ULRIKE GRETZEL

11:30 am

SELFIE-TAKING AS TOURISTIC LOOKING

With tourists’ increasing use of social media for photosharing, one of the core concepts underlying tourist photography is digital immediacy, which means that because of networked travel photos communicate: ‘‘not just, ‘I was here’; but ‘I am here, right now, having this experience in real-time, and here is the evidence that this is the case.’”

ULRIKE GRETZEL

Ulrike Gretzel is currently the Director of Research at Netnografica, an innovative market research company that provides actionable insights by extracting meaning from online conversations.

The popularity of selfies derives from the increase of internetenabled smartphones, adoption of front-facing cameras and growth of visual-centric social media platforms.

Smart phones play a critical role in facilitating selfie culture because they support both the picture capture and the instant

upload. The introduction of the reversible, front-facing screen on the iPhone 4 in 2010 that allowed users to see themselves as they are taking a picture of themselves was a crucial design innovation that paved the way to smart-phone supported selfies. Mobile apps that permit instantaneous editing and enhancing of one’s digital self-portraits as well as the use of the folksonomy and hashtag #selfie played a central role in the naming and social diffusion of the trend. Importantly, as tourists increasingly share pictures online, even traditional cameras start to be internet-enabled to support tourists in their mobile practices. This development facilitates digital immediacy and makes immediate online touristic self-presentations possible. Perhaps more importantly, photos increasingly serve as avenues for self-presentation on the Internet and particularly on social media.

The selfie first became widely shared online as a profile picture on social network sites to aid users’ self-presentation vis-à-vis other community members. Today selfies are ubiquitous on social network sites and have become an integral part of users’ online identities. As social media provide tourists with a larger and instant audience, previous research has argued that social media allow tourists to engage in identity management. Tourists keep social media in mind and are found to engage in identity management during various stages of tourist photography. It is argued that what tourists share on social media is carefully selected and potentially edited

to elicit desired reactions.

The boundaries of what is and is not considered a selfie are fuzzy and are becoming more blurred. For instance, the self-timer on a traditional camera could be seen as a selfie-friendly technology. From a representational perspective, camera manufacturers sell accessories, such as selfie-sticks, that facilitate the taking of selfies from a farther distance, making them look like regular photographs. Today, selfies may also include other people in the picture. Selfies are not considered self portraits but rather ‘‘portraits of the self in the act of self-portrayal.” Leaning on Freund’s (1980) tracing of the history of portrait photography, in which she described smiling—or performing—for the camera as a learned behaviour within a particular visual culture, Wendt (2014) argues that new facial expressions, such as the ‘duck face’ that is prominently displayed in selfies, are also learned behaviour and parodies of portraits in the age of social media.

From a practice-oriented perspective selfies are also not necessarily taken by the photographer, as is the case with tourismorganization sponsored drones in the example of Tourism New Zealand. Because of the blurred boundaries we consider the selfie as evolving and subject to changing technologies and practices that accompany it. The contemporary notion of the selfie involves a digital picture of the self or parts thereof posted on social media platforms and often tagged with #selfie but not necessarily so. We understand it not as confined to one specific type of technology or a specific genre of photograph or video, but as characterized by the desire to frame the self in a picture taken to be shared with an online audience. While the practice of photographic selfportraits is not new, the selfie practice is: The technological assemblage of digital photography allowing for more photo-taking, smartphones/selfie-sticks allowing the tourists greater control over the photos and social-media sharing with the use of folksonomies and verbal cues to describe photos creates a new genre. This allows

us to fit the selfie in with tourist photography which we also see as ‘‘a social practice, a networked technology, a material object and an image.”