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Can this truth be consistent across a range of platforms? Before the commercialisation of huge swaths of the internet (i.e. pre-Google/Facebook/Amazon, et al), it felt more possible to maintain a slew of identities that didn’t necessary need to correspond with one another. Now, as Facebook demands that we use our ‘real’ names, and as previously-discrete spheres of our lives congeal on these ever-present platforms, the thought of indulging contradictory selves seems fraudulent, like you have something to hide.
And when the algorithm acts as an oracle for the quantified self, why would one deviate from a ‘true’ self, lest we miss out on seeing it reflected back to us? Jurgenson makes a wry point of this: ‘Now that everyone knows you’re a dog, it’s difficult to be anything else.’ Who hasn’t compulsively rewatched their own Instagram stories? Who hasn’t felt the bemusement of being shown a recommended ad that doesn’t correspond to how they see themselves?
Of course, this self-surveillance, as Jurgenson notes, is ‘complemented with a healthy dose of external surveillance, too.’ And whether this surveillance is done by fans, friends, nemeses, corporations or the state, it adds to a kind of voyeurism that resembles watching television as we contribute to both looking and being looked at. If the social photo’s abundance results in desensitisation, individual agency can then be depoliticised and devalued. Like the affluent, western influencer who travels to India and takes non-consensual ‘street photography’ shots of food vendors at their jobs, it can become a kind of ‘creep shot’ that props up preexisting power dynamics on the pretext of ‘sharing’. Or, as Jurgenson writes: ‘people in public are objects to be claimed and exposed, and incipient virality takes precedent over permission.’
Why would one deviate from a ‘true’ self, lest we miss out on seeing it reflected back to us?
This sense of unrelenting tourism blurs the ethics of consent, especially if it seems like the world is a grab-bag of looking, conveniently captured whenever, wherever. At its best, it can lead to a decentralised mode of citizen journalism, circumventing state-censored news or capturing police violence that would otherwise be kept hidden. But if ‘the documentary consciousness…turns the world into a massive department store in which everything is free,’ then what does it mean to require privacy? Already, as researcher Kate Crawford has observed, this tension is resulting in what she calls ‘surveillant anxiety’, where people are reacting to big-data surveillance in offhanded ways: dressing in normcore fashion to blend in, posting less, ‘whitewalling’ (regularly deleting social media content and starting from scratch), encrypted messaging, moving on to less ‘serious’ platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. But she also recognises that this way of camouflaging the self isn’t immediately viable or available to everyone, particularly those who are already marginalised in society.
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As with the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ within the social photo, it’s important to note that privacy isn’t necessarily the opposite of visibility. For those already hyper-surveilled in society, it is more a matter of being both hypervisible and rendered unseen. It’s no accident that the accusation of being ‘attention-seeking’ online is often lobbed at those on the margins – queers, women, people of colour, disabled folk, and anyone else who sits on the intersections of these, and more – for indulging in the act of actualising selves that traditionally did not merit attention.
Amid cries of ‘narcissism’ that these types of social photos regularly elicit, beneath it lies a sense of personal storytelling that not only acts as an archive of the (mutable) self, but seeks to attain self-determination through documentation. Like other Do-It-Yourself pursuits such as zine culture, it’s a form of seizing back ownership that refuses to foreground permission; instead people actively choose to tell the stories they want, how they want, and when they want. Are these modes of storytelling only ‘attention-seeking’ because of their racialised and gendered natures?
Within the shareable social photo, it’s not a contest between human nature and technology, but a dance; they move in tandem with each other in the world.
In The Social Photo, Jurgenson acknowledges this: even as we tell new truths through these mediums, ‘holding a camera over one’s lunch has come to be a paradigmatic example of oversharing… Unless a meal is very special, the photo of food fails at being a scene, the traditional domain of photography.’ As such, these tensions construct a dichotomy that is made up of the false axes of ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, much like when selfies, not professional portraiture, are taken less seriously, or when photojournalism is celebrated as more ‘objective’.
For all of ‘social media’s gluttonous phenomenology’, the fact of its boundlessness acts as both a guise and upholder for human experience and identity. Within the shareable social photo, it’s not a contest between human nature and technology, but a dance; they move in tandem with each other in the world, revealing societal flaws, reinforcing capital, dismantling power. If, as Jurgenson writes, the ‘messiness of lived experience’ is ‘made to be something merely observable’ online, how do we distinguish ourselves from or replicate the pack, how do we create a sense of community that’s doesn’t automatically fetishise so-called ‘uniqueness’? The stories we tell bend and fold according to angles and the light; and the relationship to desire will always show its hand.
The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media is available now at Readings.
The 2020 New Critic Award is now open – you could win $3,000 total prize money and a year-long column in KYD!
