Colescing the Mirror and Screen

Coalescing the Mirror and the Screen

Consuming the ‘Self’ Online

 Continuum
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1239066

Abstract;

While humanity has always found means to represent itself through material artefacts, the digital age and its attendant screen culture offer interesting ways to ubiquitously capture and to produce the self as a digital artefact online for personal and public consumption. The non-stop capture of ourselves and our specular double are distinctive to digital living where the self can be objectified and consumed relentlessly, and where others can partake in consuming us. This paper argues that the self remains a primal subject of interest online sustaining our ‘mirror moment’ of self-discovery and recognition. Our fascination with the self is elevated further through our social and historical valorisation of the screen, which has over time stood for public spectacle and voyeurism. The screen, once the preserve of newsmakers, the celebrity or the morbid, has been disaggregated into a theatre for the consumption of the self. This ubiquitous consumption of the screen is premised through the concepts of the mirror and the screen in this paper. 

Copies at;
 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/25CTrAc2JqAJS44TEcf5/full

Self-Production through the Banal and the Fictive: Self and the Relationship with the Screen

 

 International Journal of E-Politics

 Volume 7 • Issue 2 • April-June-2016, pp 51-61

 

 

The self is performed through the banal of the everyday on social media. The banality of the everyday constitutes an integral part of our communication on digital platforms.Taking this as part of our performative lives in the digital economy, the paper looks at ways in which we co-produce the self through the banality of the everyday as wellas a wider imagination and engagement with the world. These wider engagements are termed as ‘fictive’ not because they are unreal but through a conceptual notion of how the self is performed and imagined through wider world events in digital platforms and screen cultures where convergence of technologies allow us to be constantly consumed through the screen as we live out our daily lives. The narration of our lives through the banal and the fictive constantly co-produces the self through a situated domesticity of the everyday and equally through the eventful. In the process it reveals our ongoing relationship with the screen as an orifice for the production of self and the construction of a social reality beyond our immediate domesticity.

Neda, martyrdom and the media event: Death imagery as an iconic memory

The Poster, 
Volume 3 Issue 1-2,
 http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=21478/

Abstract;


Death imagery online is a conflicted area of examination. At times it can assume a virality that will change public opinion creating iconic moments where death functions as a transformative device. The Internet with its ineradicable features to preserve content makes death a performance that can be consumed stripped of time and space. Death imagery becomes immortalized on the Internet defying the physical mortality of the body as a site of decay and decomposition. This article examines the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, exploring the entwined notions of witnessing and how the death event courted virality, immortalizing Neda as a global icon. The Internet became a site of double articulation where the act of dying was both contemporaneous and historical – captured, disseminated and consumed non-stop on the Internet. This temporal dislocation of the Internet means death as a media event can be both banalized as part of popular culture and equally consigned to the iconic; igniting affective communities that can domesticate death for collective grieving, communion and agency.

 Neda Agha-Soltan grave site in Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Iran. Attribution:By Arashnikkhah (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Self-representation and the disaster event: self-imaging, morality and immortality

Moral Limits of Self-Representation and Disaster Sites

My paper published in the Journal of Media Practice 16(3) entitled, Self-representation and the disaster event: self-imaging, morality and immortality, examines the ethics of capturing and imaging the self against disaster sites.

 

 

Abstract, 

There's growing interest in the notion of the ‘selfie’ in the digital age. Much of the interest has been making sense of this digital genre pervasive in its manifestation while implicating the individual and hinging on public gaze in digital platforms. As a form of self-representation, the selfie reveals the complex interplay of identity politics and self-curation where the self is amenable to multiple iterations of public gaze. This article, drawing on this complex interplay, inspects a specific phenomenon in this selfie culture where there is a tendency to picture oneself against the scene of trauma or tragedy. The ‘disaster selfie’ or ‘disaster porn’ as a particular genre invokes questions of the moral limit in the objectification and aestheticisation of self. This article explores the moral politics of disaster selfies, the role of the abject and our quest for immortality where these invoke a wider crisis for visuality and image ethics online.

Copies at link, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jgFKhGFYTNpzcgdFnYHH/full