Abstract
Selfie posting is now a well-established practice, particularly for young women. However, it is nevertheless much maligned in popular discourses. As a counterpoint to digital narcissism, selfie posting is also constituted as relational. This Q methodological study explored how young women make sense of selfie practices. Twenty-seven young women aged 18–23 sorted a set of statements about selfies into a quasi-normal grid. These sorts were factor analysed to identify shared patterns. Four factors were identified which were subsequently analysed qualitatively, producing a narrative for each. These included (1) ‘Presenting . . . Me!’, (2) ‘I am what I am’, (3) ‘Sharing is caring’ and (4) ‘The In-crowd – beautiful and popular’. The complexity of identity curation evidenced in this study highlights the importance of moving beyond both polarised characterisations and the pathologisation of young women selfie takers in order to explicate the interplay between normative femininities and the digital self.
Highlights
The selfie has become a prolific subgenre of everyday photography in contemporary visual culture
Instead, when contextualised by narcissism, the idea that selfie posting is a symptom of the need for love (12, 3) and a bid for approval (14, 4) in the context of the overall item array shows that selfie posting is about consolidating narcissistic self-love
The four narratives identified in this study bring together a number of issues relevant to selfie-taking and -sharing practices in ways that are not straightforwardly marked by polarisations of the ‘good’ relational selfie and the ‘bad’ narcissistic selfie post
Summary
The selfie has become a prolific subgenre of everyday photography in contemporary visual culture. The smartphone as a networked device with its portability and forward-facing camera has undoubtedly been instrumental in establishing selfie-taking and -sharing on social media as a routine practice for many. The Selfiecity project (n.d.), which surveyed selfie posting in five cities (Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paulo), in 2014 found about 4% of the images they randomly collected to be selfies Their summary report indicates that selfies were significantly more often of women than men and that young people were most represented with an average age of 23.7. These gendered and generational patterns around selfie-posting practices are consistent with previous findings around both selfies and generic social media usage. For the purposes of this article, we focus on gender and generation, or young women as they, we would argue, are the most often vilified for these practices
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
