Digital photography is contributing to the renegotiation of the public and private divide and to the transformation of privacy and intimacy, especially with the convergence of digital cameras, mobile phones, and web sites. This convergence contributes to the redefinition of public and private and to the transformation of their boundaries, which have always been subject to historical and geographical change. Taking pictures or filming videos of strangers in public places and showing them in webs like Flickr or YouTube, or making self-portraits available to strangers in instant messenger, social network sites, or photo blogs are becoming a current practice for a growing number of Internet users. Both are examples of the intertwining of online and offline practices, experiences, and meanings that challenge the traditional concepts of the public and the private. Uses of digital images play a role in the way people perform being a stranger and in the way they relate to strangers, online and offline. The mere claims about the privatization of the public space or the public disclosure of intimacy do not account for all these practices, situations, and attitudes, as they are not a simple translation of behaviors and codes from one realm to the other.

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Digital seduction, that is, practices of flirting mediated by social media and other digital applications, usually involves the display and exchange of self-portraits, commonly known as 'selfies', displaying nudity and self-pornification. This is a playful and complex presentation of the self, where making, displaying and sharing self-portraits reveal a complex gaze game. Participants are both the subject who takes pictures and the object pictured. They also put themselves in the place of the potential viewers, introducing their preferences, expectations and evaluations. This article presents the results of a preliminary research carried out in Madrid about these practices and the pleasures, gender displacements, disquiets and ambivalent feelings elicited in the case of heterosexual men.In Figure 1, a picture used by an online dating user, we find a male depiction that would have been unusual just a few decades ago. The nude male body, the ironic incorporation of the baseball bat, the messy setting, the head cropped out of the

Taking photos of oneself and sharing them on social media or instant messaging apps is a practice haunted by shame. Although both media and popular wisdom view it as a simple exercise in narcissism and vanity, research into this practice shows contradictions, ambivalence, and tensions. Drawing on an empirical study carried out with young adults in Madrid, we explore the ambivalence, or “conflicting desires” as one interviewee put it, associated with affective and attention economies involved in this practice. Despite being a common, everyday activity, taking photos of oneself, seeing oneself in them, and sharing them generates mixed feelings, ranging from pleasure at seeing and playing around with one’s image, to estrangement and disquiet. We analyze how different kinds of shame are elicited. We also explore the time entanglement of both shame and the sharing of personal images online, in which memories of the past are intertwined with forms of continuity and discontinuity between the past and the present, and with the expectation of what will be remembered in the future.