While camera phone images are shaped by the affordance of mobile technologies, they also play into broader photographic tropes and genres (Palmer 2012; Zylinska 2015; Frohlich et al. 2002; Kindberg et al. 2005; Whittaker et al. 2010; Van Dijck 2007). At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the social, camera phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital media. This phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer for changing relationships between media, memory and death (Senft and Baym 2015; Rettberg 2014). As Graham et al. argue, new media are affording emergent modes for life to be ‘extended, prolonged, and ultimately transformed through the new circulations, repetitions, and recontextualisations on the Internet and other platforms’ (2013: 133). Digital data allow new ways in which to construct one’s life, death and afterlife (Stanyek and Piekut 2010; De Vries and Rutherford 2004; Veale 2003; Bollmer 2013; Bennett and Bennett 2000; Jones 2004). This is especially the case with mobile media as a witness, repository, disseminator and magnifier of events. Within this process, new types of genres such as ‘selfies at funeral’ signal emergent relations between intimacy, mobile media, etiquette and affect (Meese et al. 2015; Gibbs et al. 2015a, 2015b). This relationship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the South Korean MV Sewol boat disaster on 16 April 2014 (known as ‘Sewol disaster’) whereby selfies operated as self-designated eulogies for the 246 high-school children who were tragically killed (Lim 2014). These selfies illustrated a new type of what Roland Barthes would call punctum (1981) – that is, the emotional affect of these images on spectators. Here we witness a ‘mobile punctum’, whereby immediacy, ubiquity and intimacy are entangled within the ‘sticky’ aesthetics and texture (Ahmed 2005) of the affect. MEMORIALISED, INTIMATE PUBLICS: A CASE STUDY PHONES DURING A DISASTER OF CAMERA As soon as the ferry capsized on 16 April 2014, hundreds of mobile phones were on hand capturing the sheer terror of the events unfolding. After the ship sunk – killing over 300 passengers (246 school children) by negar@duke.edu 13 VISUAL AFTERLIFE: POSTHUMOUS CAMERA PHONE PRACTICES 121 either drowning or hyperthermia – it was the mobile media footage that friends and family cradled in their disbelief as the traumatic reality unfolded. YouTube began to fill with hundreds of user-created content videos, consolidating public grief, anger and outcry. Most traumatic were the mobile media fragments of children leaving messages to their parents declaring their love in the face of death. Through these highly distressing IM and video messages, a process of shock, trauma, memorialisation and grief had begun. In many cases, the now deceased used camera phone images do not only expose the chaos of the situation but do also provide a co-presence and continuing bond between themselves and their loved ones. Many used their mobile phones to film a tribute to their loved ones, while others filmed the disaster in a narrative that suggested they would survive. While a few of these stories were documented and disseminated in global press by being translated from Hangul into English, dozens of stories of mobile media memorialisation processes remained untranslated and were shared just across vernacular, Korean sites. While much of the literature around bereavement and online memorials focuses upon the loss and experiences of the mourner, the Sewol disaster provided some examples of the role of mobile media – and especially camera phones – in memorialisation by the soon to be deceased. The quotidian and intimate dimension of mobile media undoubtedly impacted processes of grief differently than other media. In the Sewol disaster, many families were receiving messages and videos from their children unaware that these fragments would be the last moments captured of their children’s lives. Here the role of co-presence in mobile media’s ability to traverse the mortal and immortal took new dimensions. The story of tragedy and procedures gone wrong documented by mobile media afforded others to redeploy the material to serve not only as a memorial but also a way in which to learn from the tragedy. The affordances of mobile media both extended older rituals around grieving as an ongoing process (Rosenblatt 1995, 1996, 2000). This phenomenon is highlighted in the YouTube ‘What happened inside . . . ’ example whereby mobile media from the deceased is used not only to continue bonds with them but to also serve justice in the wake of their deaths. The replaying and editing of the mobile footage served to further formalise and legitimate the collective role of grief and the need to acknowledge its unending nature. In the re-editing of the mobile footage, spectres were allowed to live on and memorialisation was allowed to cohabitate various online and offline spaces. negar@duke.edu 122 L. HJORTH AND J. MOON While the remixing of the mobile footage of the deceased afforded different ways in which people could participate in the memorialisation process globally, it also signified a particular type of relational bond specific to Korean culture. Here the concept of Jeong is significant as one of the most ‘endearing and evocative’ words of which there is no English equivalent (Kim 1996). This is not to essentialise experience but rather to understand the specific cultural milieu from which the grief was formed. Jeong, like the notion of han (or haan, a complex feeling that is related to the history of oppression by Japanese and American forces), are often defined as quintessential to the Korean psyche. As Luke Kim notes, ‘Jeong encompasses the meaning of a wide range of English terms: feeling, empathy, affection, closeness, tenderness, pathos, compassion, sentiment, trust, bonding and love . . . Koreans considers jeong an essential element in human life, promoting the depth and richness of personal relations’ (1996: 14). While a similar notion of jeong can be found in Chinese and Japanese culture (i.e. jyo), it has a far less significant and poignant meaning (Kim 1996). The feeling of jeong is palpable in and through the tragic events and memorialisation of the disaster. Jeong binds the various camera phone memorialisation with the loved ones left behind. The mobile footage taken during the disaster still leaves a raw effect in that it captures the pain, confusion and terror of the victims as they face their death. The role of mobile media to capture this liminal stage is a testament to its intimate and ubiquitous role and unquestionably this area of mobile media memorialisation before death will continue to grow and become a key area for analysis in the future. Given the newness of this phenomenon, in this section we will detail some of the events and mobile media fragments captured from the disaster to consider the changing role of mobile media in and through moments of life, death and afterlife. One of the most tragic videos is from the high-school girl Park Ye-seul who filmed the disaster at 9.40 a.m. (the disaster was first reported at 8.40 a.m.). Ye-seul and her friends documented the disaster as it happened through selfie videos. In the videos, we see typical selfie performativity (i.e. peace symbol with fingers by smiling girls) juxtaposed with other passengers crying with terror. Her father recovered the camera phone footage after her death. The video conversation, which can be found on YouTube, consists of a conversation between Ye-seul and her fellow passengers as well as her co-present parents. She talks of how scared she and other passengers are while begging, ‘Please rescue us’. They talk about the negar@duke.edu 13 VISUAL AFTERLIFE: POSTHUMOUS CAMERA PHONE PRACTICES 123 increasing tilt of the boat. Then there is an official announcement, ‘Please double check your life jacket whether it was tighten well or not. Please check and tighten it again.’ Ye-seul says to her videoing phone (as if her parents are inside it), ‘Oh we’re going to diving into the water’, followed by ‘Mum, I am so sorry. Sorry Dad! It’s bullshit!! We will be okay! See you alive’. In the YouTube video, we also see that Ye-seul’s selfies are far from a vehicle for narcissism. They are about a numbness and misrecognition of the event (Wendt 2014). They become part of the process of memorialisation for her family and friends, spectres of jeong and han, while the deceased was still alive. Here we see the power of the mobile phone as one of the most intimate devices to capture the fleeting moments of the deceased before they pass away. For loved ones, mobile media becomes a crucial embodied part of that passage from life to death and afterlife. The role of the mobile phone as continuing bonds between the living and the dead was evidenced in one scenario between a deceased son and his father on Kakao IM. Here the mobile phone became like a portal between earth and heaven. It is not uncommon for mourning relatives and friends to send messages to the deceased in order to continue the bonds as an integral part of the han and jeong processes. CONCLUSION: LOCALISING SELFIE AGENCY More than one year after the Sewol disaster, one can feel the haunting of a country still in mourning for all those young, unlived lives (Mullen 2014; Choi 2014; Kim and Jeon 2014). The mobile media spectres haunt with residual punctum as grief goes through a variety of shades, textures and depths (Segerstad et al. 2014; Amore and Scarciotta 2011). While photography has always had a complicated relationship with power, representation and death (Barthes 1981; Sontag 1977; Deger 2008), the social life of the mobile media is changing the relationship between the memory, image ownership and dissemination. And so what happens to Barthes’s notion of punctum – originally used to discuss analogue photography – in the context of digital and mobile photography? Mobile media photography provides a vehicle for continuing these activities while at the same time it uniquely allows for these activities to extend across temporal and spatial boundaries (Brubaker et al. 2013). Far from narcissist vehicles, selfies are not only used to connect in moments of trauma and grief but also play a key role in mobilising the Korean population into a collective action against, firstly, the boat company and, negar@duke.edu 124 L. HJORTH AND J. MOON secondly, the government. As these Sewol selfies demonstrate, mobile punctum is local as it is palpable in its affective and mobilising power. Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a broader study with Katie Cumiskey exploring the role of mobile media in processes of loss. REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2005). The cultural politics of emotion. London: Routledge. Amore, S. D., & Scarciotta, L. (2011). Los(t)s in transitions: How diverse families Are grieving and struggling to achieve a new identity. Journal of Family Psychotherapy, 22(1), 46–55. Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bennett, G., & Bennett, K. (2000). The presence of the dead: An empirical study. Mortality, 5(2), 139–157. Bollmer, G. (2013). Millions now living will never die: Cultural anxieties about the afterlife of information. The Information Society, 29(3), 142–151. Brubaker, J. R., Hayes, G. R., & Dourish, P. (2013). Beyond the grave: Facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. The Information Society: An International Journal, 29(3), 152–163. Choi, I.-Y. (2014) Breaking news: Funeral parade in honour of the deceased filled the online memorial alter. Yonhap News. http://www.yonhapnews.co. kr/bulletin/2014/04/24/0200000000AKR20140424151500017.HTML. Accessed 25 April 2014. De Vries, B., & Rutherford, J. (2004). Memorializing loved ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5–26. Deger, J. (2008). Imprinting on the heart. Visual Anthropology, 21(4), 292–309. Frohlich, D., Kuchinsky, A., Pering, C., Don, A., & Ariss, S. (2002). Requirements for photoware. In CSCW ’02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, New York: ACM Press. Gibbs, M., Kohn, T., Nansen, B., & Arnold, M. (2015a). (DP140101871). Digital commemoration ARC discovery. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015b). # Funeral and Instagram: Death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society, 18(3), 255–268. Graham, C., Gibbs, M., & Aceti, L. (2013). Introduction to the special issue on the death, afterlife, and immortality of bodies and data. The Information Society, 29(3), 133–141. Jones, S. (2004). 404 not found: The Internet and the afterlife. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 83–88. Kim, L. I.-C. (1996). Korean ethos. The Journal of Korean American Medical Association, 2(1), 13–23. negar@duke.edu 13 VISUAL AFTERLIFE: POSTHUMOUS CAMERA PHONE PRACTICES 125 Kim, S.-H., & Jeon, S.-Y. (2014). Ferry captain sentenced to 36 years in prison. The Chosun Ilbo. http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/11/ 12/2014111201226.html. Accessed 12 November 2014. Kindberg, T., Spasojevic, M., Fleck, R., & Sellen, A. (2005). The ubiquitous camera: An in-depth study of camera phone use. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 4(2), 42–50. Lim, M.-S. (2014). Mum this might be the last chance to tell you, I love you mum. Korea Joong Ang Daily. http://article.joins.com/news/article/article.asp? total_id=14469894. Accessed 17 April 2014. Meese, J., Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2015). Selfies at funeral. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1818–1831. Mullen, J. (2014). Ferry disaster: Yellow ribbons become symbol of hope, solidarity. CNN News. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/24/world/asia/ south-korea-yellow-ribbons/. Accessed 24 April 2014. Palmer, D. (2012). iPhone photography: Mediating visions of social space. In L. Hjorth, J. Burgess, & I. Richardson (Eds.), Studying mobile media: Cultural technologies, mobile communication, and the iPhone. London and New York: Routledge. Rettberg, J. W. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology. London: Palgrave. Rosenblatt, P. C. (1995). Ethics of qualitative interviewing with grieving families. Death Studies, 19(1), 139–155. Rosenblatt, P. C. (1996). Grief does not end. In D. Klass, P. R. Silverman, & S. L. Nickman (Eds.), Continuing bonds. Washington: Taylor & Francis. Rosenblatt, P. C. (2000). Parent grief. Philadelphia: Brunner. Segerstad, Y. H., & Kasperowski, D. (2014). A community for grieving: Affordances of social media for support of bereaved parents. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 21(1–2), 25–41. Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stanyek, J., & Piekut, B. (2010). Deadness technologies of the intermundane. TDR: The Drama Review – A Journal of Performance Studies, 54(1), 14–38. Van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Veale, K. J. (2003). A virtual adaptation of a physical cemetery for diverse researchers using information science methods. Computers in Genealogy, 8(4), 16–38. Wendt, B. (2014). The allure of the selfie. Amsterdam: Institute of Networked Cultures. Whittaker, S., Bergman, O., & Clough, P. (2010). Easy on that trigger dad: A study of long term family photo retrieval. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 14(1), 31–43. Zylinska, J. (Ed.), (2015). Photomediations. London: Open Humanities Press. negar@duke.edu 126 L. HJORTH AND J. MOON Larissa Hjorth is an artist and digital ethnographer who studies the sociocultural dimensions of mobile media and play cultures in the Asia-Pacific. She is a Professor in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Her books include Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific; Games & Gaming; Online@AsiaPacific (with Arnold); Understanding Social Media (with Hinton); Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media (with Richardson); Digital Ethnography (with Pink, Horst, Postill, Lewis and Tacchi) and Screen Ecologies (with Pink, Sharp and Williams). Jung Moon is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne. Her work looks at Korean women called ajammas and their media practice from a feminist perspective. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 14 Like a Stone in Your Stomach: Articulating the Unspeakable in Rape Victim-Survivors’ Activist Selfies Debra Ferreday Abstract This chapter examines Project Unbreakable, a photographic project which posts selfies made by survivors of rape and sexual abuse, to demonstrate how selfie culture operates as a space of embodied resistance. Following Senft and Baym’s view of selfies as relational and constitute practices that involve the mobilisation of affect as a basis of politically engaged community building, it examines the ways in which selfies disrupt dominant narratives of survival as ‘speaking out’, a discourse which privileges some survivors’ experiences as more worthy than others. Selfies, I argue, are moving in that they literally move, circulating virally in a culture that produces victim-survivor experience as both ‘unspeakable’ and ‘spoken for’: this chapter pays attention to the ways in which they both move and mobilise us. Keywords Rape
Survival
Activism
Twitter
Trauma
Recovery narratives Project Unbreakable (http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/) is a photography project that uses the visual imagery of the selfie to make visible survivors’ experiences of rape and sexual abuse. The project uses D. Ferreday (*) Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: d.ferreday@lancaster.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_14 negar@duke.edu 127 128 D. FERREDAY Tumblr to publish survivor selfies: in its 6 years of operation, there have been thousands, submitted by people of all genders. Its stated aim is ‘to give a voice to survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse’. Each submission follows a variation on a by now familiar format associated with selfie activism1: a single, unnamed individual, holding up a placard with handwritten words. The words may be those of the survivor him- or herself, but are more usually quotes, words spoken by the rapist during the assault experienced by the author/subject or by others, including family, friends, teachers and law enforcement, who denied or denigrated the survivor’s account of their experience. The project was founded in 2009 by Grace Brown (who recently stepped down), then a photography student who was deeply moved when a friend confided in her about her own experience of abuse: as Brown describes it, this experience, which led her to meditate on the many, many survivors whose stories would ordinarily remain untold and would instead linger ‘like a stone in your stomach’, was ‘the last straw’2 leading to the project’s inception. I want to think about this image of living with a stone in the stomach as a way of thinking through what it means to inhabit traumatised subjectivity in everyday life, what forms of knowledge might be entailed in stonecarrying and how a recognition of such knowledge might be mobilised to transformative effect. A stone is a burden if carried, but also a potential tool and a powerful, shattering weapon. ON THE AFFECTIVE POLITICS OF BEING MOVED To look at Project Unbreakable is to encounter an emotionally devastating archive of feeling: it is staggering how many carry such a stone. Even in a mediated society steeped in violent imagery, the affective power of such a medium is considerable. To look at Project Unbreakable is emotionally overwhelming, occasioning rage, despair and sadness. Often – always – these images are harrowing. To read the words of rapists alongside the faces of their victims is confronting, even engulfing.3 In fact so great is the project’s concern about the potentially triggering effect of viewing so many visually immediate accounts of sexual assault that updates are posted infrequently, resisting the fast-moving temporality more usually associated with social media: as the site’s FAQ page has it, ‘this project is a sensitive topic, and we don’t want to overwhelm anyone with what is being posted. It’s more important to make sure that everyone following the blog also takes time for themselves’. Sharing practices on the site are shaped by the need for negar@duke.edu 14 LIKE A STONE IN YOUR STOMACH: ARTICULATING THE UNSPEAKABLE . . . 129 sensitivity, for caring forms of communality; comments on individual entries are not allowed: trigger warnings are ubiquitous.4 The aim in keeping examples temporally separate, then, is not simply to reproduce the sensationalistic and individualistic narrative of the heroic survivor associated with mainstream media representations of survivor testimony, but to attempt to balance the need to bear witness to the scale of rape and sexual violence – to reconstitute the atomised and fragmented hidden community of the walking wounded into a collective – with the equally pressing need for each individual to be named, seen and heard in the clamour of a media society that continually silences and erases the experience of those whose trauma excludes them from neo-liberal framings of citizenship. The timing of these posts, then, represents a performance of the need to walk the fine line between galvanising resistance and re-victimising readers by overwhelming them: between productive, empathic rage and disempowering despair. But the survivor selfies are not simply representations of violence: as Senft and Baym remind us, selfies are relational and constitute practices: they initiate ‘the transmission of human feeling in the form of a relationship (between photographer and photographed, between image and filtering software, between viewer and viewed, between individuals circulating images, between users and social software architectures, etc)’. Hence, selfies ‘send . . . different messages to different individuals, communities, and audiences’ (Senft and Baym 2015: 1589). It is this sharing of messages, this transmission of affect, I argue, that allows Project Unbreakable to function as a site of resistance. Selfies are moving in that they literally move, circulating virally in a culture that produces victim-survivor experience as both ‘unspeakable’ and ‘spoken for’: and they both move and mobilise us. ACTS OF CITIZENSHIP As Engin Isin has argued, recent times have seen the emergence of new ways of claiming citizenship, with new media and social networking constituting important sites of struggle and enabling new acts of citizenship (Isin 2009). Central to the activist potential of victim-survivor selfies is this facilitation of action, in a context that positions sexual violence as unspeakable: activist selfies allow for speaking out, but on one’s own terms. This is important because, as Tanya Horeck argues, the figure of the ‘rape victim’ is at once invisible and hyper-visible: rape is imagined as the most private and intimate of crimes, yet media and popular culture are negar@duke.edu 130 D. FERREDAY saturated with images of sexual violence ranging from the eroticised and sensational to ‘issue-based’ representations including soap storylines, middlebrow mainstream cinema and the proliferation of popular survivor narratives in publishing and TV (Horeck 2004). In this context, selfie activism constitutes a way of articulating victim-survivor citizenship that resists the overwhelming cultural imperatives that construct this term as a binary (you are either a victim or a survivor) or as a narrative of linear progress through ‘recovery’ (you start out as a victim, but through personal effort, become a survivor). In this sense, victim-survivor selfies speak to Adi Kuntsman’s reminder that selfie activisms work by mobilising the intimate and personal to political effect (Kuntsman 2015): in capturing the rage, sadness and trauma that may surface in a single moment, they are acts of citizenship in that they refuse the need to become citizen through survivorhood and instead draw attention to the actual experience of the vast body of citizens who are also already victim-survivors. It is the visual nature of selfies, their apparent capturing of a fleeting (if still composed) moment, that potentially opens up a space for resisting dominant narratives of victimhood and survivorhood. Such narratives circulate in culture to overwhelming effect: having been raped, we are told, there is work to be done to ensure that appropriate survivorhood which restores one to – albeit limited – citizenship (the focus, as always, is very much on the person who has been raped rather than on the rapist). To be a victim is to be non-productive according to the values of neo-liberal capitalism, except, we are told, when survivor narratives can themselves be made productive through commodification, for example, in the form of the popular ‘misery memoir’, a form which demands a very particular and proscribed mode of storytelling. To ‘be a victim’ is widely imagined as the ultimate failure of neoliberal subjectivity, articulated through narratives that frame continued suffering as pathological attachment to one’s own trauma, a failure to move on. Survivors are exhorted to move up, move on, attain closure in a linear narrative of courageous self-making that entails ‘rising above’ the intolerable and unspeakable status of victim. In a context where forms of trauma expressed as mental illness are already subject to disenfranchisement, then, the consequence of trauma is to be doubly denied citizenship. While the notion of citizenship invokes ideals of equality, the question of who is defined as a citizen is in practice deeply gendered, raced and classed. The question of who has access to justice, and on what terms, is entangled with the question of citizenship: for example, the legal scholar Joanne Belknap identifies a structuring binary through which the legal negar@duke.edu 14 LIKE A STONE IN YOUR STOMACH: ARTICULATING THE UNSPEAKABLE . . . 131 system separates offenders and victims into those who are marginal or deviant, and others conversely who embody a ‘citizen lifestyle’, living within mainstream society and conforming to social norms of heterosexual propriety, and hence have access to justice (Belknap 2014: 140). Yet this positioning of some subjects as citizens, she cautions, is complex, occurring as it does in a context where even privileged women are continually excluded from full citizenship (545). In cases of gender-based violence, the ability to maintain a citizen lifestyle defines the possibility of literal survival: ‘financial security, self-esteem, citizenship, social support . . . and other official support limit survivors’ capacity to . . . survive’ (Belknap 2014: 419). The experience of sexual violence is deeply entangled with questions of social exclusion, inequality and citizenship: but also, to speak out about sexual violence is to lose citizenship, to become a non-subject whose testimony is regarded as inherently suspect. Rape and abuse are unspeakable, firstly in that the marginal and disenfranchised are disproportionately unable to speak out in the first place: and secondly in that when their stories are told, their status as testimony is immediately called into question. This is not to say that the very notion of ‘speaking out’ is not implicated in relations of inequality. As Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have argued, the dominant strategy employed by survivors’ movements has been to encourage ‘breaking the silence’ in both public and private contexts. This project is almost universally articulated in terms of speech: as they note, ‘survivor demonstrations are referred to as “Speak Outs,” the name of the largest national network of survivors of childhood sexual abuse is VOICES, and the metaphor figures prominently in book titles’ (Alcoff and Gray 1993). This notion of ‘speaking out’ has gained traction, they note, in the mainstream media, with figures such as Oprah Winfrey featuring survivors discussing their experience with psychiatric ‘experts’. This speech can result in genuinely transgressive moments of solidarity that effect social change: but it is also always subject to a framing that produces a hierarchy between survivor and expert, with testimony always subject to potential recuperation as sensationalised media commodity. These representations as rape, they argue, involve a particular performance of emotion in which the survivor must appear upset, but not too upset, and especially not too angry (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 284). Further, the framing of rape through mediated forms of speech, like the helplines that have become a regular feature of rape storylines in soap opera and TV drama (‘if you have been affected by the issues in this programme, please call . . . ’), produces it as a rare ‘issue’ that affects a small negar@duke.edu 132 D. FERREDAY number of individual subjects such that the real scale of rape as a social phenomenon – indeed as one of the defining social phenomena of heteropatriarchal capitalist societies – is obscured. Paradoxically, we are told that the survivor must affirm her status as not-victim through privileged speech to a trained expert, even as the sheer prevalence of rape together with the ongoing erosion of mental health services through neo-liberal forms of governance makes this impossible. This reproduces the status of rape, and the rape victim, as absent referent in public discourse: s/he is, as Horeck describes, everywhere and nowhere (Horeck 2004). At the same time, questions of citizenship work to determine whose trauma can be recognised as such. As Jin Haritaworn points out, women of colour are discursively regarded as ‘non-rapeable’ (Haritaworn 2013: 70), and the same is true in various contexts of queer, trans and disabled people, people with mental illnesses, and sex workers as well as those simply regarded as engaging in ‘deviant’ behaviour, a fluid category that encompasses everything from non-monogamy to being drunk. Poverty is central in determining who is most likely to experience sexual violence: this is starkly demonstrated by the ‘£100 test’ cited by Walby and Allen, in which the ability to find this sum of money at short notice was found to map onto levels of risk, for both men and women. ‘Among women’, they state, ‘rates of sexual assault were twice as high among those who would find it impossible to find £100 compared with those for whom it was no problem’ (Walby and Allen 2004: 77). In the UK alone, we are currently seeing wave after wave of testimony from survivors of childhood sexual abuse whose attackers escaped detection for many years through their membership of business, media and government elites, and whose own status as queer, poor or disabled children often led to their testimonies being ignored or disbelieved. CONCLUSION: VICTIM-SURVIVOR SELFIES NETWORKED REFLECTIVE SOLIDARITY AND In the face of such overwhelmingly shaming and silencing public discourse around sexual violence, what spaces of resistance might be found? Following Senft I would suggest that selfie practices constitute precisely such a space (Senft 2008). The practices through which victim-survivor selfies are shared, consumed and circulated, I would argue, a potential articulation of ‘networked reflective solidarity’: making connections negar@duke.edu 14 LIKE A STONE IN YOUR STOMACH: ARTICULATING THE UNSPEAKABLE . . . 133 between those whose shared experience of trauma is privatised, individualised and made unspeakable. To have a ‘stone in one’s stomach’, to inhabit traumatised subjectivity in daily life is, here, transformed into the basis of collective action and mutual support. This is not to claim some utopian power for selfie activism: although it has formed an important element in a global move towards consciousness raising, it is yet to be seen what, if any, material social change will result: and, as Baym and Senft have suggested, ‘every campaign for solidarity, from the most urgent to the most banal, contains explicit and implicit claims regarding whose suffering and heroism matters, and whose does not’ (Baym and Senft 2015). Feminist scholarship has long shown that those who do have access to public platforms, especially those identifying as feminist, are subject to rape threats and other forms of hate speech aimed at policing and limiting our participation in public debate (Jane 2014a, 2014b). The digital, while it constitutes a potentially powerful space of organisation, testimony and support, has engendered new platforms for re-victimisation and silencing (Alfcoff 2015). Nevertheless, these acts of sharing operate to create spaces of support on the terms of survivors themselves. The proliferation of victimsurvivor selfies works together to insist on the way in which trauma is experienced as intimate and personal, as something that one carries around, but also to the collective and communal possibilities afforded by activism. They constitute both a way of speaking back to the multiple denials of citizenship through which rape culture is both reproduced and continually made invisible, and a graphic performance of the impossibility of speech. Functioning both as speech and not-speech, the selfie operates on multiple levels to articulate what is both literally and figuratively unspeakable in culture. As Alcoff and Gray conclude: Women’s righteous anger on our own behalf is a success won through political and theoretical struggle. The difficulty we are made to have in experiencing anger on our own behalf is indicative of the threat it poses for patriarchal society. In what ways can we express this anger and unleash its disruptive potential while minimising the adverse effect on our safety and wellbeing? (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 286) The survivor selfies of Project Unbreakable represent precisely such an unleashing of the disruptive potential of survivors’ rage. As recent demonstrations against capitalism have powerfully demonstrated, a stone represents a powerfully disruptive weapon: but to throw stones is to risk negar@duke.edu 134 D. FERREDAY immediate and disproportionate punishment by the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state. It is dangerous to throw one’s stone: even to display it as an object that might be thrown. The viral and proliferating nature of selfie culture potentially creates, then, a sense of community, of safety in numbers, which makes it possible for survivors to waive the anonymity (and hence the isolation) that is the sole protection afforded them by the neo-liberal state. Through speaking out the stone is potentially no longer carried heavily in the stomach but is hurled, shattering the silence that surrounds what is imagined as the most private and shameful of crimes. As is a political gesture, survivor selfies insist on placing accountability back where it belongs: not simply with the rapist as toxic individual, but with a wider rape culture. After all, the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these images is that the numbers of stonecarriers are not confined to a small group of unfortunates, but are limitless, stretching back into a long history of undocumented suffering. And yet we can think of stones as more than a weapon. En masse, stones can be used to build, they can form a cairn to guide the lost: piled on a grave, they are a sign of grief, of mourning. And then there is the form of the selfies themselves: in these images as in all selfies, the face is a marker of presence, but the written sign is held at a distance from the face, performing a literal distance between the person and the experience: it is thus a refusal to be defined by the experience of violation, even as it insists on the realness of that experience. The survivor’s face is displayed alongside their written words, positioning them as a subject located in language, as one who writes and through writing takes back their own experience. What is more, by reproducing the words of rapists, they make visible that sexual violence is itself inextricably entangled with normative social discourses around violence, gender and sexuality: we start to see patterns, scripts emerging (e.g. in which male victims are told to be ‘good little girls’) that shatter the illusion of sexual violence as somehow separate from the normal, the natural and the everyday. Finally though, although the words it bears are shocking and violent, the sheet of paper itself suggests hope: in the child’s game of rock paper scissors, paper beats rock, not through superior strength or violence, but through the protective and caring gesture of wrapping. The stone of trauma might be thrown, but is never quite thrown away: and yet to belong to a community of stone-bearers might feel qualitatively different than the miserable experience of carrying this burden alone. Above all it involves a refusal of shame. negar@duke.edu 14 LIKE A STONE IN YOUR STOMACH: ARTICULATING THE UNSPEAKABLE . . . 135 In rearticulating the figure of the victim-survivor as activist citizen – by confronting our culture with what it has done, and continues to do, through its yoking together of sex and violence, and especially by refusing its limited and atomising modes of reparation for harm done – selfie activism provides a potential space to refuse dominant ideals of ‘speaking out’, and to mobilise what have been framed as troublesome, pathological forms of emotional experience to politically disruptive effect. NOTES 1. Its model of selfie activism has been widely adapted by other survivor projects, and more widely as a mode of ‘hashtag activism’ on platforms including Twitter and Tumblr to speak about experiences of racism, homophobia and transphobia. 2. http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/meet-grace-brown-unbreak able-photograph. 3. Although the content of specific articles will be explored in a future article, I have made a deliberate decision, here, not to cite specific images or texts: since the focus of the project is on the face of the survivor, it feels politically urgent and necessary to foreground survivor experience. This is not, however, to deny the importance of accountability in holding rapists, and rape culture more generally, responsible for the acts of violence the selfies recall. 4. The use of trigger warnings has been controversial in recent feminist theory: nevertheless, I would argue that the trigger warning as genre should be understood as a practice for thinking through forms of practical caring, not primarily or only as a technology of constraint (Ferreday, forthcoming). REFERENCES Alcoff, L. (2015, 17 September). Rape and the question of experience. Public Lecture Given at Australian Catholic University. Alcoff, L., & Gray, L. (1993). Survivor discourse: transgression or recuperation?. Signs, 18 (2), 260–290. Belknap, J. (2014). The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice. Belmont, Canada: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Ferreday, D. (forthcoming). Becoming unbreakable: The affective politics of digital anti-rape activism as a space of radical hope. In R. Andreassen, H. Harrison, M. N. Petersen, & T. Raun (Eds.), New media – New intimacies: Connectivities, relationalities, proximities. London: Routledge. Haritaworn, J. (2013). Beyond ‘Hate’: Queer metonymies of crime, pathology and anti/violence. Jindal Global Law Review, 4(2), 44–78. negar@duke.edu 136 D. FERREDAY Horeck, T. (2004). Public rape. London and New York: Routledge. Isin, E. (2009). Citizenship in Flux: The figure of the activist citizen. Subjectivity, 29, 367–388. Jane, E. (2014a). ‘Your A ugly, whorish slut’: Understanding e-bile. Feminist Media Studies, 14(4), 531–546. Jane, E. (2014b). ‘Back to the Kitchen, Cunt!’ Speaking the unspeakable about online misogyny. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28(4), 558–570. Kuntsman, A. (2015). Acts of selfie citizenship. Paper given at Selfie Citizenship: The Political Uses of Personal Social Media Photography, Manchester Metropolitan University, 16 April. Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang. Senft, T., & Baym, N. (2015). What does the selfie Say? Investigating a global phenomenon. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606. Walby, S., & Allen, J. (2004). Domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking: Findings from the British Crime Survey. London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate. Debra Ferreday is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Her research centres on the affective cultural politics of digital and screen media, with a particular interest in questions of gender, sexuality and embodiment. Her current project, ‘Screening Rape’, explores the complex relationship between media, mediation and sexual violence across a diverse range of platforms including film, television, Internet and social media. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 15 Selfless Selfie Citizenship: Chupacabras Selfie Project Silvia Rodriguez Vega As undocumented immigrants, we have been portrayed as monsters sucking the blood out of American society. To them, we are not humans, we are the Chupacabras. – Chupacabras: The Myth of the Bad Immigrant, film by author Abstract This chapter sheds light on the experiences of immigrants criminalised by the immigration system in the USA. As the media perpetuates a discourse of immigrants as dangerous and threatening to a sanitised American way of life, the aim of this chapter is to focus on the often forgotten stories of people left out of the immigrant right’s agenda and often the main targets of punitive legal measures. At the centre of the chapter is ARTivism – activism through art. Inspired by the author’s film, Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant, undocumented immigrants in California were encouraged to take selfies with a chupacabras mask and stand up to dehumanisation and criminalisation of immigrants, by taking ‘selfless selfies’ and using the hashtags #NotYourChupacabras and #YourChupacabras. S. Rodriguez Vega (*) César E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: silvia.rodriguez.vega@ucla.edu © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_15 negar@duke.edu 137 138 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA Keywords Undocumented immigrants
Selfless selfie citizenship
Digital ARTivism
Respectability politics
#NotYourChupacabras
#YourChupacabras INTRODUCTION We generally think of selfies as narcissistic and apolitical photographs that individuals post for ‘likes’ to their social media accounts, but in Los Angeles, CA, undocumented immigrants are reappropriating the selfie genre as a form of civic engagement. ‘The Chupacabras Selfie Project’, discussed in this chapter, is about selfies without the self. Inspired by the Zapatistas, this ‘artivist’ project – a form of activism through art – reappropriates both a violent symbol and a self-centred genre that is part of the social media gestalt for collective representation and voice through the self-less selfies. On the 6th of June 2015, following a screening of my short film Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant,1 attendees had the opportunity to don an animal mask – the chupacabra – as a political statement. The film was about the lives of five undocumented immigrants in the USA and their perceptions of who is a ‘bad’ immigrant, as seen through the metaphor of the mythical chupacabras – the dangerous mythical reptile-like creature known to prey on livestock and people around the US-Mexico borderlands during the 1990s. When juxtaposed to media narratives on immigration, the similarities are uncanny. Narratives, which include quiet neighbourhoods, where unknown and dangerous creatures are lurking. This rhetoric perpetuates the fears of dangerous creatures coming from south of the border to cause harm. By taking selfies in connection with the film, attendees were asserting their humanity. Our message is simple: #NotYourChupacabras, or to satirise xenophobia, #YourChupacabras (Fig. 15.1). This chapter highlights how in the spirit of Zapatismo and Guerrilla Girls undocumented immigrants in the USA are challenging dehumanisation. The chupacabras mask offers a unique way to protect the identity of a population that is constantly under the watchful eye of the law. The mask enables undocumented immigrants to claim their right to participate in the discourse that shapes the laws that threaten their livelihood. This civic form of anonymous participation creates a safe community where the identities of vulnerable individuals are transformed into power. The idea of the selfie project came during one of the shoots where the camera captures an interviewee taking selfies while wearing the mask. negar@duke.edu 15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 139 Fig. 15.1 ‘#NotYourChupacabras’ Source: Instagram (with permission from account holder) These selfies specifically express disapproval of President Obama for breaking his promise to legalise the status of the 12 million undocumented people in the USA. Instead, the administration deported 2 million people in the course of five years (2008–2014) – more than any other administration in history (Nava 2014). Two-thirds of the people deported had only minor infractions and no criminal record (Thompson and Cohen 2014). Misdemeanours render undocumented residents ineligible for executive orders like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). Outside punishment for minor infractions further stigmatises millions of other immigrants as they enter the criminal justice system, thus deteriorating their quality of life vis-à-vis possible deportation. These recent changes in immigration law have perpetuated a divide between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrant. Although some studies have explained the creation of the ‘bad’ immigrant (Ngai 2014) and examined the effect of respectability politics2 (Higginbotham 1993) in the AfricanAmerican community, few have highlighted the voices of criminalised immigrants impacted by an enforcement-focused immigration system (Pallares 2014). The film sheds light on the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the USA through digital artivism. Artivism is defined as ‘work created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and negar@duke.edu 140 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA activism’ (Sandoval and Latorre 2008). It is importation to call attention to the metaphor of the ‘chupacabras’ as a threatening and dangerous depiction of undocumented immigrants coming into the USA endangering the ‘safe and sanitised’ American way of life (Chavez 2013, Santa Ana 2012). This chapter highlights the fight that undocumented and criminalised communities in the USA face against silencing, dehumanisation and punitive legal measures through selfless selfies. The following section will demonstrate the creation of the ‘bad’ immigrant. CONSTRUCTING THE ‘BAD’ IMMIGRANT Using the chupacabra mask, selfless selfies – selfies without the ‘self’– aim to destroy the good versus bad binary that justifies legal violence in antiimmigrant policies (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). Words such as ‘illegal’, ‘illegal immigration’ and ‘illegal alien’ work to create a framework where undocumented migrants are characterised as criminals (Perez-Huber 2009). The migrants produced by such discourse are dangerous and threatening to the ‘American way of life’ (Chavez 2013, Santa Ana 2012). Recent changes in immigration law perpetuate the divide between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ immigrant. When the president announced the first and second executive orders (DACA/DAPA), thousands of ‘good’ students and parents would gain a two-year work permit while those who do not qualify were considered ‘bad’ immigrants. Consequently, immigrants would be polarised between those deemed exemplary and undesirable. This polarisation promotes respectability politics through the punishment of ‘bad’ immigrants and the rewarding of ‘good’ immigrants. These divisions perpetuate old beliefs of meritocracy, the American Dream, and American exceptionalism (Gustafson 2005). Yet, millions remain forgotten in the margins of the immigration debate and vulnerable to policies that criminalise the poor (Union 2000). The film that inspired these selfies, Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant, questions the immigrant binary and ideas on the impossible subject (Ngai 2014). Many of the films created by/with undocumented people justify the ‘illegality’ of their existence within the USA or Europe, thus perpetuating the model minority myth. The chupacabras, rather, express solidarity with the ‘bad’ immigrant as a way to expose practices of domination endemic to institutions in the USA. The use of selfies and social media are forms of participatory citizenship the chupacabra mask elicits. negar@duke.edu 15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 141 SELF-LESS SELFIES ‘But first, let me take a #selfie’ is the most important line of the song ‘#Selfie’ popularised by the DJ duo, The Chainsmokers. In the song, the main character is a young girl at the club criticising other people and their outfits. As she prepares to go after the guy she likes, she makes the infamous statement, ‘but first, let me take a selfie’. Telling of our time, this song perfectly captures what selfies have come to exemplify in popular culture – vanity and self-indulgence. It is against this backdrop that immigrant artivists aim to make their voices heard. Artivists can utilise various art forms to create cultural impact outside of the art world by shedding light on important issues facing their community (Asante 2008). Digital artivism (Sandoval and Latorre 2008) draws on multimedia technologies to critically engage in social justice. It is through digital artivism that multidimensional meanings create the foundation of the Chupacabra Selfies Project. Reflecting on the notions immigrants as other than human and the perpetuating stereotypes of criminals and terrorists, I decided to propose the chupacabras as an idea for a film in my class, Diasporic Nonfiction: Media Engagements with Memory and Displacement. Two undergraduate students helped me film, interview and edit what would become Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant. Through interviewing various people deemed by society as ‘bad’ immigrants, we wanted to understand: How do undocumented immigrants experience dehumanisation in society through the media, law, public opinion or other means? What messages do undocumented criminalised immigrants have for policymakers? The film took news clippings about the chupacabras from the 1990s and juxtaposed them with current news stories about undocumented immigration, the similarities were uncanny. A challenge during the chupacabras project was how to use the mask to express subject identities of undocumented people, without further dehumanising them. I looked at how masks were used to create solidarity in marginalised communities. One example of this is the use of the ski masks that the Zapatistas wear in southern Mexico. The mask announces an ‘insistent, collective politicised presence, and at the same time they make visible the neglected anonymity of indigenous people in Chiapas’ (Lane 2003: 136). While the black ski mask creates a transformed, protected and unified identity, Zapatistas are not hiding behind a mask, rather one hides by taking the mask off (Kowal 2002). Likewise, founded in New York during the 1980s, Guerrilla Girl – an anonymous collective of women artists – is an example of how using a mask can create solidarity and at the same time call attention to negar@duke.edu 142 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA systematic forms of oppression. Using a gorilla mask, guerrilla girls protest the limited and sexualised inclusion of women in the arts. Through their witty art, they challenged racial exclusivity of museums, funding and exhibitions (Demo 2008). Both Zapatistas and Guerrilla Girls offer a creative and unique way to challenge exclusivity and disenfranchisement. However, as the following section demonstrates, that it is important to know who are the people behind the mask. CHUPACABRAS MASK The film highlights five undocumented individuals: Miguel, Yessica, Marcela, Bamby and Jonathan. Miguel is a college student who is ineligible for DACA due to a robbery he committed at the age of eighteen, for which he was in prison for two years. Despite the fact that he attended community college, graduated and transferred to University California, Los Angeles, Miguel is unable to have a job or be in the country legally because he does not qualify for DACA. His story highlights the ways poor immigrant communities are left out of the immigration limelight. Miguel used the chupacabras mask to position himself as a student. His selfie is a tool that describes the way Miguel has been left out of civil society due to the alleged threat his legality (Abrego 2014) poses. Yessica, another college student from San Diego, CA, was first introduced to the criminal justice system at the age of eleven when she got her notice of removal in the mail the day of her first communion. Until the age of sixteen, Yessica went to court every year ‘to prove that she was not a criminal’. Having to go to court with her mother every year influenced Yessica to question the justice system. Yessica, wearing a white dress, put a crown of flowers on the chupacabras mask and took selfies in the mirror as a representation of being othered on a very important day in her life. Marcela’s experience underscores how the law fails to protect the most vulnerable. After experiencing domestic violence for over twenty years, Marcela decided to call the police on her abusive husband. However, when the police arrived, they arrested her instead. She was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where she was detained for fourteen days rather than the few hours she had been promised. When Marcela finally got out, she returned to an empty home where all her belongings were missing and her husband had kidnapped her two youngest children to Mexico. Marcela has not seen her children since June 2010. Marcela negar@duke.edu 15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 143 wore the mask and prepared a meal as a symbolic gesture of being dehumanised as a mother and victim of domestic violence. Caught in the nexus of a xenophobic and patriarchal society, transwomen like Bamby have been left in the shadows of the immigration discourse. In the film, Bamby shares her story of crossing the border and being harassed due to her gender. She explains the horrible conditions of detention facilities. Policies like DACA and DAPA have done little to address the needs of transgendered migrants, some argue that it further stigmatises them, making them the most impacted group by the privately ran detention industry (Arkles 2009; O’Day-Senior 2008). Likewise, Jonathan, the final person in the film, describes the moments he kept his sexuality a secret while in detention. He knew the homophobia of other inmates and officers that could threaten his life. As an Afro-Latino, Jonathan sided more with the black immigrant community. Voices of black immigrants are often ignored. The policies that target undocumented immigrants also target poor black and Latinos, criminalising them further. The participants wore the chupacabra mask for part of their interview to make a satirical statement about the way society perceives them. Holding the mask to her face, Bamby stated: ‘Lots of people may ask, who is this person? It’s me!’ The chupacabra mask became a powerful metaphor by which each of these individuals asserted their humanity by mocking the dehumanising ideals that make them ‘bad’ immigrants. CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT The day of the first film screening in Los Angeles, CA, about seventy five people packed a small venue. Families, students and different community organisations were present. After screening the film, we had a dialogue where people expressed their agreement to these points of views. Students explained that it was important for undocumented youth to counter the ‘good immigrant’ and ‘DREAMer3’ mentality, which seeks to only take into account exemplary students. Students expressed that they would rather be called ‘bad’ or ‘illegals’ rather than DREAMers, a view that until now had not been shared or embraced. Others were glad the film was satirically funny about serious heartwrenching topics. It was clear that the film and dialogue left people with more questions than answers. In a way, the viewers also wanted to become the chupacabras, and because we had the mask with us, this was possible. People were given the opportunity to transform into the chupacabras by negar@duke.edu 144 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA wearing the mask and either sharing what it meant to them or taking a selfie holding a sign that on one side read #NotYourChupacabras and on the other #YourChupacabras. These photographs were posted on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Grandmothers and youth alike expressed that what they saw in the film was a reflection of their lives or how they felt. For the public, too, putting on the chupacabras mask was a way of gaining control over that stereotype. By taking on the opportunity to side with the ‘bad’ immigrant, people expressed their solidarity, thus, creating a community of highly visible people without endangering the individuals without documents. CONCLUSION What is unusual about the Chupacabras Selfie Project as opposed to many other selfie-based actions on social media (and elsewhere) is that they are selfies without the self. This Zapatista-inspired artivist project reappropriates both a violent symbol and a self-centred genre that is part of the social media gestalt for collective representation and voice. By putting on a chupacabras mask, the subject resists erasure by highlighting dehumanisation, thus creating a collective voice and building solidarity with other dehumanised and criminalised immigrants. This solidarity in turn challenges respectability politics that pressure immigrants to aim for an impossible perfection. The film Chupacabras: The Myth of The Bad Immigrant provides the stage for people to reiterate their humanity through the Chupacabras Selfie Project. Currently, the film is being expanded to include more stories of immigrants in bordering states. The ‘bad’ immigrants are given a space and place to share their story and ‘good’ immigrants can question their own subjectivity. Thus through selfies and associated actions of ‘hashtag solidarity’ (Mottahedeh 2015), anyone can join in on the opportunity to challenge hegemonic ideals on immigration. Cohen explains that the impact of choosing deviance and resistance creates counter public and private spaces where autonomy is chosen daily. ‘Through the repetition of deviant practices by multiple individuals, new identities, communities, and politics emerge where seemingly deviant, unconnected behaviour can be transformed into conscious acts of resistance that serve as the basis for a mobilised politics of deviance’ (Cohen 2014: 32). Some of the perceived pitfalls are that this project might not encompass all stories of dehumanised immigrants. However, this should not be the only film, hashtag or project that addresses negar@duke.edu 15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 145 these issues. It simply provides a small space for the great work that is yet to be done. My hope is that the film and selfies will contribute to the effort of dismantling respectability politics/the myth of the bad immigrant and for this project to be a tool for communities still fighting and resisting. NOTES 1. The film can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acp87_ 6qPVE. 2. Respectability politics was coined in 1993 by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham to explain the involvement of black women in the Baptist church. Higginbotham specifically referred to African American’s promotion of ‘temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual purity’ as a reform strategy where African Americans are encouraged to be respectable (Higginbotham 1993). In turn people of colour are also responsible to show white Americans that blacks can be respectable and good (Harris 2003). Respectability politics was adopted by middle- and working-class black women alike; it was an effective way to combat racist narratives about black women’s sexuality, work ethic and the constant positioning of black family as abnormal (White 2010). 3. ‘DREAMer’ is a popular term used in reference to undocumented students who quality for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act that would legalise the status of undocumented youth who attend college or enrol in the military; the bill was first introduced in 2001 and has yet to pass. REFERENCES Abrego, L. (2014). Sacrificing families: Navigating laws, labor, and love across borders. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arkles, G. (2009). Safety and solidarity across gender lines: Rethinking segregation of transgender people in detention. Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 18(2), 515–560. Asante, M. K. (2008). It’s bigger than hip hop: The rise of the post-hip-hop generation. New York: St Martin’s Press. Chavez, L. (2013). The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cohen, C. (2014). Deviance as resistance: A new research agenda for the study of black politics. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 1(1), 27–45. Demo, A. T. (2008). The Guerrilla girls’ comic politics of subversion. In L.C. Olson, C.A. Finnegan, & D.S. Hope (Eds.), Visual rhetoric: A reader in communication and American culture. London: Sage. negar@duke.edu 146 S. RODRIGUEZ VEGA Gustafson, K. (2005). To punish the poor: Criminalizing trends in the welfare system. Women of Color Resource Center. Harris, P. J. (2003). Gatekeeping and remaking: The politics of respectability in African American women’s history and Black feminism. Journal of Women’s History, 15(1), 212–220. Higginbotham, E. B. (1993). Righteous discontent: The women’s movement in the Black Baptist church, 1880–1920. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Kowal, D. M. (2002). Digitizing and globalizing indigenous voices: The Zapatista movement. In G. Elmer (Ed.), Critical perspectives on the Internet. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Lane, J. (2003). Digital Zapatistas. TDR/The Drama Review, 47(2), 129–144. Menjívar, C., & Abrego, L. (2012). Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants. American Journal of Sociology, 117(5), 1380–1421. Mottahedeh, N. (2015). # iranelection: Hashtag solidarity and the transformation of online life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nava, E. J. (2014, 23 January). Federal immigration reform would help New Jersey’s striving immigrants and boost the state’s economy. New Jersey Policy Perspective. http://www.njpp.org/reports/federal-immigration-reformwould-help-new-jerseys-striving-immigrants-and-boost-the-states-economy. Accessed 1 March 2016. Ngai, M. M. (2014). Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. O’Day-Senior, D. (2008). Forgotten frontier-healthcare for transgender detainees in immigration and customs enforcement detention. The Hastings Law Journal, 60, 453–476. Pallares, A. (2014). Family activism: Immigrant struggles and the politics of noncitizenship. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Perez-Huber, L. (2009). Challenging racist nativist framing: Acknowledging the community cultural wealth of undocumented Chicana college students to reframe the immigration debate. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 704–730. Sandoval, C., & Latorre, G. (2008). Chicana/o artivism: Judy Baca’s digital work with youth of color. In A. Everett, D. John, & C.T. MacArthur (Eds.), Learning race and ethnicity: Youth and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Santa Ana, O. (2012). Juan in a hundred: The representation of Latinos on network news. Texas: University of Texas Press. Thompson, G., & Cohen, S. (2014, 6 April). More deportations follow minor crimes, records show. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2014/04/07/us/more-deportations-follow-minor-crimes-data-shows.html. Accessed 1 March 2016. negar@duke.edu 15 SELFLESS SELFIE CITIZENSHIP: CHUPACABRAS SELFIE PROJECT 147 Union, K. W. R. (2000). The criminalization of the poor. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, 5(1), 1–12. White, E. F. (2010). Dark continent of our bodies: Black feminism & politics of respectability. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Silvia Rodriguez Vega is a doctoral candidate in the César E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Before that, she earned a Masters of Arts in Education from Harvard University and double-majored in Transborder Latina/o Chicana/o Studies and Political Science at Arizona State University. Her primary research interests include criminality, detention/deportation, children in mixed status families, digital media, ARTivism, poverty/inequality, and the prison industrial complex. negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 16 ‘My Face Is Not for Public Consumption’: Selfies, Surveillance and the Politics of Being Unseen Sanaz Raji Abstract Using her own activist experience, Raji explores the ways activists use selfies to brand themselves within radical-chic aesthetics, on the one hand, and the aesthetics of normalcy, on the other, in response to the increased policing and criminalisation of direct action protesting in the UK. The chapter seeks to entertain other possibilities for selfie activism: selfies without the face, selfies that interrogate the politics and culture of state and corporate surveillance, and, more broadly, selfie activism that allows a space for those who want to engage in radical political discourse but do not want to be subjected to further state violence. Keywords Branding
Clicktivism
Invisibility
Normalcy
Surveillance
State violence Ever come across this situation? You are eating your meal in a group dinner with other like-minded activists and some person whom you have never met before or made acquaintances with starts taking random photos on their smartphone of people they may or may not know without their permission? Some person did that last night. S. Raji (*) Independent Scholar and Activist, UK e-mail: sanaz.raji@gmail.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_16 negar@duke.edu 149 150 S. RAJI I was eating and talking with others who were at the party. Then a woman who I had neither been introduced to, nor have met before the party, began taking photos on her smartphone of me and others. She didn’t even introduce herself, but had the audacity to take my photo while eating. Then she turns to me: Woman taking photos: Me: Woman taking photos: Me: Woman taking photos: Me: Woman taking photos: Me: What’s your name? Sanaz. (While fiddling with her smartphone). I can’t find you on Facebook? Excuse me, why are you looking for me on Facebook? What’s the purpose? I want to tag you in this photo. I never asked to you to take my photo. In fact, I have never met you before. The polite thing to have done was to introduce yourself to me and then ask if it would be okay to take my photo. It is unacceptable to take photos of people without their permission. So, you don’t want to be associated with [xxx] group? That is not the point. I don’t know you. We have never met before until this evening. I don’t even know your name. It is not acceptable to point your phone and take photos of people without their knowledge and/or consent to do so! This awkward verbal altercation happened during a Christmas dinner organised by an activist group that I would like to keep anonymous. I have participated with this group in many demonstrations and protests over the past year. As a poor campaigner and an ‘out-of-place’ scholar, any celebration that involves restaurant dining is a particular treat. I had saved up my pennies for this gathering and only knew four or five people by name. The rest of those who attended the Christmas party were a complete mystery to me. Unfortunately, the way the dining space had been configured did not help in fostering new introductions. However, my annoyance gave way to utter anger at the way a certain member of this group operated their smartphone in a cavalier manner, taking photos of me and others, without our permission and uploading these photos on their Facebook wall, indicating the exact location and place we were all dining at. As an activist with a precarious immigration negar@duke.edu 16 MY FACE IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION . . . 151 situation, I did not feel safe for my whereabouts to be so publicly known to all on social media. Interestingly the people dining that evening have often said and stated both in person and online how we must remain vigilant against state and corporate surveillance on activists, especially those involved in anti-racist, migrant rights, environmental and Palestine solidarity work. However, it seemed we could not escape the surveillance that we were enforcing on each other through our smartphones and social media at large. And to be sure, it wasn’t smartphones and social media forcing them to take those photos, but group pressure to be seen and to be noticed, especially in the small, tight-knit, radical activist community. Group members who attended the dinner seemed more annoyed with my insistence on not being photographed tagged into photos that were uploaded onto Facebook while we were dining than with my right to eat in privacy without having my whereabouts ‘outed’ and publicised. More than a month later, in February, I attended a protest outside of a high-end British department store, opposing the selling of ‘blood diamonds’ that are complicit in furthering pro-Zionist interests. As I entered the protest area, I was aware of the high concentration of police with video cameras that monitored our movements. I chatted with someone who was also taking part in the protest who I hadn’t seen for some months. All of a sudden through the corner of my eye I could see someone taking photos of my friend and I engaged in a conversation. I immediately knew the photographer by name, a white person who I had met in numerous protests both in Leeds and Manchester. I implored with them to refrain from taking a photo of my face and asked that they instead take a photo of the placard I made in solidarity with the protest. The photographer said, ‘Why don’t you want your face in the photo?’ I whispered, ‘It’s complicated. I really don’t want to go into this here and now.’ What I couldn’t say at that instance is that I did not want to have a long drawn out discussion about my precarious immigration status especially with the heavy police presence watching our every move. They then shouted at me in an exacerbated tone, ‘It’s a public area. I’m well in my right to take a photo of you. If you don’t like it then get out of the protest!’ Interestingly, this very same photographer once had chronicled a No Borders Leeds demonstration in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants that took place outside the Home Office in Leeds sometime in 2013. They respected our collective wish for our faces not to be shown in photos taken – especially as negar@duke.edu 152 S. RAJI Black, Muslim and people of colour (PoC) refugees and asylum seekers who took part in the demonstration were still battling with the Home Office for the right to remain lawfully in the UK. Some of those who had joined us on the day of that demonstration had spent time at immigration detention centres like Yarl’s Wood, and had experienced the worst of British state violence. Somehow this photographer had conveniently forgotten that they have in the past accommodated my very simple request for other precarious individuals in activist groups. I loudly and angrily responded: ‘It may be a public area, but you do not have the right to take a fucking photo without permission! I asked you politely the first time not to take my photo. I don’t have to give you a reason why I don’t want my photo taken. You should respect my request. If you can’t do this one simple thing then don’t take photos’ The photographer proceeded to heckle me as they took photos of other protesters, mocking me for not being a ‘team player’ and ‘being a pain in the ass’ and saying that others were showing true courage and solidarity for having their faces photographed. I stood there alone while my fellow comrades were all too eager to pose for the photographer, not at all inclined to defend me from this onslaught of abuse. I was one of perhaps two or three people of colour at a largely white demonstration. Outside of London, it isn’t uncommon to be one of a few Black and/or PoCs in a demonstration for leftist, Palestine, and migrant rights causes. In retrospect, it seemed that the photographer was more upset that they could not use my brown face to make the argument for how ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ this event was. Towards the end of the protest, two fellow protesters came up to me to apologise for the photographer’s harassing behaviour and lack of respect for my request to not have my face photographed. Then one of the protesters asked if they could take a photo of my placard. As they were taking a snap on their phone, they commented, ‘I think it was wrong of that photographer to take photos of you without your consent. I got what you were saying but felt it wasn’t my place to get involved.’ To which I responded, ‘I thank you for asking my permission to take a photo of the placard and for respecting my wishes. But it is very much in your place to help protect people like me who wish to remain anonymous because of our precarious status in this country, be it due to citizenship, racial or gender violence, and disability.’ It has been nearly a year since both incidents, but I cannot stop thinking that we as activists and academics (or both) need to have a closer interrogation of the refusal to engage in visible protesting and, more broadly, of the politics of remaining unseen. Within the past few years, negar@duke.edu 16 MY FACE IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION . . . 153 the British public and, in particular, the activist community have learnt the extensive and intrusive manner in which police surveillance and infiltration were used on environmental and anti-racist activists. Not only did police spies monitor these activist groups, but in many instances began fraudulent relationships with women activists they were gathering intelligence on, had children and then when their surveillance operation came to an end, suddenly and mysteriously left, not to be located again. However, it is not just police spies that we need to be concerned about. It is also the pervasive level of state surveillance in the UK of Black, PoC, Muslim and migrant bodies through UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI), the antiextremism policy of PREVENT and ‘stop and search’. As Simone Browne (2015) has shown through her research, we cannot divorce state and corporate surveillance from racism and, in particular, the historical links to anti-Black racism and now Islamophobia. So how does that connect to the activists’ use of self-portraits or the refusal of such practice? Much has been written about the emancipatory qualities of selfies in giving women, Black, PoC, disabled and other non-normative groups a voice, through a personalised visual presence, and that in contrast with the overall dismissal of selfies as purely narcissistic and apolitical. However, I would like to shift this conversation away from both the dismissal and the celebration of selfies into exploring other, long-neglected questions concerning selfie activism. We need to be asking ourselves, who can occupy the selfie activism space? And what individuals or groups might feel, instead, that selfie activism is limiting? How does selfie-activism act as a neoliberal branding for ‘clicktivism’ – a recently emerged form of civil participation that is limited to online petitions and other similar forms of Internet ‘clicking’ (White 2010)? How do activists use selfies to portray themselves as ‘normal’ in times when the right to demonstrate and protest are being criminalised both in the UK and the USA? How can we create selfie activism that does not act as a conduit for further state and corporate surveillance? In thinking through these questions, I would like to entertain other possibilities for selfie activism – namely not shaming or deriding those of us who decide to not make our faces visible for campaigns, but focusing, instead, on the message of the banners and signs we hold in our hands. In doing so, I hope that my discussion of remaining invisible in an activist selfie will lead to reconsidering questions of activist self-care, on the one hand, and surveillance, on the other. negar@duke.edu 154 S. RAJI SELFIES, CLICKTIVISM AND CHASING THE CELEBRITY ACTIVIST DREAM TO NORMALITY Yasmin Nair’s (2016b) thoughtfully detailed piece on the Twitter ‘hashtivist’ Suey Park illustrates the neoliberal manner in which hashtag activism (and also selfies) can be used to brand and rebrand online activists into marketable commodities. With regard to Twitter and other social media activism, she notes: The contemporary emphasis on ‘monetising’ and ‘branding’ oneself emerges from this neoliberal sphere, where people are required to craft themselves into investment commodities. Twitter and other forms of social media play a role in this construction of the self as a money-making enterprise, with millions hoping to become profitable brands. (Nair 2016: n.p.) Park, a former anti-racist Twitter activists, who came to fame for her wellknown hashtag, #NotYourAsianSideKick and later to infamy with #CancelColbert, successfully parleyed her hashtivism into a profitable speaking career, from lecturing at leading universities in the USA and Ireland, to speaking at venues like Social Media Week. However, Park is not the only online activist who has been able to use social media to constantly rebrand and keep herself in the public eye. DeRay Mckesson, a former administrator for ‘Teach for America’, a corporate education outfit complicit in union busting, later caught fame as being one of the few visible faces of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with over 300,000 followers on Twitter. Mckesson is yet another hashtivist who has been able to rebrand himself and use the networks he made from the corporate world while using the cultural capital he amassed from his activism with #BlackLivesMatter to run for the mayor of the city of Baltimore. Mckesson’s election campaign was funded by a triumvirate of social media companies, which include Netflix, YouTube and Twitter (Franklin 2016). It is not surprising that the Black and anti-racist grassroots activists did not warm to his corporate interests, particularly the heavy reliance on social media in a city where 30% of the population is not online are some of the many reasons why he was not elected mayor (Woods 2016). As one Baltimore resident writes, Organising in Baltimore is relational. In Baltimore, grassroots leaders don’t earn their stripes on twitter or on the protest line; Here you earn your stripes by serving and being in the community when there are no cameras. (Wooten 2016: n.p.) negar@duke.edu 16 MY FACE IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION . . . 155 Like Nair, I believe there is a correlation between the ‘entrepreneurial’ manner of how some activists use social media as an entry to trickle down radical political and activism in a neoliberal manner for networks, connections and, more importantly, the launching of political careers. I see that selfie activism is often used in the similar manner by white, Black and PoC activists within mainstream student politics in the UK. Long before Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl performance, Black Panthers and Che Guevara motifs were increasingly being employed within selfie activism, sometimes done in solidarity with the historical significance of their respective messages. However, more often, this brand of selfie activism aesthetic was used merely to appear radical. I refer to this as ‘Malcolm X/Angela Davis drag’ – the cosmetic performance of acting and appearing radical, while having very little to show for one’s supposed radical activism. Meanwhile, those very same individuals who engage in this sort of drag play occupy positions of power with access to numerous platforms that can be complicit in actively silencing those engaged in the grassroots work of building truly radical spaces of activism. After all, in this day and age of the social media celebrity culture, showcasing the aesthetic of radicalness to one’s followers carries far more cache and glamour than actually doing the unglamorous toll of grassroots activism. For those involved with direct action work, not only are we competing with hashtivists and ‘radicals dragsters’ who are able to network their highly neoliberal and individualistic activism into lucrative careers, but also with general clicktivism mediated by major social media petition sites like MoveOn, Change.org and 38 Degrees. As Micah White powerfully argues, ‘political passivity’ becomes the end result of digital petition campaigns that use catchy advertising and the lingo of social media that ‘draw attention away from genuinely radical movements’ (White 2010: n.p.). And as digital petitions, much like hashtivism and selfie activism, dominate the world of online activism, they can also lull activists into another sort of passivity – that of investing labour into looking and appearing normal. In a time when protests are heavily monitored, when then Prime Minister David Cameron accused Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, of being a terrorist and when Green Party members found themselves under state surveillance, it is not surprising that activists are not only adopting vestiges of radical-chic aesthetics, but also the aesthetics of normalcy. The aesthetics of normalcy, to which the selfies of mundane actions – riding a bus, smiling with a friend, eating a meal – are central, is often used by activists to show how ‘every day’ ordinary we are, despite being negar@duke.edu 156 S. RAJI engaged in direct action on a daily basis. Often, this is done to dispel the terrorism label that right-wing and establishment media are painting many left-wing, anti-racist, migrant rights and pro-Palestinian activists with a very broad stroke. This is especially true in an age where direct action work is under constant policing and criminalisation, when activists are portrayed by the media as either dangerous outcasts or unstable people with too much time on their hands. And despite some romantic depictions in films and media that represent activism as exciting and noble work, the everyday grunt labour that activists do is often thankless and emotionally exhausting. It is standing in the pouring rain leafleting about a protest to stop the NHS from privatisation, only to see people take your leaflet to toss it directly into the trash. It is standing in freezing weather by the Home Office with refugees, asylum seekers and migrant rights activists holding banners, while dealing with rude hand gestures from vehicles passing by, shouting at us to ‘get a fucking life’ or that we ‘deserve to be deported to ISIS’. It is no surprise, then, that the aesthetics of selfie normalcy is appealing, and comforting, to so many activists – and indeed, is a form of selfcare that should not be dismissed. I realised right after the Christmas dinner described in the opening of this piece, that the woman who was taking photos of us eating and talking was not just taking photos for posterity sake; unconsciously, it seemed, she was using her selfies with other activists who attended the dinner, as well as some group selfies, to show how normal we are as an activist group so violently disparaged by right-wingers and those invested in settler colonialism. Our neat appearance, animated faces and smiles became something for those consuming these images to see us in a relatable light; no different from any other person who attends a festive holiday occasion. Yet, in posting those selfies on Facebook, tagging individuals photographed in addition to the location of our dinner party, her act of reclaiming the everyday normalcy could also endanger and mark us for the very police surveillance we are facing, and resisting. SAYING NO TO VISIBILITY AND YES TO ETHICAL SELFIES This is not to mean that selfies and activism cannot merge. However, we need to think of ways of using selfies that engage with self-care, protecting those at the margins of society who are often victimised by both state and vigilante violence. Here I am taking my inspiration from Aria Dean, who negar@duke.edu 16 MY FACE IS NOT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION . . . 157 interrogates the racial dynamics of selfie feminism which continues to position positively white passing, young, cisgender and able-bodied women (Dean 2016). Dean then explores the content of Black feminist selfies, and the ways they critique the racist and misogynoir issue of gaze while refusing to be visible. As Dean rightly notes, ‘In 2016, catapulting our selves [sic] into circulation as image-fragments no longer makes for a resistance or revolution’ (2016: n.p.) In thinking of selfie activism, to remain unseen is a direct conversation to the racialised politics of surveillance that Browne has expounded upon that has criminalised and restricted the voices and politics of Black and PoC communities. After all, at the protest outside the swanky British department store, my face did not make the difference, rather it was the importance of my placard’s message. Selfie activism does not have to be solely about the face or the body in order to count. It can, and should, also be about the message that one is attempting to convey, even when – especially when – one decides to remain unseen. A hand covering the face, a face hidden by a banner or placard all are at times even more powerful and politically subversive, for they point to the very surveillance, the very structural oppressions that are used to silence our critical interventions. For activists, in a time of constant discourse around self-care, it is crucial that we position this not as individual but as community care, especially in protecting those of us from the very surveillance that fuels the violence against our bodies and our work. Otherwise, we are strengthening the very surveillance that marks the Black and PoC activist bodies that are actively resisting this branding every single day. REFERENCES Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Dean, A. (2016, 1 March). Closing the loop. The New Inquiry. http://thenewin quiry.com/essays/closing-the-loop. Accessed 11 May 2016. Franklin, D. (2016) Why Deray Mckesson’s Baltimore campaign looks like it comes right out of teach for America’s playbook. Alternet. http://www.alter net.org/news-amp-politics/why-deray-mckessons-plan-baltimores-schoolslooks-it-comes-right-out-teach. Accessed 15 May 2016. Nair, Y. (2016). Suey Park and the afterlife of Twitter. Yasminnair.net. http:// www.yasminnair.net/content/suey-park-and-afterlife-twitter-0. Accessed 11 May 2016. negar@duke.edu 158 S. RAJI White, M. (2010). Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism’, The Guardian. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-lef tist-activism. Accessed 15 May 2016. Woods, B. (2016). Baltimore mayoral primary: Catherine Pugh wins as DeRay McKesson struggles. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/ 2016/apr/27/baltimore-mayoral-primary-catherine-pugh-wins-deray-mckesson. Accessed 25 November 2016. Wooten, J. (2016). Deray: Who sent you and who will you serve? KineticsLive. com. http://kineticslive.com/deray-who-sent-you-and-who-will-you-serve/. Accessed 15 May 2016. Sanaz Raji is an independent scholar and activist, who campaigns against the neoliberalisation of higher education, racism, migrant rights, and the culture of surveillance affecting migrants, Black, PoC, Muslims and the disabled. Sanaz established the Justice4Sanaz campaign three years ago after experiencing institutional racism and victimisation that contributed to her being forced off her PhD studies. She also helped to established #UnisResistBorderControls, a campaign against UK Visa and Immigration surveillance of international students, lecturers, and university worker, particularly those who are Black, Muslim and PoC. She is a published author and writer in the field of Iranian diaspora studies, critical race studies and social media. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Tehran Bureau/PBS in addition to academic journals and books. negar@duke.edu Epilogue negar@duke.edu CHAPTER 17 On the Ethics of Looking JB Brager Abstract Brager asserts that the selfie as a practice and product both presents itself as novel and references a long history of self-portraiture and self-representation that must be read critically, contending with race, gender, class and sexuality. Brager focuses on the ethical implications of looking, approaching the selfie via questions of visibility, celebrity, narcissism, representational politics, violence and erasure in order to ask questions about spectatorship and consumption in a cultural moment of selfie obsession. Keywords Ethics
Spectatorship
Representational violence
Virality
Consumability
Being political We are producing more images than ever before – the eye is pulled from image to image in the endless scroll of social media. The selfie emerges within the media feed as a mundane product in an overwhelmingly saturated visual field. As a practice and a product, it is marked by concerns of virality and fame, but also surveillance and legibility within the always already exclusionary rubric of the human as a visual project. JB Brager (*) Women’s & Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: j.brager.art@gmail.com © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8_17 negar@duke.edu 161 162 JB BRAGER In this current moment, the selfie is a flashpoint in conversations about self-representation because it is, in its specific iteration, the product of a particular and new technological move; the smartphone, the front-facing camera, even the selfie stick. The question arises – in relation to refugees who send selfies to loved ones after a successful ocean crossing, activists in the streets, prisoners in solitary confinement who have not seen their own faces for decades, perpetrators of State and non-State committed terror – of who gets to have a smartphone, whose selfies are mocked, venerated or maligned. The selfie as a product constructs a consumable subject within rubrics of humanitarian sentimentality. The failure of humanitarianism as a sentimental project, then, becomes a failure to see violence when it is happening, against certain populations, and also a failure to see certain populations as anything other than victim, wholly lacking agency. The selfie as a representational politic marks a particular technological moment but also a longer struggle. Contemporary contestations around selfie politics are productively read, for example, within histories of intersectional writing about Black women artists. In the essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker wrote of the ‘genius of a greatgreat-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseers lash’ instead of making the art that she might have made or whose work hangs in a museum under the nom de plume ‘anonymous’ (Walker 1983). This might frame conversations about selfies as part of a much older discourse, about who has the ability to represent themselves and who is always represented by others, and the material effects of such representational violence. When looking at the selfie – critically, ethically – one is forced to ask where we are looking from, as well as who we are looking at, within political frameworks of visibility, hyper-visibility, erasure and misrepresentation. Because of these ongoing representational violences, conversations about selfies and citizenship are not easily separated from conversations about selfie narcissism. A relationship emerges along lines of familiarity or consumability between the selfie and these much older discourses, about the location of racialised and gendered bodies within the representational violence of modernity. Aria Dean, in the 2016 article ‘Closing the loop’, describes the ways in which, in no time at all, the ‘life- and differenceaffirming politic [of the selfie] . . . whittled itself down to its most palatable iteration’, particularly around the reification of whiteness (Dean 2016). In tracing which selfies go viral within the networks of likes and shares online, which selfies lose followers, which selfie-takers become celebrities and negar@duke.edu 17 ON THE ETHICS OF LOOKING 163 which selfie-takers are marked for death, which selfies are viewed as sexy activism and which are viewed as undesirably political, a set of questions and answers emerges about the relationship between the selfie and political selfhood. Who is allowed to have politics and who is expected to always already be political? What privilege is there in the ability of a selfie-taker to not be political? Who is labelled as narcissistic and who is not allowed to be self-centred? Who is expected or made to feel shame around the ‘bad behaviour’ of selfie taking? Who will be captured within disciplining rubrics, who is subject to violence and then to reprimand? The selfie, as definitionally a self-portrait that is specifically uploaded, that is shared in networks of social media, does not necessarily constitute, produce or follow from a politic but rather may function as a cipher or avatar – we upload already marked bodies and existent political contestations, we are captured by old and entrenched ways of looking at each other. REFERENCES Dean, A. (2016, 1 March). Closing the loop. The New Inquiry. http://thenewin quiry.com/essays/closing-the-loop/. Accessed 1 March 2016. Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. JB Brager is a writer and illustrator, and a PhD candidate in Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Their research contends with visual and material archives of violence, contested narratives in the aftermath of genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as ethics and representation in contemporary photography and art. negar@duke.edu INDEX A Activism, self-expression and, 54 Affectiva, 92 Affective citizenship, 14 Altruism, 56 Art works, in(ter)jection into, 4 Autonomy, institutionalized formats and, 56 B Baey Yam Keng (Singaporean MP), 76, 77, 84 charismatic engagement, 75–85 digital presence, 77–78 digital vernaculars, use of, 84 ‘human touch,’ voter acknowledgement of, 84 personal branding, 81 strategic selfies, 78, 81 vote for my selfie, 75–85 voter reactions to, 81 Black and white bodies, 4 Bodyscan video, 94 Bullying, 56 C Camera phones bereavement literature, 121 disaster recalled with, 120–123 effect of camera phone agency, 120 emergent modes for life, extension of, 120 emotional performance, 120 grief, collective role of, 121 grief and emotion, relationship between, 120 intimacy, magnification of, 120 jeong, concept of, 122 memorialisation process, participation in, 122 misrecognition, 123 numbness, 123 online memorials, 121 posthumous practices with, 119–123 selfie agency, localization of, 123–124 selfie performativity, 122 Sewol disaster, 121–123 shock, trauma, memorialization and grief, beginnings of process of, 121 CamFind, 94 Celebrity management, 66 Celebrity performances, styles of, 68–71 Chupacabra Selfie Project, 137–145 © The Author(s) 2017 A. Kuntsman (ed.), Selfie Citizenship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45270-8 negar@duke.edu 165 166 INDEX Chupacabra Selfie Project (cont.) anonymous participation, civic form of, 138 collective representation and voice, self-less selfies and, 138 construction of ‘bad’ immigrants, 140 criminalization, 140, 141 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 139 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), 139 dehumanization, challenge to, 138 digital artivism, 139, 141 disenfranchisement, challenging exclusivity and, 142 expansion of film, 144 first film screening, 143 Guerrilla Girl, 138, 141–142 humanity, assertion through selfies of, 138, 143 immigrants other than human, notions of, 139, 141 immigration laws, changes in, 139, 140 individuals highlighted, 142 polarization, 140 selfie genre, re-appropriation by undocumented immigrants, 138 self-less selfies, 138, 141–142 social justice, critical engagement with, 141 subject identities, masking of, 141 topics highlighted, 138, 140, 142 Zapatismo, spirit of, 138 Citizen journalism, 26, 42, 46 Citizenship acts of, survival and, 131 affective citizenship, 14 approach to, 53 biometric citizens, 16, 89–95 connective actions, social media and, 51–53 as consumption, 52, 53 cultural citizenship, notion of, 33 Dahlgren’s focus on, 32–33 digital citizenship, selfies and, 114–115 fun and, compatibility of, 57 gender-based violence, citizenship and, 131 global citizenship, notion of, 41 individual articulations of, importance of, 32 Isin’s notion of, 23 media citizenship, 52–57 notion of, 16, 23, 130 patriotic messages of, 32 performance through selfies of, 23 performative citizenship, 23, 26 political and ethical complexities surrounding, 43 practices and acts of, distinction between, 34 selfie campaigns and double approach to, 53 selfies and, 17, 162 self-reflections on, 31 social and media citizenship, ‘actualization’ of, 54–56 social citizenship, 52 social exclusion, inequality and, 131 social theory and, 57 ‘speaking out’ and, 50, 129 teen identity, social and cultural citizenship and, 53 trauma recognition, citizenship and, 129, 130 See also ‘Dronie’ citizenship; Selfie citizenship; Selfies Clicktivism, 153–156 Collective memories, construction of, 31 negar@duke.edu INDEX Connective actions, logic of, 51 Consumer-oriented machine vision systems, 92 Criminalisation, 4, 156 Cultural citizenship, notion of, 33 Cutiebpocs, 4 D Democratic rights in Pakistan, 22 Digital Innovation at Manchester Metropolitan University, v Digital media, event mediation through, 32 Digital petitions, 155 Digital technologies, adaptation of, 16, 40 DiversifyMyEmoji campaign, 50, 51, 56 ‘Dronie’ citizenship, 16, 97–104 case for, 103–104 gendered stratification of ‘dronie’ users, 103 political implications of, 98 proposal for, 98 selfie evolution and, 98 Dronies aesthetic genealogies of, 98 aesthetic practice, perception of, 100, 102 citizens under drones, 104 citizens with drones, 104 civil rights, ‘cynegetic war’ and deprivation of, 101 ‘cynegetic war’ and, 101 ego-technical appropriation, 99, 101, 103 empowerment by, 100, 102 genealogies, 98–100 hijacking surveillance, 102 images, reception of, 99 landscape, focus on, 99 miniaturisation of drones, 98 167 ‘otherie’ practice of, 100 panoramas, focus on, 99 persons, depiction of, 99 pleasure in use of, 103, 104 politics of verticality, 100, 101, 103, 104 privacy of people, deprivation by, 102 social defence, military drones and, 101 surveillance, vertical politics of, 102 tracking, aerial methods of, 101 verticality, aspect of, 99–101, 103 vertical visibility, power of, 102 view from above, interpretation of, 98, 100, 101, 103 xeno-technicality, 100 zooming effect, 99 E Emotient, 92 Everyday life, traumatized subjectivity in, 128 Expression analysis software, 92 F Facebook facial recognition algorithms, 92 influence of, 66 messaging on, 55 in Singapore, 77 Facial recognition techniques, 15, 90–92, 94 Facial recognition technology, 92 Focus group discussions, 32 G Gadget-affine blogosphere, 98 Gender identities, 4 Global Poverty Project, 51, 52 negar@duke.edu 168 INDEX H Habitus, Bourdieu’s concept of, 34, 35 Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life, 60 Hashtivism, 154, 155 Homonormativity, 14 Homophobia, 143 Homosexualität Exhibition, Schwules Museum, 3, 14 Humanitarianism, failure of, 162 I Instagram celebrity politics on, 66–68 influence of, 66 infrastructure of, 68 International Journal of Communication, 41 Internet access in Pakistan, 22 Interpretation of messages, Chinese acuity in, 35 Invisibility, politics of, 27 Iris scanning, 91 Islamic Republic of Iran defence of people in, 60 networking of people in, 61 political co-option of selfies, 61 relevance of people in, 60 selfies and networking in, 61 sloganeering, 61 social revolt in, 61 viral content of selfies, 61 L Locational search, 32 Looking, ethics of, 161–163 M Machines, vision of, 90 MakeItHappy campaign, 51, 53, 56 Media censorship, fear of, 22 Media events, 16, 29–35 diversity of experiences of, 31 Media techniques, celebrity representation and, 67 Micro-media, major effects and, 31–33 Mobile devices, event mediation through, 31, 32 Mobile technology, 22, 120 Modernity, representational violence of, 162 N Narcissism, 41, 50, 56, 123, 162 Nationalism, 32, 40 Nepal, earthquake in, 40–43 Dharahara Tower, representations of, 40, 44, 46 digital technology, role in response to, 40 mobile media, role in response to, 41 online campaigns following, 40, 43 selfies, acts of ‘bad’ global citizenship with, 39–46 selfies, acts of ‘good’ global citizenship with, 43–44 selfies and responses to, 40, 43 selfies, global phenomenon of, 41 selfies, good and bad in bearing witness, 42 selfies, ‘other’ and, interplay between conceptions of, 40 selfies, reposition as political action, 41–42 selfies, selective imagery in, 44 negar@duke.edu INDEX selfies, viral tragedies and dangers of, 41 selfie-takers, public outcry about, 44 visual representation, limits and possibilities of, 42 witnessing tragedy in digiital age, 42 Normalcy, aesthetics of, 155 O Oppression by inclusion, 142 P Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI) Freedom March, 21 Pathologisation, 4 Peer knowledge sharing, 54 People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore, 76 Perception, management of, 90 Performative citizenship, 23, 26 Performative styles, 68 Performative turn in online political communication, 66 Personal autonomy, 56 Photographic harassment, 152 Photography, development of, 91 Photo tagging permissionless, 149–150 Police spying, 153 Political identity, active performance of, 27 Politicised use of selfies, 14 Post-optical time, 90 Privacy, Bauman’s perspective on, 97 Privacy, rights to, 151 Project Unbreakable, 127–129, 133 Protest policing, 14, 149 Public areas, rights of photography in, 151–152 Publicness, performative view of, 50 169 R Racist erasure, undoing of, 14 Radical activism, cosmeticism in, 155 Rape victim-survivors, Project Unbreakable and, 127–135 activist selfies, power of, 129 affective politics of being moved, 128–129 childhood sexual abuse, survivors of, 131, 132 citizenship, acts of, 129–132 citizenship, notion of, 130 emotion in survival, 131 feminists, rape threats to, 133 gender-based violence, citizenship and, 131 hetero-patriarchal capitalist societies, 132 messages from selfies, 129 naming individuals, 128, 129 networked reflective solidarity, articulation of, 132 networked reflective solidarity, victim-survivor selfies and, 132–135 poverty, sexual violence and, 132 selfie activism of, 128, 130 selfies, visual (and fleeting) nature of, 130 sensitivity of subject, 128–129 sexual violence, shattering illusions about, 134 social exclusion, inequality and citizenship, 131 speaking out, notion of, 129, 131 survivor faces positioned alongside words of rapists, 128 survivor rage, disruptive potential of, 133 survivor selfies, 128–135 survivor testimony, 129 timing of posts, 129 negar@duke.edu 170 INDEX Rape victim-survivors, Project Unbreakable and (cont.) trauma recognition, citizenship and, 132 victimhood, survivorhood and, 130 victim-survivor as activist citizen, re-articulation of figure of, 135 Real Eyes, 92 Representational violence, material effects of, 162 S Selfie activism, 17, 128, 130, 133, 135, 153, 155, 157 Selfie citizenship, 13–18, 40, 137–145 analysis of, 22, 24, 66 biometric governance and, 15 Selfiecity project, 93 Selfies activist selfies, power of, 129 acts of ‘bad’ global citizenship with, 44–45 acts of ‘good’ global citizenship with, 43–44 at Auschwitz, 45, 110, 111 as avatars, 163 azadimarch on Instagram, 22–27 backgrounds in, 25 celebrity activism in, 154–156 celebrity selfies, 67, 70 as ciphers, 163 citizenship and, 17, 162 civic awareness and, 49–57 collective representation and voice, self-less selfies and, 138 constant circulation of, 66 definition of, 163 digital citizenship and, 114 disciplinary perspective on, 60 documentary moments in, 110–112 Dosomething.org and, 50, 52–54 emancipatory qualities of, 153 ethical selfies, saying yes to, 156–157 of everyday life, 11, 68 ‘family’ selfies, 26 funeral selfies, 111–112 gestural imagery and, 23 global phenomenon of, 41 good and bad in bearing witness, 42 at Holocaust sites, 110 humanity, assertion through selfies of, 138 indexicality of, 91 Instagram selfies, 26, 51, 67 inter-celebrity connectivity, 68–70 intimacy in, illusion of, 72 ‘me me’ generation and, 50 messages from, 129 mobile witnessing by, 112 mobilisation of, 14, 15 as moment of complex negotiation, 115 multifaceted messages in, 115 narcissism and, 50, 56, 162 networked reflective solidarity, victim-survivor selfies and, 132–135 networking in Iran and, 61 nonrepresentational aspects of, 90 ‘other’ and, interplay between conceptions of, 40 out of place, 109–116 parenthood, depictions of, 71 payment-by-selfie system (Mastercard), 91 performance through selfies of citizenship, 23 performative force of, 23, 26 performative view of publicness and, 50 performativity and, 122 perspective of, ethics and, 46 negar@duke.edu INDEX phatic communion and, 67 on pilgrimage to Mecca, 111 placemaking selfies, 110–112, 114 political co-option of, 16, 23 politician as celebrity in, 68–70 politician selfies as charismatic engagement, 75–85 politician’s use of, 67 politicised use of, 14 power of place in, 110–111 premeditated management of, 68 promotional potential, 15 quotidian collective, alignment with, 59, 60 reposition as political action, 41–42 as representational politic, 162 responses following Nepal earthquake to, 43 selective imagery in, 44 selfie activism, alternative possibilities for, 17, 23 selfie-based gamified entertainment, 16 self-less selfies, 138, 141–142 self-representation in, 100, 162 self-witnessing aspect of, 109–116 sexually provocative selfies, resistance against, 94 Snapchat selfie lenses, 93 social capital and sharing of, 17 social space and, 112, 114, 115 strategic selfies, 78, 81 ‘street view’ selfies, 24, 25 survivor selfies, 128–130, 132–135 of Swedish politicians, 66, 68 thematic change in, 30 time-lapse selfies, 93 tracing effects of, 162 V-Day selfies in Beijing, 29–35 viral content of, 61 viral tragedies and dangers of, 41 171 virtual communities of, 55 visual (and fleeting) nature of, 130 youth self-expression and, 50 Selfie taking, 14, 77, 163 motivations for, 27 Selfie visibility, 17 Self-witnessing, digital citizen and, 109–116 Sexuality, 4, 134, 143 ShowYourSelfie campaign, 51, 54–56 Singapore, media climate in, 76–77 Smartphones usage in Singapore, 77 See also Camera phones Sociability, production and maintenance of, 67–68 Social context, fragmentation of, 52 Social interaction, new forms of, 66 Social sorting, 98, 101 Social spectatorship, 34 SuperStressFace campaign, 50, 54–56 Surveillance active vigilance against, 151 pervasiveness of, 153 politics of being unseen and, 149–157 T Taking It Global, 53 Technocultural affordances, 22 Tiananmen Square, 29, 30, 33–35 media manipulation in, 34 reflections on V-Day celebrations in, 31, 33 Time Magazine, 50 Transbodies, 4 Transphobic erasure, undoing of, 14 Twitter BlackLivesMatter hashtag, 154 negar@duke.edu 172 INDEX Twitter (cont.) CancelColbert hashtag, 154 influence of, 76 messaging on, 55 NotYourAsianSideKick hashtag, 154 self-branding on, 99 in Singapore, 78 V Visual protesting, refusal of engagement in, 152 Visual Social Media Laboratory, v W WeAreAble campaign, 51, 56 U UpdateYourStatus campaign, 51, 56 Y Youth campaigns, 50 categorisation of, 50 negar@duke.edu