Selfie Culture in the Age of Corporate and State Surveillance

This article addresses the implications for the growing use of selfies and the culture it is producing under a regime of neoliberalism marked by an unchecked celebration of the self, commodification, and privatisation. The author argues that the selfie is not just another fad deeply enmeshed in popular culture. On the contrary, selfies are less about entertainment and vanity then they are symptomatic of a retreat from privacy rights, an intense site for the commodification of the self, and a veritable resource for the surveillance state and its national intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency. Selfies are symptomatic of the power of the social media to turn public space into private displays. Not only do selfies make the self into an object of consumption, they produce a non-stop outpouring displayed as a form of self-absorbed performance. Selfie culture also rewrites the social as a space for what often amounts to an overabundance of narcissistic pandering. Selfie culture not only puts privacy rights at risk as people willingly give up personal information, it also replaces any viable notion of the social by reinforcing the notion that the personal is the only viable form of agency. In short, the article argues that selfie culture is less a site of struggle than a political index of the public's need to escape from the domain of what was once considered to be the cherished and protected realm of the private and personal.