What kind of significance does the habit of self-imaging hold in today's visual culture? Why did you become interested in the subject of the selfie?

The start of my interest was quite personal. I don't participate in social media, and I don't take selfies of myself. The way that I define the selfie in my book is that it has to be something shared through social media, just snapping a photograph of yourself isn't a selfie, a selfie is what you post and share. My elder sibling had gone through a sort of tumultuous time in her life, and she had begun to take a very large number of selfies and had really oriented herself toward this very reiterative habit of taking and posting selfies. I am middle-aged, and she's older than I am. Most selfies by women are taken by women under 30, and women tend to take far fewer selfies once the age of 30 is crossed. So I was really interested in understanding my sister and what it was that gave her so much pleasure about this act. I did feel that it was a way of reassuring herself again and again. 

Then I was teaching at the University of Virginia, and they allowed me to teach an upper level seminar for undergraduates on the selfie right before the pandemic. It was just incredibly moving to me to learn the emotions that my 21 or 22 years old students had around their own self-images. 

They were born just shortly before the turn of the century, and they'd been cataloguing their self-images from the time they were about 10 or 11 years old. So the seminar was quite a lot of fuel for the book. What does it mean to understand yourself as an image from an early age? How does that alter the way that you are in the world?

As you don’t participate in social media you did not have an active social media account during your research. How were you able to see what others are posting?

I was very strongly against social media. At least for myself, I feel that it's destructive. But to be honest, I think it's destructive for almost everyone. Anna Warner, a senior at the University of Virginia was my research assistant and she was very active on social media. If I had any questions I would ask her. And of course, a lot of social media at the time could be gleaned from Google searches. You could still actually enter Twitter and Instagram without an account, you just couldn't post. So most of the research I did myself, but Anna and I had a lot of conversations.

Photography is really great to link the self over time, and surely so we create tons of selfies. But we often hate our old selfies, hence they kind of become a special category of digital dirt on the world wide web. Do you think we should consider these old selfies as visual-waste?

My little Zoom image is my grandmother, who I'm named for, grandmother Claire. She passed away when she was 102, not that long ago. This photograph was just on the kitchen table when people were cleaning out her house. I absolutely treasure it. It's an image of her that shows her she was about 15 years old. 

There's something about vernacular photography that is so meaningful. It's where our souls float up and are caught. But I think what happens with the selfie is that as there are so many of them it becomes truly a visual waste, that nobody's going to go look at. The way this image that was in her home on paper floated up from the time she's 15 until the time she dies at 102, it stays with her. But this is not going to happen with a selfie for someone who's 15 now. That digital image that is encrypted in the Internet Archive seems very unlikely actually to stand. A selfie becomes a sort of message to the world then it is just gone. So I think that the large amount of repetition changes the meaning. 

I also think that the sense of creating an alternate self through repetition becomes problematic. When you are photographed there is a cut in yourself. Photography has a kind of violence, I'm not the first person to say that. Such as in studio photography: you're presenting a self and it's sort of a false self, but it's also a true self because it is the self-presentation. But to do that over and over every day, again and again, it's a different modality. The cut becomes so repetitious that you sort of live in the cut.

Following up on what you just said, there is a tsunami of images. And one part of the tsunami is all the selfies that we create. Almost everything goes into the cloud and stays there for now. We don't really know what the future holds for these images, because if someone buys Instagram in the future and makes the decision to erase everything, then that's that. 

I found your students' description of social media as their memory place really interesting. Looking back on the posts and recreating memories based on what you just posted two weeks or year ago is something we social media users all do. Do you think social media could or should be turned into a proper archive at any point in time? As you describe in the book, through social media practise the past can only be accessed by purposely seeking it.

It's a great question. It is already an archive in the sense of it's going online and being available. But the problem is the scale – it is so large that the only thing that can really manage that scale is artificial intelligence. So imagine an archive building so full of paper knowledge that you can't even enter the building. It sort of becomes like that. It seems to me that it could be quite useful to build human archives from this online dataset, but I don't know if these would stand as one.

In the book we can read about your conversations with your students. But different generations have totally different attitudes regarding taking selfies. Were you able to talk with the older generations to whom selfie taking is a new skill they have just learned? And if you had the chance, what do you think are the main differences regarding how generations look at the selfie and use the selfie as a new language on social media?

That's a great question. I mean, I am the older generation, and I don't use social media. Even when I was quite young, my grandmother would always say she was actually mistrustful of photography. She had very beautiful images of all her children and such but she would say, “for the most part, it's better to remember something than take a photograph because if you take a photograph, you won't remember it”, which actually turns out to be true. She had an insight there.

Once I had this conversation with my students where I said I have no images of myself from college. (That’s not entirely true because my mother had me formally photographed at 20, but that’s all I have and it’s actually a photograph that I really like.) The students were really like crestfallen. They said, how do you remember anything? How do you know what happened? That to me was a moment of cleaving because I remember everything – it happened to me so I remember it. But for them, the definition of what you know, what you remember, what yourself is what you put on social media as you went through those very formative college years. 

And these were students who are ending their college careers and they were in a melancholy frame of mind, looking back and saying, oh, we're so old now. And that is also an effect of social media, because you're immersed constantly in the fact that each year you're older than the year before because you're posting and posting. I think that sense of being old is quite premature and exaggerated by the effect of the selfie culture.

Do you think that the lack of visual literacy plays any kind of role in what we like on social media and how we respond to the selfies other people are taking? Do we take this many selfies because looking at images depicting each other is an easy conversation to have visually?

That's a great point. Visual literacy should become part of the core curriculum in our educational system because we're immersed in it. And photography is so brilliant as a form of propaganda for anything, right? I mean, good or bad, self or other. And so not being able to read through that is a handicap. 

Can we say that selfies are the easiest to read photographs out there?

I do think there's something about the human face, and I talk about this a little bit in the book too. I'm not very faithful, but I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and the icon, the face as the holy thing is really central to that faith. There's something about the human face that is just actually endlessly fascinating to us. One of the things about AI recognition systems is that they have such a hard time catching up to this aspect of the human mind that we are so incredibly well able to remember the details of another's face. When late stage capitalism pushes us toward a kind of entrenched anonymity, where there's little we can do to have a voice in a community, but to show our faces, to keep showing our faces. I do think that's also part of the pleasure of the selfie because you can feel erased in the economic system that we're in. But if you're posting your self-image five times a day, you can keep forgetting the structure of that erasure.

These selfies are intensely embedded in different websites and platforms. So all the likes, all the comments, all the shares are crucial parts of this imagery in my opinion. Do you think the logic of the platform and the aftermath of the platform’s ways of working are part of the selfie, or can we talk about just the photographic aspect of this kind of image heritage of the selfie?

That's beautifully put. My opinion is that the selfie is only the selfie when it's embedded in social media. And so all those responses are part of the art form of the selfie. And of course, you can pull the image out of the platform, but once you do it is something else, an image standing on its own. And I think that's partly why they often look so very, very strange out of their milieu. 

Why do you feel we have the urge to post new and new selfies every day, besides the aspects that we already talked about?

I know I have already mentioned it, but I do actually think it's very much embedded in the capitalist structures that we live in now. Our meaning as human beings in terms of the structure of the social world is increasingly limited to capitalist expressions. That's really all we have. I mean, there are small enclaves of meaning outside of that. The institute that you all have created is certainly such an example of an enclave of meaning outside of that. But on a daily basis, we buy and sell, and that's really all we are allowed in terms of being a self in a community within the monoculture of capitalism. So I do actually see the production of the selfie as a kind of ideal capitalist product, that the self becomes a product that can be sold through social media over and over again, even if you're not actually getting any money for it. Social media is a very massive factory that makes us feel we are receiving something when, in fact, we're actually giving something away. And I'm on thin ice here because I don't participate in social media. But my hypothesis is that we do it because it is so unsatisfying that it has to be repeated. Where is the satisfaction really coming from? Satisfaction is coming from immediate likes and clicks. And so you can never really be satisfied by that. And that is why I'm saying it is the ideal capitalist product, because vacuity is the thing that makes it so perfect for that capitalist structure. And I think that's why it's so hard to stop. 

Can we say creating selfies is a conformist and in a sense consumerist behaviour?

I would see it that way. I know that there are artists who use the format of Instagram in more radical ways. I speak very briefly about Martine Gutierrez in the book for example. But the format of social media is intrinsically and inherently limiting, you're always within the small box literally. You can't have a wall of social media on a physical building. And that's why the George Floyd selfie was so fascinating to me that it sort of jumped out of social media and became this other thing. The fact that people felt so strongly about it and took it out of social media and they painted it is captivating. While our nation was mourning what was done to him, they painted his face everywhere.