Controversial Selfie For Critical Discussion: Case Study

A photograph, painting, canvas, or drawing today is not the same as it was a decade ago. Technology has evolved to the point where we can photoshop a person into a picture, enlarge a person’s butt, or even whiten people’s teeth. At what point do those technological advances cross a line? With social media ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Tumblr, do these media sites promote egotistical behavior? In January of 2013, John Paul Titlow discusses some of the disadvantages and advantages that Instagram has in his essay: “#Me: Instagram Narcissism and the Scourge of the Selfie” that was posted on a website called ReadWrite. Although Instagram was primarily created to simply share pictures, it has evolved to do much more than that. Some businesses use it to advertise, some people use it to share their art, but then there are some people use it to flaunt their own personal lives in the form of pictures. Titlow acknowledges that Instagram is a desirable way to share art and diverse imagery, but additionally acknowledges that it can be a place where one can promote their own self-popularity. He explains that Instagram has become remarkably important in people’s lives to the point that they cannot view life past those Instagram likes (Titlow). Ultimately, Titlow succeeds in emphasizing the issues that Instagram has created by reason of the way he expresses his text, while furthermore expressing who the audience of his essay is, and by making his overall purpose clear.

Photographers have the ability to capture a certain moment in their lifetime. Some of them take advantage of the image in front of them and some do not fully understand the purpose of the moment. Is it worth recording the moment? Everyday people take images on their cell phones because they want to share them with friends and family. In 1993, Kevin Carter went on a trip to Sudan and took a picture of a starving Sudanese girl being stalked by a vulture. However, what photographers, like Kevin Carter, fail to realize is that every time a picture is taken, a part of the individual photographed is taken away. Kevin Carter’s presentation of the starving child serves not only as a claim of the ignorance of American people, but also as the measures

The documentary #chicagoGirl shows the integral role the internet, particularly social networking sites, have played in mobilizing activists in the middle east. The film follows Alaa Basatneh and her role in coordinating protests and supporting the revolution from across the world via social media. Basatneh was born in Syria but her family moved to Chicago to escape the oppressive regime. She and her family got out far before many others could. She began living a normal teenage life; frequenting the mall, hanging out with friends, and casual social media usage. As news trickled out of Syria Basatneh new she needed to do something but felt too far away to make an impact. She soon realized her role in fighting the horrific conditions created in by President Assad was through social media.

Image is everything in today’s society appearance of things have become more important that what they really are and these images are being constantly fed to us through the media. Image has both a positive and negative influence on the individual but most people have been drawn into

Christine Rosen, author of “The Image Culture”, talks about the way the human culture is changing because the world is now in an era dominated by the image. Another author that believes the image culture is tearing apart society is Torie DeGhett, who is a famous journalist who writes for the Atlantic. Christine Rosen is successful in her argument about image culture by successfully showing how technology, such as Photoshop, affects images, and by using examples of war and natural disasters to persuade her readers into realizing the dangers of the image and the “destruction” to come. Torie DeGhett is successful in her argument about visual culture by successfully using pictures of war and using examples from editorials in newspapers that didn’t print Jarecke’s photo to get readers to realize the modern fixation of the image and the long term dangers of visual exposure. DeGhett supports Rosen’s point that everyone has the power to create, distort, and transmit images which evidently alters people’s understandings and acceptance of what they see questionable by backing up Rosen’s views on the topic of

For this Photo Board Assessment, I had to produce four photos which depicted my personal culture, my identity, my view of a human rights and my view on historical influences. Thinking about this assessment, I thought it would be easy to caption these photos but then I realised that it wasn’t easy at all. I was really nervous to share my photos mainly because I didn’t want others to judge me on how I captioned my photos. But learning upon this Culture and Society paper, I have learnt that everyone has their own cultural beliefs, value, identity and thoughts about their photos. Everyone had different opinions and thoughts.

Minh-ha raises the point that now; women in particular have the potential to be “co-creators” in regards to their body image. She argues that the images of women – particularly those previously marginalized – have been radically transformed and that they now have agency to portray themselves wherever, however and if they chose. Gone are the days where the object of an image was controlled and objectified. Now, one may control how and if they are to be objectified and to what audience. She muses over Giroux promoting the idea that selfies (and thus other forms of self-presentation on social media, inclusive of reality TV shows) are simply

Furthermore, the “selfie” or digital image seeks to represent a moment of time or fun that does not prove to be an authentic representation of one self. Moreover, it can be eluded from the text that self portraits are the art and the selfie or “digital” image is the human need. The text elaborates this ideology, stating “…digital photography has

In the novel, the greater focus is on exploration and developments in technology which do exist in modern society. Taking the previous statement into consideration, this idea can be relayed back the way people use the internet. When posting on social media, many people’s first thought when they post a picture, tweet, or status is how their posts will make their followers feel. The ultimate goal for many is to showcase their lifestyle; this is not necessarily to make others envious, even though this is sometimes the case, but to overcompensate for the things in their lives that are not going as they wish they were. The best way to represent this point is in remembering “how important it is to show everyone the fun you’re having through pictures” in today’s age (Why Social Media is Destroying Out Social Skills). With this being the most important motive in the minds of many, social skills are ruined as individuals find it more necessary to be flashy than happy. Because of how easy it is to access each other’s lives, it is very tempting for one to feel discouraged or intimidated by another’s lifestyle. As a result of that, social platforms, especially those like Instagram, have become a place where people seem to compete to see who has the most

A.J Willingham shares his views on why fake photos continuously go viral on social media sites. His argument uses evidence from several natural disasters Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Harvey and Irma. He uses theoretical examples that involve the social feelings of middle eastern men and women in relations to terror attacks. Willingham successfully shares his opinion on how and why fake images are shared during disaster.

Many young girls have to go through life being bombard with ads telling them they should look a certain way. Ads, music videos, TV shows, movies, and billboards all present one body type for woman to have. Photography has been used to preserve historical moments and to capture snap shots of life. Why now is it being used to give young girls a negative view point about their bodies? Several studies have been done to see if there is a connection between social media and negative body stereotypes. This paper will go over a handful of those studies to prove photography is being used to harm girls’ mental wellbeing.

In 2013, the Oxford Dictionary crowned ‘selfie’ as the word of the year due to the overwhelming popularity of taking selfies at the time (The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 is ‘selfie’, 2013). Similar to many other media trends, selfies have created several controversial topics for the world to argue about. Among these controversies, selfie shaming is one of the subjects that have been talked about most. One notable case of selfie shaming was when sorority girls from Arizona State University were publicly mocked by sports announcers for taking selfies at an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game (O’Neil, 2015). Through an analysis of selfie shaming, one can find that the social norms of new media culture clash with the social norms of

In the article “Sportscasters mock sorority girls for taking selfies at a baseball game, get ridiculed for being old”(2016), sorority girls who take selfies at baseball game is defined as bad behavior, the grown men did selfie shaming to them, therefore many people joined in the army of criticizing those girls, even some people did not want, but they have to follow the social beliefs. It is clearly to see that the social understanding leads people to think. Actually the sorority girls are just a group of teenagers who want to take a beautiful picture, but the selfie shaming makes them become the public attention. The selfie shaming tells us that the society has a bias to new media

Digital photography has been put together with social media applications much like Instagram. Instagram allows the user to instantly share their photographs on social media networking site. Hence, it provides the user with several digital photographic filters to use and possibilities for other manipulations. For example, cropping, cropping provides the user with user with easily used tools but it is also a constrained environment (Zappavigna, 2016) as there are restrictions, for example, on image dimension. The types of photographs made out that the selfie is the most common type of photo (Dinhopl & Gretzel, 2016). Dinhopl and Gretzel (2016) suggest that selfietaking, which is a social media related practice, has consequences for photography

It took awhile to come to realization that my best friend had left me alone at prom, and it took longer to overcome the feeling of loneliness. Now that the person, whom I trusted and loved, had abandoned me I decided to take pictures. With the camera around my neck I walked the cafeteria, and the loneliness faded as familiar faces appeared within my camera’s lens. Illuminated only by the DJ’s light projectors, most of the room was shrouded with shadows. Nonetheless, the people lit up the moment they saw, so all my friends and acquaintances would stop me in my tracks to ask if I could take their picture. Senior students who I’ve never met before would all smile and pose as if we’d been good friends. Regardless if the picture was taken or not