Note on How Social Media Shapes Our Identity via Nausicaa Renner

In “The Social Photo,” Nathan Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories. In one passage, Jurgenson, a founder of Real Life magazine, writes that selfies are “less an accurate picture of me at this time in this place and more . . . a visual depiction of the idea of me.” They’re units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren’t discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn’t really matter if they existed in twenty years. This explains the prevalence of disappearing photos, like Instagram stories and Snapchat. (Jurgenson is also a sociologist for Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company.) It also explains photos of food, which are rarely artful or worth saving.

For Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs, and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience.

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Nausicaa Renner

How Social Media Shapes Our Identity

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