Summary: In the third chapter of “seeing Ourselves Through Technology”, Jill Rettberg writes about the different types of visual self-representation throughout our daily lives. She states how by looking at one part of a social feed or picture only shows the viewer part of the story, and to further understand you have to look at it from a larger viewpoint, and consider it more as a part of a group rather than assessing just one part. We use selfies and profile pictures as a way to show the world or our particular audience how we view ourselves. The chapter dives into different ways we have done this before the selfie era.
Making Connections: This chapter is really relevant in today’s society. With many people using social media and the internet to find new avenues of self expression throughout their daily lives, this chapter takes an even more critical look at the different types of self-expression throughout time. With the Internet era, people have begun to express themselves and allow friends, family, or even total strangers to get a peer into their lives. People tend to put certain information out there and filter out the unwanted to create a different view from reality.
Commentary: When Rettberg started to write about the different time lapse videos made by Lee and Kalina, it reminded of the time I stumbled upon these types of videos on YouTube and how they made me feel. In our daily life, we barely seem to notice growth and the process of aging because we do see ourselves everyday and watching these types of videos gave me a sense of mortality. That we are only here for what really isn’t a long time looking at the grand scheme of it. My first other thought was these people allowed others to see what is reality and a true side where there are happy and depressed days. By showing the world a time-lapse video in the fashion of Rebecca Brown, you choose to allow others to digest all of photos at the same time to make a cumulative outlook compared seeing only two profile photos on someones Facebook page. This is something I really never gave a second thought to, but after reading this chapter this is something that is stuck in the front of my mind for the time being.
Mustafa's summer english blog 