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Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
1
Chapter 11
Selfies and recontextualisation: still life self-imaging in social
media
Michele Zappavigna and Sumin Zhao
Introduction: #coffeeselfies
Digital visual self-representation is an area that has received a lot of attention in
recent research as a result of the explosion in practices of ‘social photography’; that
is, the production and proliferation of social media images on various digital
platforms.
1
Exploring these visual social media practices offers an important
perspective on how photography both shapes and is shaped by mass practices. In
particular, it highlights how social media is modulating the relations possible
between the self, the viewer, ambient audiences, and the ambient publics that can
form as images are contributed to and circulate within the social stream.
The use of the term ‘ambient’ as a modifier here is intended to reflect the way
in which online communication, due to the affordances of technologies such as
social media platforms, can enact ‘ambient affiliation’, a process ‘where personae do
not necessarily directly interact but instead :commune” around values’
2
. This form of
social bonding does not presuppose a dialogic exchange between two parties in
order to create an attitudinal alignment, as might be the case in face to face
communication. Common examples include the kind of mass communion of feeling
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
2
seen in hashtagging practices and in the production of iterations of internet memes.
3
For instance, previous work in this area has considered the way in which positive
attitudes tend to accumulate around ideational hashtags such as #coffee, as
microbloggers contribute instances of positive sentiment and opinion to the social
stream:
Got my morning cup of #coffee, ready to start my day off!
Good morning, Twitterverse! Today’s as good day.... Enjoy in the morning a
delicious #coffee
I love #coffee
The #CoffeeSelfie tag (Figure 1) connects this unfolding positive feeling to one of the
most popular practices of digital visual self-representation, the selfie.
4
Selfies are self-portraits typically taken with the front camera of a mobile
device. This chapter considers how these images are recontextualised across
different social contexts. While most research has focused on selfies that directly
depict the photographer’s face, we consider how what we term ‘implied/inferred
selfies’ and ‘still life self-images’ (of objects such as coffee) are reconstrued across
domains of meaning-making. These types of images are photographs in which the
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
3
photographer’s perspective is indirectly represented through various traces of the
photographer’s body, and through personal or intimate objects.
Figure 1 An example of a #coffeeselfie
5
Cups of coffee, such as the example ‘#36weekpregnant tummy’ (fig. 1), are frequently
represented in social media discourse where they tend to invoke positive sentiment
(as suggested in the tweets above), as well as meanings to do with working hard or
being tired that are central to many communities of users. In this way, coffee is an
everyday object that has been ‘iconized’ or fetishized in social media discourse,
6
becoming something that people refer to both in text and images as a way of forging
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
4
interpersonal alignments around a shared positive experience (as suggested in the
caption in Figure 1). At the time of writing, there are approximately 35,000 images
tagged #coffeeselfie on Instagram. While many of these are traditional selfies that
include the face of the photographer, many are indirect selfies of the kind we will
explore in this chapter.
Research into selfies has tended to focus on their most recognisable form:
direct representation of the photographer’s face and/or body. Many images (such as
Figure 1) that could be described as selfies, and are often tagged with ‘#selfie’, do
not include a direct representation of the photographer’s face. The photographer may
be indicated via parts of the body visible in the image, or through traces such as a
shadow or reflection.
7
Vernacular terms for these types of images include shelfies
(shelves of books), foot selfies, and food selfies. In these kinds of images, the
photographer’s perspective is implied or inferred through the visual structure of the
image.
8
Rather than simply directing the viewer’s gaze toward a presented object like
a book shelf or a plate of food, these images foreground the photographer as a
subject with a perspective in particular ways, and inflect the ‘point of view’ that is
construed by the representational and compositional choices made in the image.
Recontextualisation
Our aim here is to explore how the visual structure of implied or inferred selfies
facilitate processes of what the British sociologist and social linguist Basil Berstein
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
5
has termed ‘recontextualisation’.
9
Recontextualisation is essentially the notion that
one discourse can be embedded in another. Bernstein developed this idea within a
field which would become the sociology of education, and used recontextualisation
as a way of understanding how pedagogic discourses function in relation to the
primary discourses that they aim to teach. For example, Bernstein distinguishes the
knowledge production of ‘physics’, as a discipline, from the incorporation (via
recontextualisation) of this knowledge into pedagogic discourse in physics, as a
school subject:
A textbook says what physics is, and it is obvious that it has an author. The
interesting point, however, is that the authors of textbooks are rarely
physicists who are practising in the field of the production of physics; they are
operating in the field of recontextualisation.
10
Our discussion develops Bernstein’s concept of ‘recontextualisation’ in order to use
this concept to explore how selfies allow one discourse (e.g. a discourse of the self)
to be inserted into another (e.g. commercial discourse). Before beginning our
analysis, we introduce the theoretical orientation informing our analytical methods:
social semiotics and its key notion that visual images, as multimodal texts, can
construe multiple social functions. The concept of intersubjectivity is then
introduced together with the idea that the visual choices construed in images can be
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
6
used to enact different perspectives associated with different social subjects. This
allows us to explore different types of recontextualization processes that leverage
inferred and implied selfies, investigating the ‘semantic shifts’ that occur across
discourses and discursive domains. Three types of recontextualisation will be
considered: recontextualisation into the ‘autobiographic self-curation’ discourse of
Instagram practices, into the ‘ambient community’ discourse of hashtag practices,
and into ‘aesthetic’ discourse of visual blogging practices on Tumblr.
In particular, we show how social photography articulates subjective and
intersubjective positions through visual structures that result in a juxtaposition of
the self and the other, as well as a conflation of the subject and the object. This
articulation of the subject through social photography necessitates a negotiation
between the self and the other, and often inserts a discourse of the self explicitly or
implicitly in the representation of the object. This kind of perspective has
implications in terms of the ways in which publics are identified, particularly
approaches that focus on social solidarity and mutual identification as criteria for
establishing communality. It generates a tension whereby, on the one hand,
members of a public may no longer necessarily identify themselves via broad
traditional variables, such as racial/gendered/nationalistic features, but, on the other
hand, may rally around more constrained communal features via processes of
‘ambient affiliation’
11
through contributing to iterations of visual memes or hashtag
practices. For instance, this might involve communion of feeling around certain kinds
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
7
of fetishized objects like coffee and brunch items marked by hashtags such as
#brunch, #coffee, and #coffeeselfie. In these cases, the visual structure affords the
intersubjective positioning of a self in various ways that we will explore below.
Selfies and Recontextualisation: A social semiotic perspective
Practices of selfie creation and sharing have been documented across social
contexts as diverse as war and militarism, civic participation, education, pregnancy
and breastfeeding, and funerals.
12
It is a semiotic or meaning-making practice carried
out by private individuals, in particular young people, as well as groups visible in news
and entertainment media, such as politicians and celebrities.
13
Because of the
breadth of this field of activity, it is unsurprising that selfie research itself has been
multidisciplinary, spanning media studies, photographic theory, psychology, and
informatics. These domains have shown particular interest in the contextual
dimensions of selfie production, such as the role selfies play in perpetuating
consumerism, and in facilitating commodification of different aspects of our social
lives.
14
There has also been a focus on selfies in relation to discourses regulating
‘how people ought to represent, document and share their behaviour,’
15
particularly
in relation to gender, race, and sexual identities.
16
Some limited attention has been
given to the selfie in work exploring ‘hashtag publics’
17
, a term used to refer to the
idea that hashtags are instrumental in forming communities.
18
Such publics have
been interpreted as acting both as ‘virtual sites for constructing communities’ and
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
8
as markers or ‘symbol[s] of community membership’.
19
Hashtags have also been
seen as affording coordination of public discussion about issues and events, forming
‘ad hoc issue publics’.
20
Activist tags such as #BringBackOurGirls and
#BlackLivesMatter have been seen as ‘framing devices that allow crowds to be
rendered into publics; networked publics that want to tell their story collaboratively
and on their own terms’.
21
This work considers how selfies will often be posted with a hashtag
supporting a particular cause or incident, such as #istandwithadam in support of
Australian Football League star Adam Goodes who was subject to racist booing.
22
Studies considering selfies in relation to attention economies and social media
influencers have noted that selfies are often tagged strategically in order to increase
their visibility and the number of ‘likes’ they attract (tags such as #followforfollow
and #likeforlike accordingly promise reciprocation).
23
However, they tend to focus on
‘presented’ selfies,
24
where the photographer’s face is explicitly represented in the
image, and thus not to account for the kinds of point of view that can be realised
when an implied or imagined self is construed in the image.
Our approach to analysing the selfie is informed by social semiotics, which
sees the selfie as a visual sign, in other words, a multimodal text. Social semiotics,
originating from the work of the British linguist, Michael Halliday, is a theory that
explores how meanings are made in different social contexts by considering the
semiotic modes and resources that are being used, including language, visual
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
9
images, layout, colour, typography, and texture. According to this perspective,
language and other modes of meaning making enact three simultaneous functions,
referred to as ‘metafunctions’: an experiential function of representing experience, an
interpersonal function of negotiating relationships, and a textual function of
organizing information.
25
Research applying this approach to semiotic modes
beyond language has been termed multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), with most
studies of visual images being informed by Kress and Van Leeuwen’s seminal work,
Reading Images.
26
Kress and Van Leeuwen adopt the terms ‘representational’, ‘compositional’,
and ‘interactional’ to account for how each of the metafunctions defined by Halliday
are realized in images.
27
If we follow Kress and van Leeuwen’s account, Figure 1 has
a representational function of depicting the coffee cup sitting on top of the woman’s
pregnant torso, a compositional function of organising the cup as the focus of the
image, and an interactional function of positioning the viewer as the observer of the
cup and arguably the woman’s torso. This latter interactional, or interpersonal,
function is how the image forges a relationship with the viewer, and in turn is involved
in how communities of viewers, and publics, are positioned. In images where a visual
participant is depicted, part of this interpersonal semiotic work is done through the
system of gaze, where the viewer can establish imagined eye contact with the person
depicted.
28
However, as we have discussed earlier, the image here does not ask us
to ‘observe’ the cup or the woman’s torso, but instead to ‘observe as’ the woman. In
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
10
other words, the cup and the torso indicate the presence of the woman’s perspective,
rather than just visually indicating her body. As we will see, images that do not
feature a face can draw on other interpersonal resources to enact
interpersonal/interactional meaning potential. Many sub-genres of selfies like the
image in Figure 1 rely on a unique set of resources—which we call intersubjectivity—
for creating interactional meaning.
If we adopt this metafunctional perspective on self-imaging, we can think
about selfies as configurations of visual resources, where those resources are
working together to enact all three types of meaning (Table 1). As Table 1 shows,
there is not ‘a selfie’ but different types of selfies, with different configurations of
metafunctional meanings, and different combinations of visual resources that
realize the three kinds of meaning. A presented selfie, for instance, is a selfie in which
the face of a photographer (representational) is present and positioned in the centre
of the frame at a distorted angle (compositional). Interpersonally, it enacts a
particular intersubjective relation by articulating the self’s perspective on the
technologically mediated representation of the self. In articulating this perspective,
the photographer in turn puts forward a proposition to be negotiated between
him/herself and various viewers of the image in the social media environment. This
may include the primary audience (families, friends and followers on social media),
the ambient audience,
29
media commentators and social media onlookers.
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
11
In previous research, we have focused on the self’s perspective (SP®) on
objects as different kinds of intersubjective relations such as the implicit relations
shown in Table 1.
30
In particular, we have examined how different types of selfies are
used to represent and negotiate everyday experiences of motherhood on Instagram
31
and the ways in which various structures of selfies have been ‘transported’ in Tumblr
visual blogging practices to create a particular form of shared aesthetic experience
on social media.
32
Through this line of work, we have brought into question the often
taken-for-granted notion of ‘the self’ in the selfie. For us, the key to understanding the
selfie as a unique photographic practice is not how it construes the subject, but its
ability to enact intersubjectivity and juxtapose it with subjectivity. In so doing, selfies
create a discourse concerning both the-self-being-seen (look at me I am drinking
coffee) and the-seeing-self (this is how I experience drinking coffee). We have been
particularly interested in two types of selfies that have not been discussed
extensively in the literature: inferred and implied selfies. These highlight the tension
between the-self-being-seen and the-seeing-self as experienced by the viewing
public. The viewer is being positioned as the subject of the seeing (‘seeing as’ the
photographer), yet is clearly not the subject being seen. Simply put, the viewer is
being asked to see the world through the perspective of a self which is not their self.
The concept that an image might construe the perspective of a self (that is
not the viewer’s self) is important when we consider how implicit in the idea of a
public is the notion of engagement of the self with others. Here the subsuming of the
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
12
other into the self might be seen as a negation of the viewer’s perspective,
subjectivity and difference. In other words, there appears to be a tension between
the backgrounding of the viewer’s subjectivity and the foregrounding of the
photographer’s perspective. The type of perspective afforded by the visual structure
paradoxically makes it possible for the viewer to identify with subject positions that
are different to their own in terms of ethnicity, age or gender, and on the other hand
calls in to question what kind of collectivity such an ambient public in fact is, if the
perspective of the other is fully integrated into the self.
While our previous research has focused on the juxtaposition of subjectivity
and intersubjectivity in selfies, in this chapter, we turn our attention to the conflation
of the subject and the object (®X). We focus on how certain kinds of regularly
depicted objects (such as coffee) have increasingly become involved in construing
an extended sense of self. We introduce ‘still life self-image’ (see Table 1) as a natural
extension of the inferred and implied selfie, and look at the recontextualisation of the
object-as-subject visual structure in different discursive domains. We use the word
‘recontextualisation’ in a classic Bernsteinian sense, referring to the ‘semantic
shifts’
33
that occur when the discourse of the self (realized through various
structures of selfies) is inserted into a new discourse, such as autobiographic self-
curation or digital parenting.
Types of selfies
Metafunctional Resources
Inter-subjective Relations
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
13
Representational
Compositional
Presente
d
+photographer’s
image; (+other
visual
participants;
+objects;
backgrounds)
the
photographer:
+centred
+ foregrounded
Meta
perspective
Self’s perspective on
technologically (camera
phone) mediated
representation of the self
(or group)
S ® T ®S
Mirrored
+photographer’s
mirror image +
mirror; + the
phone; (+minor
images of
objects;
backgrounds;
other visual
participants)
the
photographer:
+centred
+ foregrounded
Meta-
meta-
perspective
Self’s perspective on
technologically (camera
phone) mediated
representation of
technologically mediated
(mirror) representation of
the self
S ® T ® T ® S
Inferred
34
+ body parts
(e.g. feet, legs,
hand or arms);
+objects, +other
visual
participants, or
scenery;
+varied
composition
+ body parts
foregrounded
+ other visual
participants
salient
Self’s
perspectiv
e on
technologi
cally
mediated
representa
Explicit
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
14
Implied
+objects
implying the
photographer;
+other visual
participant;
+objects;
scenery
+varied
composition
+ objects
implying the
photographer
foregrounded
tion of
self’s
perspectiv
e of certain
phenomen
on (X)
SP®T®SP
®X
Implicit
still life
self-
image
+objects
implying the
photographer
+arranged
composition;
+downward
/aerial angle
Table 1 Inferred and implied selfies
35
From object to subject: Autobiographic self-curation and still life self-images
Alongside self-portraits directly depicting the photographer’s face published via
social media platforms are millions of images of users’ personal belongings. These
objects offer a means of representing dimensions of personal experience. The
prevalence of social media users photographing personal objects, as an expression
of identity, brings the importance of understanding the context of an image into
sharp relief. The question arises of whether these images can be considered selfies.
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
15
A popular visual practice involves users carefully laying out the contents of their
bags. At the time of writing, there are approximately 175,000 images
36
tagged
#whatsinmybag on Instagram, and there are many thousands of images using the
same tag on other services where users share images such as Flickr and Twitter.
Figure 2 Examples of 'what's in my bag' images
These kinds of image are often include a caption featuring an iteration of the phrasal
template ‘what’s in my ____’, for example:
Discover what’s in my July makeup bag! #bbloggers #beautybloggers
#julymakeupbag #beauty #whatsinmymakeupbag
All set for year end trip. #whatsinmybag #whatsinmycamerabag
#photogear #yearendtrip #noplan #travel #nikon #manfr…
All the things in my backpack including 4 days of food. The gear has shifted
slightly from the beginning of the trail, but mostly it’s just a lot smeller [sic]
and dirtier. You see something I don’t need? Let me know! #shakemedown
#pctig #mexicotocanada #whatsinmypurse #womenwhohike #optoutside
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
16
Because everyone else is doing these ‘what’s in my bag?’ Photos, I'll do one
too !"# #purse #whatsinmybackpack #whatsinmybag
#whatsinmypurse #stuff #nerdy #nerdygirl #geek
As these captions suggest, this is a visual structure that is recontextualised across
different domains of social life (makeup, photography, travel etc.).
Still life images have traditionally been ascribed the ideational function of
documenting objects. Indeed, the images in Figure 2 do have a representational
function of documenting the contents of a user’s bag. However, if we factor in
interpersonal meaning, they also construe the subjectivity of the user: their
perspective as a curator who has carefully laid out these objects for view. In the
context of what has become a highly commercialised sphere, these objects also have
a status-promoting function that is reminiscent of earlier still life compositions such
as Trompe l’oeil compositions across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Figure 3). These images had the social function of promotion of the social
status of the artist by laying out valuable tools or items suggestive of their expertise
as craftsmen. In the case of social media images, particularly in the domain of
‘beauty blogging’, status promotion often occurs via documenting the expensive
makeup items in a user’s handbag, or other desirable commercial objects.
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
17
Figure 3 Examples of Trompe l’oeil composition: Edward Collier (1699) (LHS); Carl
Hofverberg (1737); William Harnett (1888)
The above leads us to propose that what Brusati has referred to as ‘still-life self-
images’ has a long history. Brusati was referring to early 17th century Dutch artists
who ‘created a new, hybrid genre of self-portraiture in the form of still-life easel
paintings featuring one or more images of their maker,’ for instance, one reflected by
a polished surface.
37
Commentary on many periods of art history reveals similar
concern with the extent to which objects reflect the subjectivity of the artist.
Schapiro comments on Van Gough’s painting, Shoes (1886):
In isolating his own old, worn shoes on a canvas, he turns them to the spectator; he
makes of them a piece from a self portrait […] For an artist to isolate his worn shoes
as the subject of a picture is for him to convey a concern with the fatalities of his social
being. Not only the shoes as an instrument of use […] but the shoes as ‘a portion of
the self’ (in Hamsun’s words) are van Gogh’s revealing theme.
38
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
18
Also consider the following commentary on two works by Frances Hodgkins, Self-
Portrait: Still Life (c.1935) and Still Life: Self-Portrait (c.1935), that notes how still life
self-imaging can be used to subvert or avoid the problematic history of
representation of women’s bodies:
Two major late works […] sidestep physical appearance altogether, and although not
instantly apparent as self-portraits, designate themselves self-portraits via their titles
[…] Their imaginative approach, little commented upon, is of considerable interest in
relation to current investigations into the problematics of women artists' strategies for
the representation of ‘self’. By the rather unusual tactic of conflating the genre of self-
representation with the genre of still life of paradoxically conjugating subject (self-
portraiture) with object (still life) they avoid those pitfalls associated with
conventional figurative self-portraiture by women artists and engage […] in a subtle
and inventive use of metaphor leading to unconventional constructions of
subjectivity.
39
Ideas of this kind about the still life self-imaging punctuate the history of
interpretation of practices of self-portraiture. A complete archeology of this history
is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the notion of the still life self-image
serves as a starting point for considering the extent to which the self can be indirectly
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media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
19
represented in an image, and how that indirect representation can be
recontextualised across domains of experience.
Returning to our example of coffee as an iconized object indirectly
representing the subjectivity of the photographer, consider Figure 4. This is an
example of a very frequent social media practice of photographing food or beverages
from either a downward (sometimes akin to eye-level looking downward) angle or an
aerial angle. This image was accompanied by the following caption:
Family time cuppas @ Baby Lets Cruz #kidscafe #babycinos #chai
#bananabread #babyletscruz #mtevelyn
The coffee and food represented in the image imply the photographer’s perspective
on her own experience (in this case of motherhood). Indeed, within online
motherhood communities coffee has become a rallying icon for expressing
meanings about the exhaustion engendered by caring for children.
40
The hashtags in
this image forge different kinds of ideational and interpersonal relations with the
image that reveal dimensions of the perspective construed.
41
The hashtags impact
on how we ‘read’ the image and recognize the context into which the implied selfie
has been recontextualised, as we will see in the following section. They are also
important in terms of contributing to the hashtag public that accumulates as
iterations of the tag are applied to new texts added to the social media stream.
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media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
20
Figure 4 An example of an image implying the subjectivity of the photographer.
Ambient community and hashtags
As social tagging practices have proliferated across social media platforms, selfies
increasingly feature hashtags that give clues about how their visual structures have
been recontextualised across domains of social life. For instance, the still life self-
image in Figure 4 accrues different meanings depending on whether it is simply
tagged #coffeeselfie, or whether it includes tags such as #momlife, which often
accompany this type of image. The latter aids the viewer in recognizing the
recontextualisation of the visual structure into the public domain of digital parenting,
specifically personal expression of the experience of digital motherhood. Within a
single feed of social media images like a user’s Instagram feed, this kind of practice
is a form of self-curation or life writing.
42
In other words, we can gloss this as:
Implied/inferred/still life self-image structure + domain X hashtag (e.g. #momlife,
#fitspo etc.) = my technologically mediated representation of my perspective on my
experience of domain X
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21
Viewed more broadly as the public practice of hashtagging images, the above use of
the social tag #momlife is an instance of technologically mediated
recontextualisation. In other words, the same image might construe different
meanings across the same social media platform depending on the tagging that is
applied to the image. This tagging recontextualizes the image to be read differently
in different ambient networks and publics. The tag has a very particular meaning
within the motherhood blogging community where it is associated with a repeated
textual pattern or genre in which mothers express shared frustrations about the
tedious or repetitive dimensions of ‘momlife’. This tag actively appeals to those who
self-identify as ‘mom’, and might be contrasted with other tags such as ‘teacherlife’,
‘studentlife’, and ‘officelife’ that perform different kinds of ambient identities, or with
tags such as ‘thuglife’ that function as memes parodying the notion of a compliant
social subject.
Viewed across aggregated instances, the hashtag is an ambient perspective
requiring multiple individualised perspectives in order to accumulate meaning. It is
simultaneously the perspective of the user and the perspective of the shared social
media stream. This dual perspective is seen in the implied selfies in Figure 5, tagged
respectively #teacherlife and #momlife. The associated captions are:
Finally get to hang at a coffee shop without a red pen in my hand & just read
for fun. #teacherlife – at Lux Central
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22
#saturdaymorning. A #book, #coffee and the sound of my little playing.
Enjoy the ‘being’ between ‘doing.’ #bepresent #yoga #yogi #momlife
Figure 5 Implied selfies tagged #teacherlife, #momlife and # (left to right respectively).
Credit right image: @SciTeach3
The hashtagging practices can be related to Bakhtin’s ideas about how discourse is
inherently multi-voiced, always making connections with other voices.
43
Hashtags
enable a ‘polyphony of voices’ to compete for discursive visibility in the social
stream.
44
Adding a hashtag to a post amplifies the semiotic ‘reach’ of a social media
post by making it potentially visible to more users/audiences, and increasing the
scope of potential intertextual relations with other texts, across multiple contexts.
45
The presence of a hashtag renders a text more ‘open’ to externalised propositions
since it offers the possibility that this audience may engage with the stance
construed, for instance by replying, rebroadcasting or rating (via a like/favourite) the
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post.
46
Intertextual meanings are particularly important in social media
environments given the tendency of images, video, and written text to be replicated,
modified, and recontextualised at rapid rates and high volume. This has led to the
metaphor of ‘viral’ distribution being used to characterize such proliferation where
‘spreadable media’ is shared across social networks.
47
From selfies to quasi-selfies: the curation of digital visual aesthetics
While selfies and other forms of social photography are primarily produced for and
posted on individual accounts on Instagram, Facebook or, to a lesser extent, Twitter,
their trajectory on social networks extend far beyond these origins. These images are
often reused by different individuals and media outlets in various contexts and on
different platforms. The key technological affordance that facilitates reuse of the
images in this way, the ‘share’ function, exists on most social media platforms, such
as the share icon on Facebook or the re-pin function on Pinterest. The travelling of a
social photograph from one individual account to another, from one context to
another, and from one platform another, results invariably in the recontextualisation
of the image. As it travels, the image acquires new meaning potential while
maintaining, to various extents, its original meaning.
One of the key destinations of these travelling selfies is visual curatorial
platforms such as Pinterest or Tumblr. These social media platforms are visual, with
the majority of posts being simply images. On Tumblr, for instance, 78.11% of posts
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are photos.
48
They are also curatorial, as many of the photos on these sites are
secondary sources reposted from other accounts or platforms. The users in these
instances curate rather than produce the content published on their account. Figure
6 is an example of a curated visual blog on Tumblr, which we have discussed in detail
elsewhere.
49
Figure 6 An example of curated visual blogs on Tumblr
What is particularly fascinating is how similar structures that can be found in personal
accounts on Instagram are also prevalent in these curated blogs. Inferred selfies, like
the hand holding four cups of coffee on the bottom of the screen capture, or still life
imaging such as the food photos on top-right the screen capture shown in Figure 6
are prevalent across both platforms. The presence of selfies in these blogs creates
a fascinating paradox— these ‘selfies’ simply cannot be read as selfies since the self
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25
does not produce the images; the curator is not the photographer. When we looked
at these images more closely, we observed the emergence of a particular type of
image that we call a ‘quasi’ selfie. Figure 7 includes two images of almost identical
visual structures. The image on the right (reposted on a Tumblr blog) is a quasi selfie
since it is unlikely that photographer is also the represented visual participant
because the participant is holding the coffee cup with both hands. Indeed, the
conflation of the photographer and the reader in the photo on the right, posted on a
Instagram account, also relies on contextual clues, such as the personal profile
information, and/or the #selfie hashtag.
Figure 7 Implied selfie vs. quasi-selfie
In the context of visual blogging, we argue that variations on selfie structures are used to create
an ambient everyday aesthetic experience.
50
These selfie-like images entice us as the
viewing public to discover aesthetic value in mundane everyday objects (such as a
plate of food) and activities (such as drinking a cup of coffee). ‘Selfies’, on the one
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hand, subjectify this aesthetic experience by juxtaposing subjectivity with
intersubjectivity: we are the seeing-self but not the-self-seen. On the other hand, they
objectify the aesthetic self by conflating the subject with the object: the seeing of
the object is the discovering of the subject. This juxtaposition of subjectivity with
intersubjectivity produces a new form of the public, where an individual no longer
identifies themselves through traditional (visual) identity markers such as race,
gender and sexuality. Instead, they are enticed to position the subject or the self
through different ways of seeing, being and doing. The “sharing” on social media, in
this sense, is thus not simply the sharing of personal experience with an imagined
public but the creation of a shared subject/intersubjective position.
The co-presence of implied selfies, quasi-selfies (often originating from
professional blogs such as food blogs), and still-life imaging, together with still life
images, suggests a selfie-isation of social photography. That is, selfies can be
recontextualised in a discourse that does not concern the self. More precisely, selfies
are understood not just as a set of visual structures, but a recontextualizing
discourse.
Conclusion
This chapter has adopted a social semiotic perspective on selfies. We have focused
on images where the photographer’s face is not directly visible, and instead the
perspective of the photographer is invoked through different sets of representational
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27
and compositional choices. We argued that the selfie is not a singular image type
but a group of images or a genre with many subgenres with different configurations
of metafunctional resources and meanings. The selfie can be thought of as a
recontextualising discourse in itself since it can be used in contexts that are no
longer about a singular ‘self’.
Figure 8 summarises the kinds of selfies we have explored in terms of the
degree of explicitness with which the photographer is visually construed. It presents
the degree to which an image that does not explicitly depict the photographer’s face
construes the photographer’s presence as a social subject in public. As this figure
suggests, an inferred selfie (where part of the photographer’s body is visible in the
frame) is the most explicit option, whereas the still life self-image (featuring only
objects) is the most implicit option.
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28
Figure 8 Degree to which an image construes the subject (photographer).
One of the key debates in selfie study is what actually constitutes a selfie.
51
For us,
the difficulty in demarcating the boundary of selfie as a genre lies in this fact that
selfie is not simply a genre but a discourse, more precisely, a discourse of
recontextualization or recontextualizing discourse.
52
In Bernsteinian accounts,
pedagogical discourse is a discourse of recontextualisation where an instructional
discourse concerning the subject knowledge such as History or Biology is embedded
in a regulative discourse concerning social behavioural regulation. Similarly, the
selfie is a recontextualizing discourse in which the discourse of the self/subject is
inserted in another discourse, be it self-curation, digital parenting or aesthetic
consumption. Semantic shifts occur when selfie texts move from one context to
another facilitated by the technological affordances of social media platform, such
as hashtag or re-post functions.
This ability of the selfie discourse to insert itself into other discourses is one
of the key reasons for its pervasiveness in our contemporary life. As we have shown
in this chapter and elsewhere, the ubiquitous presence of selfies is not only evident
in the various social practices and semantic domains in which selfies can insert
themselves, but also in its ability to ‘selfie-ise’ other photographic practices on social
media, as in the case of still life self-imaging or quasi-selfies in advertising. The
inferred, implied, and still life selfies that we have explored in this chapter
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29
problematize the idea of stable social media publics being forged through direct
representation of the ‘self’. We have shown that taking as a first principle the notion
that a selfie directly represents a self and that this self, when viewed in terms of a
collectivity, can be seen a manifesting a public does not adequately account for the
affordances of social photography. These affordances mean that the self may be
subsumed by the other through the perspective offered by inferred, implied and still
life selfies.
Further analysis of this selfie-isation, or ‘selfication’, of social photographic
practices is needed and will contribute to emerging debate on semiotic capitalism,
53
particularly with regard to the intersubjective dimensions of publics, and their
relation to consumer objects. The kinds of relationship between the self and other
that we have surveyed in this chapter, and their capacity for recontextualisation, may
prompt us to question what it means for a digital photographic practice to be
involved in forging a public. As selfie discourse creates a particular way in which the
subject relates to the object and to the other, our participation in, criticism of, and
resistance to, the all-encompassing system of visual meaning potential starts with
this single act of photographic production. Even though ambient publics are not
centralized, and can be ‘ad hoc’,
54
they should not be interpreted as politically
disengaged or less able to act in the service of particular social goals than face-to-
face social action. Rather, they represent new modes of public engagement that
leverage the affordances of digital technologies and representation.
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30
Endnotes
1
See, for example, Michele Zappavigna, ‘Social Media Photography: Construing
Subjectivity in Instagram Images’, Visual Communication 15, no. 3 (2016): 271–292.
2
Michele Zappavigna, Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse
(London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 201; Michele Zappavigna, ‘Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic
Perspective on Twitter’, New Media & Society 13, no. 5 (2011): 788–806.
3
Michele Zappavigna and J. R. Martin, ‘#Communing Affiliation: Social Tagging as a
Resource for Aligning around Values in Social Media’, Discourse, Context & Media 22
(April 2018): 4–12.
4
Michele Zappavigna, ‘Coffeetweets: Bonding around the Bean on Twitter’, in The
Language of Social Media: Communication and Community on the Internet, ed. Philip
Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (London: Palgrave, 2014), 139–160.
5
Permission was obtained from this user to include this image. The original image is
available here at the time of writing: https://www.instagram.com/p/BJJyN_0jUEw/?taken-
by=flickarika
6
Zappavigna, ‘Coffeetweets: Bonding around the Bean on Twitter’.
7
Jill Walker-Rettberg, ‘Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself’, paper
presented at the Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture, Copenhagen: IT University of
Copenhagen, 1–3 December 2005.
8
Sumin Zhao and Michele Zappavigna, ‘Digital Scrapbooks, Everyday Aesthetics & the
Curatorial Self: Social Photography in Female Visual Blogging’, in Multimodality and
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
31
Aesthetics, ed. Frida Forsgren and Elise Seip Tønnessen (London, New York: Routledge, in
press); Sumin Zhao and Michele Zappavigna, ‘Beyond the Self: Intersubjectivity and the
Social Semiotic Interpretation of the Selfie,’ New Media and Society 20, no. 5 (2017): 1735–
1754; Michele Zappavigna and Sumin Zhao, ‘Selfies in “Mommyblogging”: An Emerging
Visual Genre’, Discourse, Context & Media 20 (December 2017): 239–247; Zappavigna,
‘Social Media Photography’.
9
Basil B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of
Language vol. 2 (London; New York: Routledge, 2003).
10
Basil B. Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique
(Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 34 [Add page number for quote].
11
Zappavigna, Searchable Talk; ‘Ambient Affiliation in Microblogging: Bonding around the
Quotidian’, Media International Australia 151, no. 1 (2014): 97–103; Michele Zappavigna,
Discourse of Twitter and Social Media, Continuum Discourse Series (London: Continuum,
2012); Zappavigna, ‘Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter’.
12
Fatima Aziz, ‘Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selfies by Pakistani
Instagrammers’, in Selfie Citizenship, ed. Adi Kuntsman (Cham: Springer International
Publishing, 2017), 21–28; Sonja Boon and Beth Pentney, ‘Selfies| Virtual Lactivism:
Breastfeeding Selfies and the Performance of Motherhood’, International Journal of
Communication 9, no. 1 (2015): 1759–1772; Katrin Tiidenberg, ‘Selfies| Odes to
Heteronormativity: Presentations of Femininity in Russian-Speaking Pregnant Women's
Instagram Accounts’, International Journal of Communication 9, no. 1 (2015): 1746–1758;
Catherine Bouko, ‘Youth’s Civic Awareness through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic
of “Connective Actions”’, in Selfie Citizenship, ed. Adi Kuntsman (Cham: Springer
International Publishing, 2017), 49–58; Jenna Brager, ‘The Selfie and the Other: Consuming
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
32
Viral Tragedy and Social Media (after) Lives’, International Journal of Communication 9,
no. 1 (2015): 1660–1671; Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein, Digital Militarism: Israel's
Occupation in the Social Media Age (Standford, California: Stanford University Press, 2015);
Lisa Silvestri, ‘Shiny Happy People Holding Guns: 21st-Century Images of War’, Visual
Communication Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2014): 106–118; Martin Gibbs et al., ‘Selfies at
Funerals: Remediating Rituals of Mourning’, Selected Papers of Internet Research 15.0,
2014 (23-25 October): Bangkok, Thailand, available at https://minerva-
access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/52809 (accessed 8 August 2018); James Meese et al.,
‘Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms’, International
Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1818–1831; Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell, ‘V-
Day Selfies in Beijing: Media Events and User Practices as Micro-Acts of Citizenship’, in
Selfie Citizenship, ed. Adi Kuntsman (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 29–
37.
13
Kath Albury, ‘Selfies, Sexts, and Sneaky Hats: Young People’s Understandings of
Gendered Practices of Self-Representation’, International Journal of Communication 9
(2015): 1734–1745; Anirban Baishya, ‘Selfies|# Namo: The Political Work of the Selfie in
the 2014 Indian General Elections’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1686–
1700; Valerio Coladonato, ‘Power, Gender, and the Selfie. The Cases of Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama, Pope Francis’, Comunicazioni sociali 36, no. 3 (2014): 394–405; Crystal
Abidin, ‘Vote for My Selfie: Politician Selfies as Charismatic Engagement’, in Selfie
Citizenship, ed. A Kunstman (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 75–87; Beccy
Collings, ‘# Selfiecontrol:@ Cazwellnyc and the Role of the Ironic Selfie in Transmedia
Celebrity Self-Promotion’, Celebrity Studies 5, no. 4 (2014): 1–3; Samita Nandy, ‘Persona,
Celebrity, and Selfies in Social Justice: Authenticity in Celebrity Activism’, in Mobile and
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Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
33
Digital Communication: Approaches to Public and Private, ed. J. R. Carvalheiro and A
Serrano Tellería (Covilhã, UBI, Portugal: Livros LabCom), 101–122; Jesse Weaver Shipley,
‘Selfie Love: Public Lives in an Era of Celebrity Pleasure, Violence, and Social Media’,
American Anthropologist 117, no. 2 (2015): 403–413.
14
See for example Mehita Iqani and Jonathan E. Schroeder, ‘# Selfie: Digital Self-Portraits
as Commodity Form and Consumption Practice’, Consumption Markets & Culture 19, no. 5
(2015): 405–415; Yoo Jin Kwon and Kyoung-Nan Kwon, ‘Consuming the Objectified Self:
The Quest for Authentic Self’, Asian Social Science 11, no. 2 (2015): 301–312; Alice E.
Marwick, ‘Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy’, Public Culture 27, no. 1 75
(2015): 137; Crystal Abidin, ‘“Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things
Online?”: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity,’ Social Media + Society 2, no. 2 (2016):
1–17.
15
Theresa M. Senft and Nancy K. Baym, ‘What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global
Phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1589.
16
Apryl A. Williams and Beatriz Aldana Marquez, ‘Selfies| the Lonely Selfie King: Selfies
and the Conspicuous Prosumption of Gender and Race’, International Journal of
Communication 9 (2015): 1775–1787; Anne Burns, ‘Self (Ie)-Discipline: Social Regulation
as Enacted through the Discussion of Photographic Practice’, International Journal of
Communication 9 (2015): 1716–1733.
17
Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, ‘The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc
Publics’, in Proceedings of the 6th European Consortium for Political Research General
Conference (University of Iceland, Reykjavik, 2011); Nathan Rambukkana, ed., Hashtag
Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
34
18
More generally, the idea of ‘virtual community’ has been prevalent in internet research.
See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1993).
19
Yu-Ru Lin et al., ‘# Bigbirds Never Die: Understanding Social Dynamics of Emergent
Hashtag’, in Proceedings of the 7th International Aaai Conference on Weblogs and Social
Media (Boston: AAAI, 2013), 370; Lei Yang et al., ‘We Know What @You #Tag: Does the
Dual Role Affect Hashtag Adoption?’, in Proceedings of the 21st International Conference
on World Wide Web (New York: ACM, 2012), 2.
20
Axel Bruns et al., ‘Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics: A Large-Scale Comparative
Study of User Engagement across Trending Topics’, Communication Research and Practice
2, no. 1 (2016): 20–46; Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, ‘The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the
Formation of Ad Hoc Publics’, paper presented at the Paper presented at the European
Consortium for Political Research conference, Reykjavik, 25–27 August 2011. Available at
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/ (access 5 August 2018); Nathan Rambukanna, ‘From#
Racefail to# Ferguson: The Digital Intimacies of Race-Activist Hashtag Publics’, The
Fibreculture Journal, no. 26 (2015): 159–188; Nathan Rambukkana, ‘#Introduction:
Hashtags as Technosocial Events’, in Rambukkana, ed. Hashtag Publics, 1–12; Theresa
Sauter and Axel Bruns, ‘# Auspol: The Hashtag as Community, Event, and Material Object
for Engaging with Australian Politics’, in Rambukkana, ed. Hashtag Publics, 47–60; Axel
Bruns and Jean Burgess, ‘Researching News Discussion on Twitter New Methodologies’,
Journalism Studies 13 (2012): 801–814; Axel Bruns and Hallvard Moe, ‘Structural Layers of
Communication on Twitter,’ in Twitter and Society ed. Katrin Weller, et al. (New York: Peter
Lang, 2014), 15–28; Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns, ‘Tweeting the TV Event, Creating
“Public Sphericules”: Ad Hoc Engagement with SBS's Go Back to Where You Came from—
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media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
35
Season 2’, Media International Australia 152, no. 1 (2014): 5–15; Elisabeth Montemurro and
David Kamerer, ‘# Dearcongress: A Public Letter’, First Monday 21, no. 3 (2016), available
at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5498/5217 (accessed 8 August 2018).
21
Zizi Papacharissi, ‘Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and
Mediality’, Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 308.
22
Bruns et al. ‘Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics’.
23
Crystal Abidin, ‘“Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?”:
Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity’, Social Media + Society 2, no. 2 (2016): 1–17;
Marwick, ‘Instafame’.
24
Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘Beyond the Self’.
25
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday and Christian MIM Matthiessen, Halliday's
Introduction to Functional Grammar, fourth edition (London and New York: Routledge,
2013), 20.
26
Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design,
second edition (London: Routledge, 2006).
27
Ibid. 41-44
28
Ibid.
29
Michele Zappavigna, ‘Ambient Liveness: Searchable Audiences and Second Screens’, in
Studying Digital Media Audiences: Perspectives from Australasia, ed. C Hight and H
Harindranath (London: Routledge, 2017), 150–172; Zappavigna, Discourse of Twitter and
Social Media. 29
30
Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘Beyond the Self’.
31
Ibid.; Michele Zappavigna and Sumin Zhao, ‘Selfies in 'mommyblogging': An emerging
visual genre’, Discourse, Context and Media (2017), 239-247
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
36
Zappavigna, ‘Social Media Photography’.
32
Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘Digital Scrapbooks’.
33
Basil Bernstein, 2. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique
(Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
34
Credit for this image: @SciTeach3
35
We have permission from the Instagram users to use the images shown in this table.
36
Many of these images are not of user’s bag items and are instead ‘piggybacking’ on the
popularity of the hashtag.
37
Celeste Brusati, ‘Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century
Netherlandish Still-Life Painting’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20,
no. 2/3 (1990): 168.
38
Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Still Life as a Personal Object—a Note on Heidegger and Van
Gogh,’ in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, ed. George Braziller
(George Braziller: New York, 1994 [original 1968]), 140.
39
Elizabeth Eastmond, ‘Metaphor and the Self-Portrait: Frances Hodgkins’s Self-Portrait:
Still Life and Still Life: Self-Portrait’, Art History 22, no. 5 (1999): 656–57.
40
Michele Zappavigna, ‘Enacting Identity in Microblogging,’ Discourse and Communication
8, no. 2 (2014): 209–228.
41
For an overview of image-tag relations in social media texts see Zappavigna, Searchable
Talk.
42
Aimée Morrison, ‘Autobiography in Real Time: A Genre Analysis of Personal Mommy
Blogging’, Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 4, no. 2
(2010), available at https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4239/3285 (accessed 9 August
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
37
2018); Marlene Kadar, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3-20 .
43
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. trans Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1935/1981), 89.
44
Bud Davis, ‘Hashtag Politics: The Polyphonic Revolution of #Twitter’, Pepperdine
Journal of Communication Research 1 (2013): 18.
45
Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi,
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 34-61 .
46
Research into hashtags has also been interested in how hashtags function as a reflexive
signal of a user’s ‘metapragmatic awareness’ of their own voice in relation to self-promotion
practices (e.g. hashtags by politicians featuring their own name) and how hashtag use differs
across different types of voices (e.g. ordinary versus corporate tweeters). See Roel
Coesemans and Barbara De Cock, ‘Self-Reference by Politicians on Twitter: Strategies to
Adapt to 140 Characters’, Journal of Pragmatics 116 (July 2017): 37–50; Ruth Page, ‘The
Linguistics of Self-Branding and Micro-Celebrity in Twitter: The Role of Hashtags’,
Discourse & Communication 6, no. 2 (2012): 181–201.
47
Lars Kai Hansen et al., ‘Good Friends, Bad News-Affect and Virality in Twitter,’ in Future
Information Technology, ed. James Park et al (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 34–43; Henry Jenkins,
Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a
Networked Culture (London & New York: New York University Press, 2013). This has been
of particular interest to quantitative studies of ‘information diffusion’, concerned with how
topics proliferate on social networking services, as well as in professional domains such as
marketing. The information diffusion approach has however, due to the difficulties of
automating linguistic analysis of large datasets, tended to background dimensions of
Pre-print version only. Please do not quote this version. To appear as:
Zappavigna, M., & Zhao, S. (in press). Selfies and recontextualisation: Still life self-imaging in social
media. In M. Miles & E. Welch (Eds.), Photography and its Publics. London: Bloomsbury.
38
communication such as how ‘meaning, values, and norms’ are construed in texts. See
Bernhard Rieder, ‘The Refraction Chamber: Twitter as Sphere and Network’, First Monday
17, no. 11 (2012): 1.
48
Yi Chang et al., ‘What Is Tumblr: A Statistical Overview and Comparison’, ACM SIGKDD
Explorations Newsletter 16, no. 1 (2014) Available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.5206.pdf last
accessed 9 August 2018
49
Sumin Zhao and Michele Zappavigna, ‘The Interplay of Technologies and Genre: The
Case of the Selfie’ Social Semiotics (special issue on Social Media as Semiotic Technology).
28(5), 665-682; Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘Digital Scrapbooks’.
50
Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘Digital Scrapbooks’.
51
Matthew Bellinger, ‘“Bae Caught Me Tweetin”: On the Representational Stance of the
Selfie’, International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 1806–1817.
52
See Zhao and Zappavigna, ‘The Interplay of Technologies and Genre’.
53
Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2014), 279 .
54
Bruns and Burgess, ‘The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics’.