Understanding the MuseumSelfie
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During 2013, selfies became a seemingly ubiquitous means of expression. They have been the subject of intense and popular attention. With the further penetration of mobile technology, they will become a broadly accepted and normalized mode of self-expression. This mode of expression has resonance in the museum space. Images continually appear with the #museumselfie hashtag, independent of museum-sector initiatives. Based on a year of travel and graduate research, this presentation outlines a theoretical framework for understanding the function and meanings of museumselfies. It aims to demystify these images, decode the messages they broadcast, and place them in a framework of three themes: identity theory in visitor studies, contemporary social media theory, and current museological practice. This will show that museumselfies are a valid subset of the selfie phenomenon, one important for the museum sector to recognize as an important creative expression by visitors.
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Understanding the MuseumSelfie
- 1. Understanding the Museumselfie @alli_burnie Alli Burness Museum Computer Network Conference November 2014, Dallas, Texas
- 3. March 2013 @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 5. The Museum THE MUSEUM SELFIE Identity Theory Photography @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 6. • The #museumselfie is a meta-performative act of identity work • The #museumselfie is visual evidence of the personal meaning-making process conducted by visitors @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 7. Identity • Identity is constantly changing through our performance of everyday life, be that physical or digital. @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 8. Photography • The Mona Lisa argument against #museumselfies is an illusion. • The #selfie is about sharing everyday moments that weave the fabric of life in all of its variety. @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 9. The Museum • The #museumselfie is a glimpse into the actions and performances which create museums • A #museumselfie lets us see a visitor weaving their personal story around, onto, into an object or museum @alli_burnie #musesocial
- 10. @ The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh
- 11. @ Denver Art Museum
- 12. @ Rhode Island School of Design Museum
- 13. @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- 14. @ Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
- 15. @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- 16. @ Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
- 17. @ The Barbican Centre
- 18. @ The Studio Museum, New York
- 19. @ The Escher Museum, The Hague, Netherlands
- 20. Does a #MuseumSelfie have to be taken at a museum?
- 21. Alli Burness @alli_burnie museumselfies.tumblr.com alliburness@outlook.com
Editor's Notes
- I’ve been running a Museum Selfies tumblr since May last year. It was a side-project from my year of travel in 2013.
- Very early into my travels, I couldn’t help noticing this way of using the museum and wondering what on earth was going on. If this was a new way of using the museum space, I wanted to better understand it.
- Fast forward to 2014, I have completed graduate research on the topic. I’m now one of many people around the world researching selfies. These researchers create a group called The Selfie Researcher’s Network, who have even created a university-level class and syllabus.
- I looked into the relevant bodies of theory around these images - identity theory & the visit experience + social media & photography + performance in the museum. I found strong visual evidence for each. In this presentation, I’ll outline these key areas and explain how they’re relevant to museum selfies. First, putting the theory aside, museumselfies are so much fun – I find editing the tumblr endlessly funny or beautiful – I’m often impressed with the creativity that visitors convey in their selfies.
- I also think these super fun photos hold insight into what our visitors are doing in the museum. If we combine the museum, photography and some key ideas in identity theory – performance in the everyday museum visit experience comes to the fore – and so I have come to think of museumselfies meta-performative acts of identity work. I also think museumselfies are evidence of the personal meaning-making process conducted by visitors as they weave their lives into the museum.
- If we choose to dig deeper into museumselfies, it’s important we have a useful understanding of identity and how it works. In a recent piece of writing, I briefly outlined two general schools of thought about this: http://bit.ly/14Tz9wu FIRST: A popular idea about identity as the authentic, essential self that sits within us, like a traditional notion of a soul. The idea is that the self remains the same. This is an idea I don’t agree with but as I unpack it, you’ll start to recognise how it manifests in popular media. From the “authentic, essential self”, the presentation of the self online has a fracturing effect; online spaces draw us away from this essential truth of the self by requiring us to present ourselves in multiple ways across multiple platforms. The idea of being cognitively absent from our physical space when online also emerges. This is where ‘digital dualism’ comes in. The idea of the physical being more real than the digital. So - taking selfies disrupts ‘real’ moments in our lives by encouraging us to capture and share ourselves self-consciously to online audiences. Another school of thought about identity hinges around performance. This idea understands it as something that is constantly changing, continuously being constructed, through our performance of everyday life. This logic of performance encompasses both our physical and digital lives. I think this idea gives us a more constructive base from which to gain insight from selfies. The online space amplifies the self-conscious, day-to-day methods we all use when navigating our world. Selfies are one way in which the ‘performance in everyday life’ is made explicit. A specific point of identity theory I like is made by Stuart Hall. He talks about identity as “points of suture” – which means we, as individuals, agree to invest momentarily in a social discourse offered by an institution – such as a museum. This mutual agreement to invest in an identity position is temporary. I think the museumselfie lets us see that temporary point in which an identity is sutured together between the museum and an individual. A number of researchers have found identity to be important to the museum experience - John Falk’s outlines his FIVE visitor motivations based on identity. Linda Kelly has looked at the role of identity in different types of learning experiences in museums. Jay Rounds has suggested “identity work” is the primary influencer in how visitors look and browse in museums.
- Selfies are a vernacular photography practice – they didn’t emerge from institutions, and despite Jerry Saltz’s attempts to find a lineage, they haven’t emerge from an art historical movement. Selfies are brought into museums by visitors. Anyone here or following with the #musesocial tag knows that images are the currency of the internet and have become a method of communication. The medium is now the message. I would say beyond that, social photography is a way of being *in the moment* I’ll quote Nathan Jurgenson here: “social photography should be understood not as a remove from the moment but a deeply social immersion…. Selfies, largely, are not recording the exceptionally rare events with famous people but exactly the opposite, the everyday moments that weave the fabric of life in all of its variety.” (“The Frame is Not the Photograph” http://bit.ly/1dqGuRt) Across all the images that make their way to my tumblr, selfies with famous objects are not the majority. From the thousands of these images I’ve seen, I will say that the Mona Lisa argument against selfies is an illusion. The bulk of these images are creative, humorous, fun or beautiful – often with obscure works or architectural spaces. Museumselfies are sharing the moments that weave the fabric of the visit experience, in all its variety. Nowadays, the role photography in the age of social media is less about memory and more about identity. And here we wind back to performance- photos are an integral part of performing our identity today. And selfies especially so. We perform as we pose, we perform as we take the photo and we perform when we put that photo on social media. In this way, they are less photograph and more speech act. By this I mean much more than the photograph itself. I mean the whole parcel of the selfie, including the posing, the intent, the editing, the insertion in social media, commenting, looking and liking. There’s a lot more to the selfie than the photograph - it’s a whole activity. What’s a ‘speech act’ I hear you ask? A (totally watchable) 9 min video explaining the #selfie: http://bit.ly/1it3fId
- For better or worse, implicitly or explicitly, whether we like it or not, museums are performance spaces. The dominance of storytelling and narrative, some argue at the expense of the materiality of objects, speaks to this performative museology. I’m not talking museums as self-aware institutions - I think we can argue that visitors are aware of their central role in the display process. The museumselfie is a glimpse into the actions and performances which create museums. In addition to this, museumselfies showcase personal experiences with objects – a feature of museums which is usually sidelined in favour of the “professional” insights of the curator, director, or artist. Personal stories have been proven to play a role in the meaning-making process – including identity motivations / emotion / imagination / biographical stories. These images let us see the moment when a visitor weaves their own personal story around, into, or onto an object. It shows them applying the language of their own experience, not necessarily the educational interpretation which may or may not be provided for them. We could say that visitor photography and museumselfies as an indicator of how dominant the visitor is at making meaning in the museum. We can now see why I think of museumselfies as meta-performative acts of identity work. All three primary components – identity, photography and the museum are inherently performative. The museumselfie is the concentration of these three.
- http://instagram.com/p/oVzvkFwPMR/ A distinctive feature of the selfie is the looped gaze. This refers to the gaze of the selfie-taker meeting the gaze of the selfie viewer. This is key to the consent inherent in a selfie – the photographer gives permission to the viewer to look and implies a return of that look. In this way – the selfie communicates communal looking and self-awareness and this is amplified by their presence in social media. Whether we are subjects of selfies or looking at them – we are all looking at each other. There are many museum selfies which don’t show the self-takers face. Here, the selfie-taker is exerting their ‘directorial control’ and deliberately complicating that looped gaze. A distinguishing feature of museumselfies is the relationship and interaction between museum spaces or objects and the body of the selfie-taker. Selfies (and museum selfies particularly) are not about faces, they’re about bodies and what they’re doing. In museum spaces, visitor bodies and behaviour is supervised and controlled – there’s explicit and implicit rules about how visitors behave and what visitors do. And there are debates around who and how certain bodies are present in museums today – and Porchia Moore’s research speaks to that. Visitors can take back some control over the museum experience by taking a selfie, and sometimes use selfies to push the rules – there’s a selfie in here which is a good example.
- http://instagram.com/p/ePmV0aBfWv/ Some commercial organisations are scraping selfies for data – they contain valuable evaluative data. The companies are determining dominant emotions associated with a brand or product, links between brands, demographic types who consume their products. We have visitors who share their selfies with us. Selfies are a ripe source of data about what our visitors are doing in museum spaces. I know I can see evidence of all 5 of John Falk’s visitor motivation segments in the museumselfies I’ve seen. MuseumSelfies could be a fantastic data source which could form the core of an audience evaluation framework. They are something visitors leave behind and show what visitors do in museums – two types of evaluative data we try to collect through other means such as observation, with message boards and comments boxes. The remaining element, what selfie-takers say, could be collected as part of an interview stage of this research. Ultimately, a framework could be created for museum staff to gain better insight from these images taken at their institution.
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