In this example the person who watermarked and

In this example, the person who watermarked and reposted
someone else’s selfie did not post selfies of their own on Tum-
blr. The person admitted to that in one of the responses to crit-
icism. Looking at this and similar conflicts from the past years,
I would argue that this is an important distinction and a big
reason for why the reposting blogger didn’t understand that
selfies can mean a lot for people who regularly share them. For
those people on Tumblr, who take and share sexy selfies, these
images are much more than a mere photograph. For them,
selfies are expressions of their bodies and selves, ways of being
or becoming. We will return to this in more detail shortly.
CONTEXTS
How do social, cultural, technical, geographical, political and
other relevant contexts shape and constrain how we take and
share selfies? Starting from the technical context, we need
to think about the role of platform and app affordances.
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55 How Do We Selfie?
Affordances, as mentioned in the Introduction, refer to the
perceived use potential of a given technology. They depend on
the intentions of the particular person using it. How do the
affordances of Snapchat, Instagram or Tumblr shape how we
take, share and interact around selfies?
On most popular social media apps and platforms like
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Tumblr, people’s images
flow in remixed streams of social information. Mine mingles
with yours. Visual, textual and hypertextual (i.e., links and
hashtags) merge in a ‘post’, and multiple posts make a ‘feed’,
a ‘dashboard’ or a ‘wall’ experience. We encounter our own
and other people’s selfies in a noisy, colourful, rich flow of
stuff, much of which is visual. This is an important contextu-
al characteristic. While caricaturists and satirists like to poke
fun at people who post online, by equating this with the act
of yelling ‘I had pasta for lunch!’ out of a window, or nailing
photographic auto-portraits of themselves to the wall of the
city hall, the analogies are not apt. Yes, both places can be
considered (partially) public, but a restaurant check-in on a
Facebook feed and a selfie on an Instagram account join an
endless, quickly refreshing throng of other similar content.
There is a speed and a rhythm in it, which influences how we
make sense of what is public and what is not. If our utter-
ances are wiped off the edge of the screen with a blink of an
eye, posting selfies and status updates feels much less weird
than yelling ‘I had pasta!’ from your window would.
Beyond the flow-like experience that is common across
many platforms, each specific app or platform has its own
affordances for (visual) self-expression and communication.
Let’s look at some of Instagram’s and Snapchat’s.
Anyone who uses Instagram knows it is intended as a
smartphone app. While viewing via a web browser from a
computer is easy, posting from a computer requires a specific
additional app. It has built-in filters and photo editing tools.