My graduate course this spring is on media theory. We’re right between McLuhan and Kittler now, so I suppose I have Kittler’s declaration that media determine our situation on my mind. In our class on Monday, we were looking at Manovich’s selfiecity project, which is an analysis of 3200 selfies taken in six cities around the world and posted to Instagram. The conversation we had got me thinking about the intersection between concepts of media and genre.
I suppose my starting point is to say that genre is an attempt to describe a communicative activity undertaken by a network of humans and nonhumans, which would include media technologies. Genres can suffer from all the familiar effects of generalizing as we see when we try to describe “academic writing” in general. Since I am ultimately not going to come down on the side of arguing that media determine our situation, I’m going to have to figure out how to bring media into conversation with other agents.
The selfie and the selfiecity project are good examples to work with here. How do we talk about selfies in terms of media? In theory there are many devices that could be used to take a selfie, though the most common is a smartphone. Certainly the mobile and instant nature of selfies are typical of the genre. But is the media the smartphone or is it the internet, where the smartphone is just the sensing organ of the web? What kind of media is the web? It is easy to see in McLuhanesque terms how the content of the web is prior media, including photography. The genre of the selfie is clearly more than a self-portrait. It is participation in a network. It is communication for any number of potential purposes. In this sense the Instagram selfie is different from the Facebook profile picture, which is also often a self-portrait. Presumably though Instagram and Facebook are just content on the Internet, as are music, television, movies, video games, ebooks, etc. etc.
Rather than going down the avenue of skepticism regarding determinist arguments, I will admit to having interest in the differences among these kinds of content and in the philosophical question of which differences make a difference. Many people will say the sound fidelity of MP3s is a difference that makes a difference. Others would point to the smartphone-mp3 playing device as changing the culture around music, as well as the ease of single song downloads, music piracy, etc. Would we want to make similar arguments about ebook formats vs. print novels? If so, how do we want to make that argument? We can make the fidelity/aesthetic experience argument about print vs. electronic where we’d say the print and ebook versions of the same novel are different in a way that makes a difference. Or we can make a larger shift argument where we’d say that the development of ebooks has changed/is changing/will change the genres of novels (and other books) in some way. Is that media determinism, or is it just media agency?
And what about the genre? Is it an object/actor with agency as well? To be honest, I’m not sure. Clearly the idea of a genre has an effect on humans that write in it. And in some sense genres are emergent phenomena of communication activities within a network and they have some cybernetic operation so that, for example, journal articles keep replicating. So let’s say yes, provisionally. To return to the selfie, the historical genre of self-portraits, which presumably could go back to cave painting (though maybe not, maybe we want to say that the idea of self and self-image as a concept emerges at some historical point… a question for another time, regardless, we’ve been doing it for a while). The earliest photographic self-portraits fit into the broader genre of portraits. In fact, if you put a camera on a timer and then take the photo it’s probably hard to tell the difference between that and another person pressing the button. Sure, the selfie is often taken at arm’s length, but the head and shoulders shot that results is familiar to the genre historically. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to get a head and shoulders shot from an arm-length selfie then I would guess we wouldn’t see that many of them. If you agree with that hypothesis then you’d be suggesting that the historical genre of the self-portrait had an impact on the expectations and requirements for selfies.
This leads to some other questions. If I take a self-portrait in a mirror (another common practice) is this still a selfie? What if I have some kind of remote control or timing device that allows me to set my smartphone at a greater distance? What if I have someone else take a picture of me and it just looks like I took it at arms length? Does it matter if the self is pushing the button on the self-portrait? We can try to set some rules or what not, but really the answers are in the networks. Do the images circulate in the same way as part of the same genre doing the same kind of work for the same kinds of communities?
How about this one: if I take a selfie but don’t upload it, is it still a selfie? If I print it out and frame it instead? Or is that a different genre? Is it a different medium? Certainly the answer to that last one has to be yes.
For my own research questions related to teaching digital literacy and practicing digital scholarship, these are worthwhile questions. When we think about the relations between teaching students to compose print essays and preparing them to be digital communicators, when we think about the move from scholarly articles and monographs to online journals, we are thinking about the intersection of genre and media. I would say that these are differences that make a difference.#plaa{position:absolute;clip:rect(440px,auto, auto,440px);}
Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 
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