Selfie and World
On Instagrammable Places and Technologies for Capturing Them
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Author / Producer
Date
2023-06-12
Publication Type
Journal Article, Journal Article
ETH Bibliography
yes
Citations
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OPEN ACCESS
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Rights / License
Abstract
Instagrammable places are designed to be photographed for Instagram. This leads to the homogenization and commodification of the world to suit the app’s affordances. It is worth asking why Instagram users are so motivated to play along when only a miniscule fraction of them can monetize their pursuits. I argue that Instagram and its accompanying form, the selfie, touch upon a basic human need for meaning-making: for narratively organizing one’s experience of the world, and reversely for performing a narrativized identity in a meaningful world. The app establishes what Don Ihde has called a hermeneutic and an alterity relation to the world, by superficially contributing to an understanding of the world based on one’s own co-constitutive agency of framing and selecting features of the world to be photographed and shared, and by performing this agency to an audience.
Permanent link
Publication status
published
Editor
Book title
Journal / series
Volume
1 (1)
Pages / Article No.
1 - 11
Publisher
Universiteit Twente
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Philosophy; Everyday aesthetics; Instagram aesthetics; Selfie; Post-phenomenology; Travel; Hermeneutics
Organisational unit
09773 - Mazouz, Nadia / Mazouz, Nadia