Abstract
This chapter undertakes a genealogical approach to the selfie in looking for its media precursors by focusing on one of the selfie’s dominant features: its immediacy and its isochronism, meaning the simultaneity of individual and monitored image. Different from the traditional photographic portrait, the user can watch his/her representation on the screen of a mobile application, usually the smartphone. In the history of media technology, the video camera and the closed-circuit video installation have been the first appliances to offer the simultaneous technological image; thus, the closed-circuit video can be regarded as a cultural and technological predecessor to the selfie. In the further course of the argument, this idea is explored by referring the visual isochronism to cybernetic concepts such as “loop” and “feedback” as well as to Claude Shannon’s “mathematical theory of communication.” On the basis of a technological model of information and communication, this chapter furthers the idea of electronic media as being part of a larger system that reacts and interacts. In this context, media function not so much as tools of representation but as agents of discursive storage, calculation, and transmission systems. All these actions are enclosed in electronic and digital structures. Considered against this technological background, the selfie appears as a continuation of cybernetic concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
“Cybernation in effect means a new world of autonomy and decentralism in human affairs. […] To many people these new patterns seem to threaten the very structure of personal identity . For centuries we have been defining the nature of the self by separateness and non-participation, by exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness ” (McLuhan 2003, 54).
- 2.
According to Gilbert Simondon (1980), each technological movement demands an imaginary, in order to affiliate technological and social movements. He argues that “the real perfection of machines […] relates to the fact that the functioning of the machine conceals a certain margin of indetermination. It is such a margin that allows for the machine’s sensitivity to outside information. It is this sensitivity to information on the part of machines, much more than any increase in automatism, that makes possible a technical ensemble” (29).
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Krewani, A. (2018). The Selfie as Feedback: Video, Narcissism, and the Closed-Circuit Video Installation. In: Eckel, J., Ruchatz, J., Wirth, S. (eds) Exploring the Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_5
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