Out now: The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait by Brooke Wendt

Out now! The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait by Brooke Wendt.

Over 130 million images with the hashtag ‘selfie’ have been uploaded to the social media platform Instagram. In The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the New Self-Portrait, Brooke Wendt examines the significant hold that the ‘selfie’, or the digital self-portrait, has over self and society. Media theorist Vilém Flusser observed that society could become programmed to snap pictures for the sole benefit of cameras, as though under a ‘magical spell’, if photographs continued to be undecoded. Wendt examines this magical spell by analyzing users’ self-portraits on Instagram, one of the most popular contemporary platforms for image production.

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Naked Logic: Lecture of Boldizsár Hordós at Metaforum X, Budapest

By Geert Lovink, November 12, 2024

I am happy to teach computer history at a fine arts university. Besides, I also work with small kids. Part of my job is to pry phones out of their hands—not the most pleasant part of the day. This is partly because (as with every mandatory intervention) it stirs up more chaos than it prevents. [...]

Infrastructure that Sticks: Digital Affect Within Sovietcore

By Salome Berdzenishvili, November 4, 2024

Жить тяжело и неуютно Зато уютно умирать (Living is difficult and confining, But dying is liberating) The words written above are an excerpt from the song Sudno (Boris Ryzhy) by post-punk band Molchat Doma from Minsk. These words also often loop over the reels on post-Soviet aesthetics found online – the ones of decayed brutalist [...]

Ágnes Básthy: Crisis? What Crisis? Taking a Suspicious Walk around a Fashionable Notion

By Geert Lovink, October 31, 2024

(Text of the speech by Ágnes Básthy on the first day of Metaforum X, Budapest, October 25, 2024) “‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprized the term to indicate the [...]