The Invisible Lives of Selfies

The selfie has rapidly emerged as a significant aspect of visual culture. Selfies can be considered a kind of self-portrait, with roots in artistic self-representation, popular photography, and digital imaging. However, the visual image is only one, albeit crucial, component of the selfie. How that image circulates, how it is consumed and commented upon constitutes key considerations of how selfies work. But the vast majority of actions that affect selfies occur without much knowledge of the selfie taker. In this way, selfies implicate a host of concerns beyond the representational, including commercial, ethical, and political issues arising from their status as data.

The selfie, while clearly a visual phenomenon, also includes data traces, facial recognition and tagging systems, data tracking and analytics that are invisible to most selfie makers and consumers. These back-end processes invoke multiple concerns in the realm of privacy, surveillance, and security, in part due to the enormous amount of information – data – posted selfies contain.

This article focuses on the “invisible” aspects of the selfie, turning the gaze to understanding what we don’t see when we look at, post, and comment on selfies. The analysis reveals what lies beneath selfies, asking: What is being done with selfie data? Several aspects are discussed, including how selfies produce machine readable data, used by programmers, marketers, and governments. AI filters and facial recognition software makes an appearance, along with their inherent racial and visual biases - mirrored, reflected, and caught in the shadows. Finally, this article frames filters, data selfies and the face as particular genres of visual culture increasingly linked with algorithms, filters, and data, to question the cultural, political, and social implications of the selfie.