Korean travel selfies as contested placemaking practices

Abstract

Selfies allow us to exert control over how we are seen and to construct our identity through the people, places, and activities that we imbue with value. The composition of the image, situation, and location photographed indicate aesthetic and ontological choices that reveal cultural values, performances of identity and social position of the person taking the selfie. When read as digital placemaking practices, travel selfies become salient to producers and audiences as political and performative expressions of identity and one’s place in the world. This article examines the travel selfie within the South Korean context and argues that thinking about selfies as placemaking practices informs the productive and potentially empowering nature of these photographs, which simultaneously conform to and contest neoliberal consumerist ideologies. The authors analyze a case study in which the placemaking practices of selfies are represented and critiqued. We argue that these digital placemaking practices become sites where young people’s imaginations, aspirations, and frustrations about social hierarchies, national imaginaries, and class status are expressed and debated through representations of international travel. Through textual and discourse analysis of the images and virulent public criticism faced by South Korean females who travel abroad and document their experiences on Instagram and Naver, we examine the tensions that emerge regarding expressions of the ‘spatial self’ online.