From Self-Portraits to Selfies

As a longstanding tradition ever since the invention of photography, the self-portrait represents what makes humans unique: our highly developed self-awareness that motivates us to capture and preserve ourselves in some material way, so we can re-experience, re-examine, and perhaps better understand not just ourselves, but also the very process of capturing our own self-awareness. But it was not until the invention of digital photography and the internet that this endeavor blossomed among both professionals and amateurs. Everyone had the opportunity to not just take self-portraits, but also to shoot as many as one desired at no extra cost, to choose the best results immediately by viewing the camera LCD screen, to edit the images oneself on a computer, and to share them online. As a result, self-portraits became highly popular in online photosharing communities such as Flickr in the early 2000s.

Having been a photographer all my life, as well as a psychoanalytic cyberpsychologist studying online behavior, I was fascinated by the impact self-portraits were having in online communities. Because our mind intrinsically rivets to the characteristics of the human face, seeing someone's self-portrait in social media makes them feel more real, more so than simply typing text. Self-portraits are a highly effective method of revealing oneself in cyberspace while attempting to control that projected self-awareness. The massive numbers of self-portraits that began to appear online provided an unprecedented opportunity to study this phenomenon in depth.

The “objective self-portrait” creates the illusion that someone else might have taken the photograph, in traditional photography by placing the camera on a surface or tripod to shoot from a distance, or more recently in the use of the “selfie stick” that enables one to place a phone camera at the end of a pole. The greater the distance between camera and subject, the less likely the viewer will assume it is a sel