Trust My Selfie / Hyperallergic

CHICAGO — “In the world of networked individuals, it is the person who is the focus: not the family, not the work unit, not the neighborhood, and not the social group,” write authors Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman in their 2012 book Networked: The New Social Operating System. In this spaceless place of the new media neighborhood, the selfie is an individual’s identifier and recurring yearbook photo. The internet is a participatory medium on which a cluster of social networks exist. In order to be a part of, one must regularly return to and engage with it and them. Trust is currency in the social network, and selfies are a way to help someone feel closer to you. Won’t you be my neighbor?

 

The networked individual is defined by their way of connecting, communicating, and exchanging information through looser, more fragmented networks both on and offline rather than tightly knit and wound communities, groups, families, and villages. Yet at the same time, networked individualism locks people into their own internet filter bubbles, a term coined by Eli Pariser. In the filter bubble, algorithms on Google’s personalized search and Facebook’s user-centric news feed offer up the information that you, the user, want to receive. While networked individualism is looser and more fragmented, it isn’t a great space for learning the viewpoints of people whose opinions are unlike your own.

Read the full post: http://hyperallergic.com/91822/trust-my-selfie/