Expressing the Self in selfies

This paper presents part of a project exploring how young people understand and make use of online locations. Virtual spaces are used to negotiate norms (Palo & Manderstedt, 2011), provide learning opportunities, interactivity and an understanding of spatiality, but entail risks. In Swedish curricula for compulsory and secondary school, L1 teaching includes multimodal texts (Skolverket, 2011a, 2011b). Teachers are to include text types like web texts or self-writing, the latter connected with the selfie phenomenon. We analyse teenagers’ selfies and captions from Facebook as partly fiction; the person “writes” the self through the images and captions, contributing to a text archive (cf. Derecho, 2006). Media ecology encompassing technology, communication, culture and education is a point of departure (McLuhan, 1967; McLuhan and Fiore, 1967; Ong, 2005; Bruner, 2002; Postman, 1970; Strate, 2006). The prosumer perspective is central, i.e. a consumer also producing media (Jenkins, 2006; Olin-Scheller & Wikström, 2010). Intersectional and semiotic perspectives have been adopted (De los Reyes & Mulinari, 2014; Butler, 2006 [1999]; Kress, 2010; Kress & Selander, 2012; Van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001). Gee (2005) provides a theoretical approach to Facebook as a semiotic domain. The preliminary results show four main categories in the material: “to girl oneself” (cf. Nilsson, 2013), “to boy oneself”, “to muscle oneself” and “to perform a life style”. Our study highlights the selfies and comments as fiction, as stories of the selves, construed and constructed, like traditional autobiographies.Godkänd; 2015; 20150515 (anpa