Description
This book is open access under a CC BY license. Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.
Review:Rettberg fills an important gap in the existing literature with insightful analysis of a wide variety of very recent digital practices. Her writing presents an appealing voice of academic authority that is inflected with a personal experience strongly grounded in an ethos of embodied and situated knowledge. Rettberg explains what it means to be a participant observer who tracks her own movements, emotions, and interactions with ubiquitous technologies and many other means of self-surveillance. This is a timely and compact scholarly monograph that provides an extended critical interpretation of a contemporary topic. As an important feminist new media theorist, Rettberg is worth listening to. - Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego, USA Jill Walker Rettberg challenges us to take seriously selfies and other forms of digital self-expression and understand them in the broader context of culture and power. In so doing, she connects important ideas and theories about aesthetics, privacy, art and data to explore and explain contemporary data-fication of the body and identity. I will never look at a selfie the same way again. - Steve Jones, University of Illinois, USA Rettberg's incisive examination of contemporary tools and habits of self-documentation - blogs and Facebook updates, Fitbits and selfies - reveals the ways those practices relate to centuries-old patterns like autobiography and self-portraits. She also demonstrates that contemporary distaste for self-documentation is often motivated by a desire to discipline or silence the (non-elite) practitioners, a habit targeted with special ferocity at young women. Seeing Ourselves... is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the history and patterns of self-documentation. Clay Shirky, New York University, USA
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