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Seeing Ourselves Through Technology
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There are three distinct modes of self- representation in digital media: written, visual and quantitative. Each mode has a separate pre-digital history, each of which is presented briefly in this chapter. Blog
and written status updates are descendents of diaries, memoirs, commonplace books and autobiographies. Selfies are descendants of visual artists’ self-portraits, and the quantitative modes of life logs, personal maps, productivity records and activity trackers are descendants of genres such as accounting, habit tracking and to-do lists. In today’s digital culture, the three modes are intertwined. Digital self-representation is conversational and allows new voices to be heard. However, society disciplines digital self- representations such as selfies and blogs through ridicule and pathologising. In 1524 Parmigianino painted his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Parmi- gianino used oil paints to paint on the hollow inside of half a wooden ball, to mimic the shape of the mirror he copied his reflection from. The distortions of the convex mirror are exactly replicated in Parmigianino’s self-portrait. His hand is in the foreground, grossly distorted by the fish- eye perspective of the convex mirror he is looking into to see himself. We can just see the short pencil he is holding to sketch his own image. We see what he sees.
Parmigianino used a convex mirror to see himself; today we use digital technologies. We snap selfies on our phones and post them to Instagram. We write about our lives in blogs and in status updates to Facebook. We wear activity trackers on our wrists, log our productivity and allow Facebook and other apps to track our locations continuously. The data we track is displayed back to us as graphs, maps, progress charts and timelines. Parmigianino’s self-portrait may not seem to have much in common with a FitBit user’s charts of steps and sleep patterns, but both are examples of how technology is a means to see part of ourselves. Whether we use a wearable, networked step-counter or a convex mirror and oil paints, technology can reflect back to us a version of who we are. And the data, filters and social media we use to see and share our reflections distort our images in their own particular ways, just as Parmigianino’s convex mirror distorted the perspective of his face.
Walker Rettberg Jill - Personal Name
1st Edtion
9781137476661
NONE
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology
Management
English
Palgrave Macmillan
2014
Norway
1-112
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