What is the self in the celebrity selfie? Celebrification, phatic communication and performativity

Abstract

The aim of this article is to outline celebrity selfies as a photographic genre and means of self-expression within celebrity culture. In the theoretical framework, we approach celebrity selfies on three distinct levels. First, the article elaborates on the concept of celebrification in order to set the cultural context for celebrity selfies. The second section discusses the phatic communicative function performed by celebrity selfies on social network sites to establish presence and keep fans updated and connected through the successive documentation of the everyday lives of celebrities. In the third section, we present the performativity of the image itself, which creates a sense of immediacy by putting on display its own coming into being. The following sections engage in a case study of selfies posted on the Instagram profile of the Danish pop singer and songwriter Medina, which merges intimacy, access and authenticity with promotion and branding. Finally, the conclusion elaborates on this article's contribution to the understanding of celebrity selfies and discusses the paradox that celebrity selfies narrow the gap between celebrities and their followers, at the same time as they continuously maintain differences across the gap.

Pussy power not pity porn: Embodied protest in the #FacesOfProstitution Twitter network

“…Research on selfies is prodigious with previous studies examining selfie-taking by teenagers (Dobson, 2015;Marwick, 2015), the use of selfies among elite user groups (eg. politicians, see Abidin, 2017; celebrities see Jerslev and Mortensen, 2016), life cycle selfies (eg. selfies at funerals, see Gibbs, Meese, Arnold, Nansen and Carter, 2015;Leaver and Highfield, 2015; and selfietaking while sick or injured, see Tembeck, 2016), dating apps and the reshaping of perceptions of intimacy (David and Cambre, 2016) and the performance of citizenship through selfie-taking (Kuntsman, 2017).…”

Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news

“…The study of the selfie as performative practice draws on sociological accounts of linguistic self-presentation, by Goffman (Hess ,2015) and Austin (Jerslev and Mortensen, 2015) and on semiotic approaches to aesthetics (Koffman et al, 2015;Iqani & Schroeder, 2016) so as to foreground three dimensions of digital self-representation. The first focuses on the selfreflexivity involved in the public staging of the private self; this dimension draws attention to the civic, political and cultural potentialities of 'vernaculars of performativity' in social media (Papacharissi, 2011), approaching them as 'cultures of connectivity' -sites of individuation, bonding and memory rather than simply as 'networks ' (van Djik, 2013).…”

Visual communion: The photographic image as phatic communication

“…Overall, a new digital media culture is referred to as phatic, a culture dominated not by informational intent, but by social intent (Miller, 2008). Similarly, a mode of photo sharing where photographs are shared mainly to nurture and to confirm social relationships is becoming more common (Sandbye, 2012; Villi, 2012), and the concept of phatic is increasingly used when reporting research related to visual communication, current photo sharing practices and social media (Bayer et al, 2016; Jerslev and Mortensen, 2016; Kofoed and Larsen, 2016). In phatic photo sharing, neither the content of the photographs, their visual qualities nor the verbal stories about those photographs are seen as the key features of sharing; rather, the communicative significance, the pleasure of communication and the visual connectivity are focal (Lobinger, 2016: 481).…”