Abstract
Driven by a plethora of case studies drawn from diverse arenas including art, literature, television, and popular culture, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology maintains that despite the increasing ways we audience and are audienced by machines and technology, users can still be empowered to produce vernacular forms of self-representation through human agency and interpretation. Coupled with Rettberg’s auto-ethnographic snippets, the book is a goldmine of historical and contemporary case studies with which readers are invited to visualise the complexity of self-representation practices and artefacts. Rettberg’s highly descriptive but easily relatable illustrations are seamlessly woven into her own explications of scholarly concepts.
Parmigianino’s convex mirror Self-Portrait (p. 2), Cindy Sherman’s artwork (p. 8), Ellen DeGeneres’s 2014 Oscars selfie (p. 18), wearable lifelogging camera the Narrative Clip (p. 26), and Dave Eggers’s techno-dystopia novel The Circle (p. 73) are among the numerous artefacts and practices readers are provoked to rethink. For this reason, despite being a thoroughly researched scholarly work, the book is accessible to academic beginners or even nonspecialist popular audiences.
The book opens with “Written, Visual and Quantitative Self-Representations,” presenting brief analogue histories of three primary modes of self-representation in digital media, namely the written, the visual, and the quantitative. Through historical and contemporary examples, Rettberg walks readers through trajectories of textual, image-based, and numerical modes of data, such as social media status updates as successors to diary writing and autobiographies, and GPS activity trackers as successors to pen-and-paper lists.
While thoroughly researched and cross-referenced to both archival and contemporary sources, the language remains clear, jargon-free, and draws readers in through narrative descriptions that are easy to visualize. For instance, as a contemporary case study and in response to the recent popular media panic surrounding selfies, Rettberg asserts that selfies as self-documentation and self-presentation can be tools for “self-improvement and self-knowledge” (p. 3). As self-representations, Rettberg asserts that selfies are also acts of “self-reflection” and “self-creation” (p. 12) in that the data does not merely exist in an objective sense but requires users to interact with an interface, and frame their self-visualisation in a specific stance, before being captured, logged, and contextualized.
Through her succinct writing style, Rettberg successfully addresses populist notions of self-representation devices and technology. These include “Serial Selfies” (Chapter 3) viewing social media genres as serial feeds whose individual “post[s] or image[s] . . . are part of a series” (p. 33), “Automated Diaries” (Chapter 4) investigating “the information and images that these devices record and the ways in which they present the data to try to make it meaningful for the user” (p. 45), and “Privacy and Surveillance” (Chapter 6) negotiating “a balance between using our machines to see ourselves and being forced to be seen by machines” (p. 79). “Filtered Reality” (Chapter 2) and “Quantified Selves” (Chapter 5), in particular, speak to issues of mobile media and communication.
Rettberg eloquently exemplifies how everyday microuses of technology can be amplified to meso-contexts, such as the gamified geo-locative app Foursquare (p. 47), and macrosettings, such as the disciplinary power of surveillance by “data brokers” and “commercial companies” (p. 80). However, in a bid to pitch for generalizability, many of the explications and case studies seem to discount sociocultural peculiarities of ideo-geographies for which these uses and interpretations are likely to be shaped by politics of access, vocabulary, and ideology. The social media cited, for instance, include Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, We Heart It, Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit, all of which tend to operate on normatively occidentalist principles of freedom of speech, self-expression, and individuality, whereas the polymedia landscape of non-Anglo Saxon user-geographies may differ. There is also an implicit assumption of middle-class values and affordances such as the privilege of privacy and access to digital paraphernalia, know-how, and vocabulary, which may not be equally relatable to all demographics of users or readers. That said, the strength of Rettberg’s writing is in her highly illustrative explications through which readers are able to visualise her arguments without the aid of devices or technology.