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  • Selfie
  • Amanda Fields and Melanie Carter

Keyword Essay

As more and more multimodal projects emerge through writing program curricula, and as community literacy projects redefine what it means to facilitate change and reciprocity through generating multiple texts for multiple audiences, we think it would be useful to consider the significance and prevalence of the selfie as a genre, particularly in regard to its potential power to inspire social activism and critical consciousness.

In 2013, Time magazine published the cover story “The Selfiest Cities in the World,” which reported on a geotagging project of the top 100 places where selfies had appeared on Instagram, including, at the head of the list, Makati (Philippines), Manhattan (New York), Miami (Florida), Anaheim and Santa Ana (California), and Petaling Jaya (Wilson). While Time magazine’s methods were flawed (e.g., not all selfies are tagged as such, nor do all appear on Instagram), the prevalence of selfies across several regions and cultures is clear. Further, while the selfie as a genre is not confined to a specific age group, digital trends are often assumed to be the realm of youth, and, therefore, selfies are often linked in popular media with assumptions about youth, e.g., that technology such as the smartphone has disconnected them from healthy interpersonal relations. In 2013, Time also focused on “The Me Me Me Generation.” The May 20, 2013 cover depicts a young woman lying on her stomach, legs up, staring into her smartphone, which she is holding in a position that suggests she is taking a selfie. This issue offers a discussion about why millennials suffer from entitlement issues and how they “will save us all” (Stein).

This emphasis on young people—their potentiality as well as the ways they may disappoint—is not new, of course. Young people are often divided into those who must develop into productive citizens and those who are deviant and must be contained. Susan Talburt and Nancy Lesko note that adolescence is a term that allows for certain kinds of narratives to exist. Since the 1880s, and with the emergence of the concept of adolescence from G. Stanley Hall, youth have been trained to be disciplined citizens, or “potential offender[s],” or members of subcultures. Such categories contribute to the idea that youth are always “‘becoming,’ … their bodies, actions, and emotions … read as evidence of their immaturity” (Talburt and Lesko 14). Henry Giroux’s sobering assessment is that youth are no longer viewed as a “social investment” but either as “consumers” or “troubling, reckless, dangerous persons” (3). Because of the entrenched [End Page 101] nature of youth categories, Lesko and Talburt call those who work with youth to be wary of interventions and “new” approaches to this work, asking how these activities “recirculate discourses that universalize youth categorically” (19).

Talburt and Lesko’s discussion of the ways that youth are categorized helps clarify the context influencing the 2013 cover of Time, where we see a depiction of a teenager, comfortable in her own privilege. She is focused on herself and the way she presents to the world, yet she seems to lack concern for that world around her, preferring the screen she stares into. Assumptions about class, race, gender, and nationality are evident. Here is the white American teenager, taking a selfie. She is entitled but carries some abstract adult hope of preserving and transforming society for the better. It is a progress narrative with obvious limitations. The popular media lens tends to convey the selfie as emblematic of the shallowness and privilege of (often white) contemporary youth, and the genre is understood from this limited perspective. We are interested in shifting this narrative about youth and in rethinking the genre of selfie (and genres similar to the selfie) as a medium for collaboration and social transformation.

In this essay we discuss the emergence of the term “selfie” in popular media and its status as indicative of navel-gazing digital transference. Next, we suggest that the genre of the selfie is flexing to accommodate social movement, and we consider the rhetorical significance of the declarative impulses accompanying selfies. We then discuss a literacy partnership between composition students in the United States and in Egypt...

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