Losh shares that scholar Mariam Posner taught a class recently where her students spent a long time reading about and learning how to write a digital ethnography. Posner shared that there was a wide range of objects of study: “there was a huge range, everything from Yik Yak to a couple of Tinder papers. I also saw papers about women’s physical fitness culture on various social media platforms, along with outliers that focused on a very specific YouTube fan community or Twitter fan community.” All Posner shared sounds so interesting to me. It makes me want to take a course just like that one. It also makes me think about our final project and I’m sure we’ll end up doing something really cool.
Losh also shared that another scholar, Alice E. Marwick, worked on a paper on the duck face. How interesting to know that people are doing this kind of research. When I read about the term ‘the duck face’ and the research that has been done, my memory went back to when I was a child and I remembered taking selfies along with my older sisters with our disposable cameras. We would then run to CVS, a few blocks away from home, to reveal the roll using their one hour photo service. We would go through all that process to then find out, when looking at the pictures, that many of those selfies had half our faces cut off or were blurry. It’s funny to remember that because it was the coolest thing to do back then. How easy it is now to grab our phones, snap a selfie, retake if needed, to then share it with others all done in seconds or maybe few minutes.
Losh’s blog posts also talked about scholars Terri Senft and Mark Marino. Senft mentioned that selfies in the classroom could be used for illustrating, opposing or complicating “what the text is saying”. Which I found important for her to say because I feel like selfies don’t take away from text or replace the text but they enhance and expand what it’s being communicated. Senft also states “at the end of the day, the object of analysis in my teaching isn’t the selfie. It’s the idea: the idea of identity, the idea of belonging, the idea of surveillance, the idea of the outsider.” Which shows that Senft is not focused on the selfie itself. But rather, in the idea that expands the selfie further.
Marino noted, like some of the other scholars mentioned, the privacy of the students. Which is always a concern for those who do not feel comfortable sharing private information online. I personally always opt to remain as private as possible so it is appreciated when privacy is acknowledge and respected. I remember recently sharing with a classmate from a different class, how we use twitter in this class and how Dr. Zamora has encourage us to use twitter as part of our class. Without letting me finish, she responded immediately that she would not feel comfortable at all having a professor telling her she must create a social media account as part of the class requirements. I then, instantly shared that we weren’t required to expose our identity and that we could maintain our privacy. It was only then that she had a complete different approach to using a social media platform as part of a class. This shows the concern people may feel when they think their privacy is going to be compromised in some kind of way. I found interesting the projects Marino shared that he did in his class with his students. The “know thy selfie” paper, the “specular selfie” which was nearly my favorite one, and how his students participated in two “netprovs”. Which I’m excited about ours coming up soon in this semesters. I enjoyed how Losh did a great job in bringing a total different perspective on what a selfie is and how it has been incorporated into the classroom.
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