ABSTRACT
The selfie, once a novel and highly criticized digital mode of self-portraiture, has now appeared to become wholly average. Presently, only shocking or unique selfies resonate, particularly now that they are a ubiquitous digital practice for individuals on social media and embraced by businesses, brands, museums, attractions, and more to build ties with consumers, patrons, and visitors. The ubiquity of selfies in individual daily life, combined with its use in consumer culture, allows us to consider that we are now in fact in a selfie culture—a middle ground that is the result of bottom-up and top-down flows by individuals and consumer culture. We consider this space as an emergent communicative field, a terrain from which to examine how the selfie went from novel to omnipresent and became just understood as something normal in contemporary culture. To analyze this, we tie these bottom-up and top-down flows together through the idea of historically situating the selfie as a self-portraiture. Therefore, we use the visual rhetoric of self-portraiture to build this arena. We explore considerations of “peak-” or “post-” selfie in conjunction with consumer culture, all to ultimately define the idea of selfie culture and explicate it as a groundwork for future studies.
