Selfie Snapshots of an Existential Crisis :::
Do I Exist If I’m Not Screen Seen???
“…Selfies, when one is willing to engage with oneself only as a media object. We start taking pictures of ourselves to remove ourselves from the experience of ourselves. We mediate ourselves to become external phenomena from which we can detach ourselves. But the principle is the same: Broadcasting allows us to be audience to ourselves, because we are speaking to no one else in particular and it may as well be ourselves too…
The screen is an easy metaphor for “audience-ification” — it stands like a barrier between the watcher and what is being watched and creates a frame that seems to set the viewer outside of it. But we are pulled through and repelled by screens all the time, and the ramifications of what we see spills out beyond the frame.
Broadcasting is a mentality that one adopts toward potential perceived audiences that conveys that their attention is desired but not necessary to the message being projected. Broadcasting makes attention not a condition of communication but its outcome, its product. It alienates attention and makes it a commodity. And most of all, it has this effect on the broadcaster, who becomes self-alienated.”
(from “Speaking to No One” by Marginal Utility in The New Inquiry)