"See Me Showing You Me"

What is the relationship between a selfie and the public? Why is it important for you to know how I'm feeling at any given moment in time?

As of 2013, the word "selfie" was officially added to Oxford English Dictionaries in recognition of the new practice of digital self expression. It's no surprise this once niche term gained traction as a mainstream phenomenon; after all, with the advent of Web 2.0, sharing content over the World Wide Web has never been more convenient. Where once the self portrait was reserved for a privileged select few, now anyone with a camera phone can make one. We can share our stresses and joys with friends and relatives across the globe in a matter of seconds. We can share photos of our bougie coffee at our Seattle boarding gates at 7am and even more of our lunch time burrito bowl when we land thousands of miles away in Los Angeles at 9am (assuming we arrive on time).

But why?

According to Eszter Zimanyi, the importance of sharing lies within our knowledge of the selfie as a "digital transience," which is to say online media that is finite and brief, yet archived all the same. A selfie exists as a fleeting moment in time, and yet the thoughts, emotions, implications, and understandings associated with the image(s) linger as long as someone exists to consume it. That's all a deeper way to say: in a world of fast moving information, we want to squeeze in somewhere and start a conversation. We capture our status and our place in the world to evoke a response. We aim to leave an imprint, a visual signature on others, to provide an extension of ourselves to a digital circle.

In other words: we want to belong.

So where does health vlogging (video blogging) fit into all this?

Well, here is where I argue that vlogging (effectively a "moving selfie") conveys the same, if not stronger, sentiment.

Images, at their core, convey much more information than words, and in the case of moving images, that information can be amplified. Where selfies are still shots of moments in time, a video captures several moments as they happen. And in the case of a vlog, the moments are barely edited or unedited all together; the footage is raw and documentary in nature. In other words, there appears to be more room for authenticity behind this "extension of self."

The health vlog then becomes a personal archive or documentation of one's own reality; a reassertion or reclaiming of a highly individual narrative meant to personalize rather than sensationalize as mainstream media tends to do.

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Sources:

Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (Illustrated ed.). Basic Books.

Psychology of selfies | Charisse L’Pree | TEDxSyracuseUniversity. (2015, May 15). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzMERmRKtwU

Zimanyi, E. (2017). Digital Transience. Media Fields Journal, 12.