Digital Expressions of the Self(ie) by Ray, Avishek; Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel; Raman, Usha; Web, Martin; Gupta, Neha; Komarraju, Sai Amulya; Premika, Anuja; Azam, Riad; Salim, Farhat; Subramanian, Pranavesh;

Rövid leírás:

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India and its diaspora.

Hosszú leírás:

The book examines the social and cultural role of selfies in India. It looks at how the selfie, unlike the photograph, which was a gesture towards an external reality, remains intimately self-referential, yet reconfigures social ordering, identity formation, agency, and spaces in curious ways.

This volume approaches questions about the construction and performance of the self through the digital selfie and uses this situated, contextualized, and culturally specific phenomenon as a site to explore the themes of self-making, place-making, gender, subjectivity, and power. Highlighting the specific contexts of production, the authors examine the array of self-expressive capabilities realized in a multitude of uses of the selfie that simultaneously reconfigure the self, the space, and the world.

An important study of visual social media culture, the volume will be useful for interpreting everyday media experiences and will be of interest to students and researchers of image studies, visual studies, photography studies, visual culture, media studies, culture studies, cultural anthropology, digital humanities, popular culture, sociology of technology, and South Asian studies.

?Selfies have been subjected to scholarly scrutiny over the past decade. But this collection of essays on ?the social life of selfies in India? brings a refreshing and important localized take on the tactility, temporality, and technique of the selfie. Contributors draw from a variety of disciplines including Sociology, Fan Studies, Urban Studies, and Media Studies to interrogate the evolutionary role of selfies among various grassroots groups in one of the most populous countries globally. Considering established social media like Instagram, newer social media like TikTok, and messaging apps like WhatsApp, the collection unravels how selfies are constructed and deployed by identity groups including young men and domestic labourers, and interest groups including tourists, fans, and avid readers. Collectively, these emotive stories question the socio-cultural impacts of selfies as product and praxis, and their enduring ability to shape human understanding one snap at a time.?