notions of the digital self

Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives. This book is open access under a CC BY license. (Source: Publisher's blurb)

Lecture with Siri Meyer on self-representation from the Renaissance to social media.

This book explores self-representations in three modes: written, visual and quantitative, and looks
at how these modes of self-representation are used in a digital age. The histories of written and
visual self-representations are well known through lineages of autobiographies, diaries, memoirs
and self-portraits, and have clear descendents in blogs and social media sites like Instagram,
Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Quantitative self-representations also have a long history but have
been less studied as an aesthetic and rhetorical genre. With digital media, the personal tracking of weather, travels, habits and moods is commodified through activity trackers, wearable devices
and apps for lifelogging and productivity.
The book, which will be published as a peer-reviewed, open access and print-on-demand book in
the Palgrave Pivot imprint in October 2014, includes chapters on selfies, on the use of technological and cultural filters, on real-time diaries and on surveillance. For the purpose of this
workshop, the presentation will focus on how we can understand what José van Dijck calls
dataism, the belief in the objectivity of data in constructing representations of identity or behaviour, as a form of paratext to the individual life. Lifelogging is in itself a form of paratextual behaviour, or, seen inversely, the lived life is a form of paratext to the self-representation created on Instagram, in a blog, or through a Fitbit activity tracker. Quantitative self-representations in particular offer an interesting opportunity to think about how the paratextual meets the cyborg, as we strap devices onto our bodies to translate our movements, our heartbeats and even our emotions into quantifiable data about our days.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Transient self–portrait is an artistic research project with the aim of creating an interactive piece.
I take as the point of departure two pivotal sonnets in Spanish literature that are normally studied
alongside each other, En tanto que de rosa y azucena by Garcilaso de La Vega, a 16th Century
Spanish poet, using Italian Renaissance verse forms and Mientras por competir con tu cabello by
Luís de Gongora, a 17th Century Spanish poet from the Baroque period. Gongora’s sonnet is a
homage to Garcilaso’s and the styles and the cultural aspects that appear on the sonnets are very
different reflecting the attitudes from the Renaissance and the Baroque.

This project is a response to some of the concepts that emerge from these sonnets; ephemerality of
life, consummation, transient entities, fragility, which are also relevant to our age and the electronic
world we inhabit. The creative process is that of producing, reflecting, programming and testing
the medium to explore these notions in an electronic media society of dialogues with self-images,
engaging the participant in a reading experience of ‘in’ and ‘out’ of language, via webcams and
interactive aesthetics. The sonnets pass from different stages of written, visual, aural, language
and code to dissipate into nothing. In my presentation all these aspects will be discussed by
demonstrating the work.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)