In her reflection on her essay “The Selfie: A Reinvention of Identity in Visual Self-Depiction,” Fatiha Kamal unpacks and interrogates how she learned to write essays in high school: “My essays from high school were very formulaic, in the standard five-paragraph format that was divorced from my own original voice and creativity. Editing and revision were always performed to check spelling and grammar. In short, my view of the essay form was an incredibly narrow one.”
Since conclusions are often the most formulaic and unreflective features of a five-paragraph essay, we’ve excerpted the conclusion from Kamal’s first draft as well as from her final draft. As you compare, consider how the final draft models a more thoughtful approach to composing a conclusion? Try to go beyond the obvious fact that the final version is longer and name particular differences in quality, clarity, and rhetoric.
Draft 1: Conclusion
In her TedTalk “Art in the Age of Instagram,” Jia Jia Fei, the former Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum explains that with the advent of social media, the “rapid digitization of art” has allowed individuals to quickly share images of museum-curated art, turning the work from an “art of object” to a “social object,” in which is value is assigned to it not from the artist but rather the viewers and their reaction to the art. With selfies and self-portraits, this idea is particularly significant; the relationship between the two is unlike that of a relationship between any other two genres of painting and their digital equivalent. The innovation that is the selfie is not simply that of a technological innovation, but also an innovation in art and self-expression. It is not only a representation of how in a highly-connected, social-media centric world everything including our identities is a matter of public opinion— a selfie has also become a reminder of how interconnected we are to each other and how our identities are a reaction to the world around us and the people we are surrounded by. From the internal explorations of a self-portrait, the selfie has prompted us to attempt to understand ourselves through an alternate lens, one that shows us as a part of a greater world-view rather than as a separate individual.
Final Draft: Conclusion
Former Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Jia Jia Fei describes the selfie as an “art object” turned “social object” (00:02:55). In her Tedx Talk “Art in the Age of Instagram,” Fei explains that with the transition of a piece from an art object to a social object, “the physical object” becomes “an object completely defined by the conversation happening around it rather than the experience itself” (00:03:01-00:03:15). As digital avenues of image production and distribution become more accessible, the ability to share art expands to potentially millions of viewers on the Internet. The scope of exposure to the work in such a short amount of time results in a shift in who dominates the conversation surrounding the art. No longer is the artist in control of the meaning of the piece, but rather the multitude of viewers in the comments section who collectively determine it, often disregarding the intention of the subject altogether.
While altering the artist-viewer dynamic that self-portraits had previously established, the status of selfies as “social objects” have also helped alter the purpose behind self-depiction in the technological age. A 2018 study conducted by Sarah Diefenbach and Lara Christoforakos at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich investigated the psychological effects of selfie-taking as a means of self-presentation. The study participants’ reported feelings toward selfies—the emotional and social impacts that taking and posting selfies may have—varied from person to person, correlated to their levels of self-promotion and self-disclosure. Diefenbach and Christoforakos offer the possibility that the appeal of selfies lies not in a singular effect which could be deemed positive or negative, but rather in the fact that selfies provide “a lightweight possibility for self-presentation.” The selfie provides an outlet for self-expression that the self-portrait had previously laid claim to. However, it does so in a way that “feels good for people, [and] does not reveal too much about deeper motivations,” essentially allowing the viewer to determine whatever the image’s underlying purpose is. With such a rapid process for image production, image posting, and social feedback that allows the subject to “strategically adjust and experiment with the impression they make on others,” the subject of a selfie retains an adaptable and inconsequential identity in the context of the single image, something that was difficult to accomplish with self-portraits given the medium’s own set of constraints. Thus, the selfie as a mode of self-depiction may have altered the previously established motivation of wanting to express a complex n identity to a viewer to wanting to ‘please’” the viewer instead (Diefenbach and Christoforakos).
The selfie’s key innovation is not simply technological. While the technological advances of cameras, smartphones, and social media led to the birth of the selfie in the early twenty-first century, the selfie’s most significant effect as an innovation is its alteration of how we view the practice of self-depiction in the twenty-first century. Where traditional self-portraits have served as a vehicle for artists to communicate their identities to viewers for centuries, the selfie shifted the artist-viewer dynamic by relying on the viewer to help shape the photo’s—and the artist’s— identity. Whether the selfie is of oneself on vacation, with friends, or simply alone in a bathroom with their smartphone pointed at the mirror, there is always an audience willing to praise or ridicule the image. In a highly connected, social media-centric world, the selfie serves as a reminder that everything, including our own identities, are a matter of public opinion.