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Editor's Notes

• #5: 1600: 20-30% of Europeans could write late 1800s: 80-90% of Europeans could write There’s a long history of self-representation, and some argue that the first time anyone drew anything - with a stick in the sand, or on a cave wall - it was unavoidably an act of self-representation. Self-portraits and in particular diaries and autobiographies have been strongly connected to the development of an idea of the “self”, too, which really didn’t exist as we know it until the modern era. The ancient Greeks and even earlier cultures did have an idea of the soul, however, which was in many ways similar to our idea of the self. Know thyself and take care of yourself were twin principles to the ancient Greeks, and self-care was a necessary prerequisite to self-knowledge. However, as Foucault has pointed out, taking care of yourself was largely forgotten in our Christian “morality of asceticism”. Writing about oneself was rare until the late 1500s, although Augustine’s Confessions from the 4th century are a famous piece of self-writing, and there are some examples later too. Of course, only 20-30% of Europeans could write around the year 1600, and it wasn’t until the late 1800s that 80-90% of Europeans could write. So clearly textual self-representation was a practice only for the elite up until more or less the last century. (Chartier 2001, 125).)
• #7: I’m also talking about personal media, not mass media, and not professional art or literature. The quote above is a slight simplification of what Marika Lüders actually says, but more or less her point – she wants us to focus not only on mass media, as media studies has tended to do in the twentieth century, but also on personal media, which include digital and non-digital (pre-digital) forms, such as diaries, scrapbooks, phone calls.
• #8: This is personal, self-representational media. This is a couple of pages from a school diary I used in my last year of high school, in 1990. There’s clearly a template here (dated boxes, the idea of writing down appointments, plans and homework that is due), but really most of it is embellished freely. However, there’s clearly symbiosis with mass culture. The flower power reference, the sort of adapted drawing for someone vaguely The Cure-ish, a poem copied in (by popular Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold). Note of a movie I saw with a friend.
• #9: Here’s another example of personal, self-representational media: a traditional photo album. Photos glued in in order with annotations. Meant to be shared with friends and family.
• #11: Image: http://kommunikation.wikia.com/wiki/Sitzung_1:_Pierre_Bourdieu._Was_ist_sprechen%3F_PP-Präsentation_(SS_09,_Gruppe_C)?file=Bourdieu.png
• #18: Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips: Photo Op, 2005. Tony Blair in front of an oil explosion. Reference to Iraq war. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/15/tony-blair-selfie-photo-op-imperial-war-museum
• #23: No surprise then, that people like to feel knowledge about and power over themselves. (terri senft calls it a grab. Physical, skin to skin, doing something with it and also “up for grabs”, open to interpretation. Not gaze anymore.) “The camera expanded the possibilities of self-portraiture. It can bar the viewer from possessing the photographer.” (Seeing Ourselves) “Given how often they swapped their broadcaster/audience roles with one another and with fans, I realized I needed to speak about the circulation of camgirl images less in terms of a traditional filmic gaze and more as a series of “grabs” (Senft: 2008:46). I chose this word because of its relation to skin: grab means to grasp, to seize for a moment, to capture (an object, attention), and perhaps most significant: to leave open for interpretation, as in the saying “up for grabs.””
• #24: To some extent, outsourcing some of our self-representation to technology may not be that different to outsourcing it to a painter. From the book “Seeing Ourselves”: “Interwar photographer - androgynous and disturbing - relishing the power of being able to turn the camera’s eye on the world.” Germain Krull, on the other hand, keeps the camera as a barrier between herself and the world.
• #28: distortion of the mirror. Technology that helps us see ourselves also changes us We can never see ourselves the way that others see us. Also: others can never see us the way we see ourselves. Self-portraits are both an attempt to see ourselves and an attempt to show others they way WE think we look.
• #29: One of the chapters in my book is titled “Filtered Reality”. Filters were popularised by Instagram and smartphone apps like Hipstamatic, but of course they have existed before, only less easily appliable by amateurs. I use filters in the literal sense: a filter applied to a photograph. But I also use it metaphorically to talk about the ways in which technology very visibly distorts our self-representations. Sometimes we deliberately select a filter. Sometimes we are unaware of how our data, our text, our images are being processed. Filters are technological. But they can also be cultural. This filter is a great example - it was one of the defaults when Apple’s Photobooth came out, but of course it is copying Andy Warhol’s famous paintings.