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Viral selves: Cellphones, selfies and the self-fashioning subject in contemporary India

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Viral selves: Cellphones, selfies and the self-fashioning subject in contemporary India

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Content UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Viral Selves: Cellphones, Selfies and the Self-Fashioning Subject in Contemporary
India

by

Anirban Kapil Baishya

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Cinema and Media Studies

May 2018

August 2018
A dissertation submitted to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In partial satisfaction of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF
PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (CRITICAL STUDIES))
August 2018
i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract vii
Introduction: Cellular Beginnings: The meaning(s) of the selfie 1
• “Looking Back” at Myself(ie) 1
• Locating the selfie in India 8
• Two Key Terms: “Viral” and “Mobile” Subjects 13
• Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
(or how to study the selfie) 17
• Plan of the Work 26
• Notes 31
• Introduction Bibliography 32
• Image Sources 38

Chapter One: The Aesthetics of the Selfie: Digitality, Interfaciality
and the Image of the Self
• Introduction: Surfacing the Self(ie) 39
• Body/Face, Camera/Phone: Selfies as Facial Machines .43
• “Welcome to Selfiestan”: A Vernacular Interface 50
• Facializing India (or the invasion of the selfie experts) 57
• The Work of Being Watched: Theaters of the Self(ie) 78
• Conclusion: An Aesthetic of Insertion 91
• Notes 99
• Chapter 1 Bibliography 103
• Image Sources. 115

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39 Chapter 1: The Aesthetics of the Selfie: Digitality, Interfaciality and the
Image of the Self
Acknowledgements
Abstract
ii
Chapter Two: The Fatal Image: Space, Death and the Selfie 118
• Introduction: Technology, Space, Death 118
• Death and the Camera-Image 122
• The Photographer’s Body: Extension, Equilibrium, Vulnerability 126
• From Cameras to Cellphones: Hierarchizing Hazard 130
• Pathologies of the Self(ie) 133
• From Pathology to Regulation 137
• (Un)Defining the Selfie-Death 140
• Mapping the Selfie-Death in India 142
• Between Risk Management and Augmented Spaces 146
• Risk Management in Practice: The contradictions of selfie-regulation 155
• “But What About the Dead?”: Selfie-Death as Moral Panic 165
• Conclusion 167
• Notes 169
• Chapter 2 Bibliography 173
• Image Sources 183

Chapter 3: “Being With”: The Selfie and Solidarity Politics 186
• Introduction: The self, the social and the selfie 186
• “Unframing” the selfie: A visual theory of social relations. 191
• Selfie Solidarity: Image, hashtags and community 196
• Selfie-Reaction: Contesting Community as Image 203
• The “Civil Contract” of the Selfie: Social Media and Civilian Action 210
• The Consensus Machine: “Swachh Bharat”, “Selfie with Daughter”
and Election Selfies. 218
• Selfies and the Electoral Subject: Narendra Modi and the address of the selfie 235
• Conclusion 257
• Notes. 258
• Chapter 3 Bibliography 263
• Image Sources 283

Conclusion 287
• “One does not simply assume social media is the same everywhere” 287
• Findings of this study 293
• What Else is there? 298
• Notes. 302
• Conclusion Bibliography 303
• Image Sources 307

Dissertation Bibliography 309
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Chapter 2: The Fatal Image: Space, Death and the Selfie
Conclusion: Grounding the Selfie
Dissertation Bibliography

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If I were to replace this written acknowledgment with selfies of the people who have
helped me along the way, I would probably run out of pages. Or, in all probability, the images
would be mere thumbnails—unnoticed and indistinguishable from each other—like flattened
faces on a grid. In either case, I would probably end up replicating a “rogue’s gallery” aesthetic
that would run counter to the very intention of such an exercise. Perhaps that is why (despite
countless forms of emergent media, each one “newer” than the next), some things are better left
to “that dangerous supplement,” the old technology of writing (whatever that may mean in this
day and age).
I would like to begin by thanking my chair Nitin Govil for his unwavering support of my
work over the years. His guidance was instrumental during the initial months of the PhD when I
was transitioning into the rhythm of graduate school life in the US. Nitin has been an observant
reader of my writing and an honest critic when the time demanded it. But above all, he has
always pushed me towards improvement and has encouraged my growth as a scholar. I could not
have asked for more from a mentor. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee—Tara
McPherson, Priya Jaikumar, Michael Renov and Virginia Kuhn. Priya Jaikumar’s graduate
seminar on space and place, and Michael Renov’s documentary class in the summer have been
key to the development of my critical thinking. I remember Tara McPherson’s television studies
class in my second semester with fondness, and my one-on-one meetings with her always left me
aspiring towards her breadth of knowledge and handle over the field. At MA+P, my classes with
Virginia Kuhn (Vee) provided me which some much needed inspiration during my last two
semesters in the PhD program. The dissertation writing phase can be prone to stagnation. But

iv
Vee’s classes offered me new ways of thinking about theory and practice; in her classes I
encountered fresh ideas, learnt new skills and met new people.
I would also like to thank the entire faculty and staff at the Cinema and Media Studies
Division. Ellen Seiter has been an unwavering source of support and inspiration, both inside the
classroom and outside. Her generosity towards students is something I hope to emulate in my
own teaching someday. A special note of thanks to Kara Keeling whose inputs were crucial to
the shape of my project as I prepared for my exams and wrote my prospectus. I will always be
grateful to Akira Lippit for his class on Japanese cinema; his class introduced me to the work of
Jean-Luc Nancy, and some of that interest has rubbed off on this dissertation as well. I also took
a cultural studies class with Aniko Imre, a class on the Blaxploitation era with Todd Boyd and a
class on avant-garde cinema with Thomas Kemper. My lessons in those classes have left an
indelible imprint on my thinking and research. Not enough can be said about the support I have
received from Bill Whittington, J.D Connor and Christine Acham. They have provided me with
very crucial advice and have facilitated my journey through the PhD track. I would also like to
thank Jade Agua, Alicia Cornish and Maria Cheteboune at the CAMS office. They have been
part of the CAMS office at different times, but each one of them has helped me traverse the PhD
journey without a hitch. The dissertation has also benefited from the generous funding of the
USC Graduate School and the Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI). The Graduate School’s
Research Enhancement Fellowship and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate (VSGC) Summer
Research Fellowship have contributed to the fieldwork without which this dissertation would not
have been possible.
No dissertation would be completed without the support of friends and family. My
parents, Dwipen and Anima Baishya have been unflinching in their support of my endeavors.

v
They have also endured my odd hours, mood swings and sporadic bursts of obsessive work.
Without their support, I may not have continued with graduate education. My brother, Amit
Baishya and my sister-in-law Andreea Marculescu have been key sources of inspiration, both as
scholars and otherwise. They have provided me with emotional refuge and laughter. My brother
has always been my proofreader by default. Not acknowledging his labor in this note would
constitute a criminal offence. I would also like to thank Sreedharan Nair, Mini Syamala and
Vivek Sreedhar. They are my family by extension and have also endured the impact of my
research on the rhythms of their everyday lives when I was visiting Trivandrum. Gopinathan
Nair and Syamala Kumari are not with us anymore, but they would have been happy to see the
completion of this work. My niece, Aradhana Singha has been instrumental to my work. She has
rigorously documented cellphone advertisements in Guwahati for me and some of that has been
used as evidence and illustration in this dissertation.
Special mention must be made of my transnational network of dissertating friends—Neha
Vermani, Anannya Bohidar, Akhila Mathew and Anirban Kumar. Although we are located in
different parts of the world, many a joke, meme or recipe has been shared between us. They have
remained my pillars of support for almost a decade now. Akhila Mathew and Justin Cherian have
also pointed me towards some key contacts that helped me in my research. Among other friends,
Shruti Sengupta, Anirban Ghosh, Priyam Ghosh and Ayesha Matthan must not be forgotten.
They have helped me with advice and contacts remotely, and although friendships are not
transactional relationships, I don’t think I could compensate them for their help. At USC, I would
like to thank my cohort—Isaac Rooks, Mike LaRocco, Sonia Misra, Maria Zalewska and Qui Ha
Hoang Nguyen. Sebnem Baran, Kohki Watabe, Jinhee Park, Trace Cabot and Debjani Dutta
have also proved that it does not take a cohort to make friends. Graduate school life can come

vi
with its attendant pressures, but they have made it fun. I must thank Parijat Bhattacherjee for a
key translation from Russian to English. At ScoRe, Hemant Gaule (Mumbai) and Amit Prabhu
(Delhi) have been generous with their time and have pointed me towards resources and sites in
the PR industry.
The dissertation fieldwork has taken me to different parts of India. I have been fortunate
to have friends in the cities I have visited. Mit Chowdhury and Pritisha Borthakur’s residence in
Noida was my refuge for two prolonged stays for fieldwork in Delhi. Likewise, in Mumbai, the
Tambe family has hosted me graciously and helped me find my way through a largely alien city.
Special mention must be made of Ira Bhaskar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi and
Devika Jayakumari at the Center for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum. They have been
mentors in more ways than one and their belief in my work has provided me with the inspiration
to keep going. To Ira Bhaskar, I owe my curiosity about the idea of the “mode.” It was in her
melodrama class in JNU that I first began to think of the distinction between mode and genre.
Although the selfie as a mode and the melodramatic mode are perhaps worlds apart, I must
acknowledge my debt to her in thinking about the distinction between a specific object and the
orientations it can engender.
Finally, I must thank Darshana Sreedhar Mini. She is my partner in crime and dissertation
writing group rolled into one. Her sharp observations and questions have pushed my thinking
and writing in better directions. As a fellow graduate student, she has also shared (and put up
with) my violations of the circadian rhythm. Without her curiosity, encouragement and support, I
would have missed many a deadline. Apologies for any other names that I may have missed:
consider them “data-entry” errors.

vii
ABSTRACT
In the 21
st
century the selfie has emerged as a major constituent of digital visual culture. Enabled
by the convergence of cellphone technology, wireless networking and digital imaging, the selfie
has become the medium of choice for most contemporary representations of the self. By “selfie,”
I refer specifically to digital self-images that are shot and circulated via handheld, camera-
equipped portable communication devices such as cellphones and tablets. Debates surround the
use of selfies—while some see the selfie as the detritus of contemporary culture, others see it as
an enabling and empowering force. Thus, the selfie brings us into the fraught terrain where
managerial logics of state and corporate control vie with new forms of personal expression and
collective organization. This dissertation examines the selfie as a mode of image making and
communication that has become a metonym for the conduct of life in the digital everyday. The
selfie’s positioning between interfaciality and sociality opens up new questions about the
relationship between technology and social life. To conduct this investigation, I turn to the
specific context of contemporary India where the rise in cellphone technology and internet usage
since the late 1990s has been phenomenal. From films to advertising to politics, selfies have
found their niche in the visual and technological aspects of contemporary Indian culture. Using
this popularity and ubiquity as a starting point, my dissertation attempts to examine the selfie in
relation to technoculture, political mobilization, solidarity movements, urban planning and
policing. I look at specific case studies to see how the selfie assumes specifically local
characteristics in India, how its ontology affects pre-existing social structures and how its
rhythms impact the pace of everyday life. By turning to a situated understanding of the selfie
within particular national and local contexts we can understand the ways it circulates as a mode
and as a kind of privileged lens to understand networked capitalism and its forms.

1
Introduction
Cellular Beginnings: The meaning(s) of the selfie

“Looking Back” at Myself(ie)
I owned my first cellphone in 2006. My parents bought it for me when I moved to Delhi,
the capital of India from Guwahati, my hometown in India’s northeastern region. It was a modest
Nokia handset—the Nokia 6610. With its polyphonic ringtones and a color screen, it was a
marked improvement over my family’s collectively used Nokia 3310. However, there was no
camera. My relationship to cameras was different. My father owned a Pentax SLR (single lens
reflex) camera as early as 1988, and since 1999, I had my own “hobby” camera, the Kodak KB
10, a 35mm point-and-shoot model. In my trips outside of home, a childhood friend’s cellphone
would be used in case my family needed to call me. On the other hand, I wielded the camera for
my group of friends, clicking pictures on our trips, and as delegated photographer I would be
missing in most of the frames. The camera and the phone were yet to be fused in my
imagination, and although camera phones did start appearing in the market, they were a far cry
from today’s sleek multi-megapixel smartphones. Cameras and phones are almost inseparable
now, and if I were to take the trips with my friends today, we would all probably be clicking
pictures with our phones and sharing them with one another or on social media. In the age of the
selfie, those prior problems of delegated photography, developing reels and printing photographs
for albums have seemed to vanish into thin air.
Cut to Los Angeles, 2013. I had just moved to the United States to start my PhD and
carried one of my older phones with me from India. Although the phone worked perfectly well (I
could text and talk), I found myself handicapped in many ways. This was partly an effect of

2
moving to a new place; but there was more to it. I soon found out that having a smartphone in
my hand would make my forays in the city easier, both in terms of finding out bus and train
schedules, looking up area information on the go and using Google Maps’ live navigation
features as I walked. In a few months, I moved to an Android smartphone that would offer me
these seeming pleasures of digital flânerie, but there was also an interesting side effect. My
phone now had a camera, and it allowed me to solve a “personal” problem. I have been regularly
shaving my head since 2006 and shaving the back of the head always involved some guesswork
or help from others. Living alone also meant depending solely on my own sight and touch for
something as basic as shaving. For the first time, the cellphone allowed me to see if I had
managed to get everything in the back of my head. The first selfies I shot were of the dorsal side
of my head. This cellphone-enabled sight of my body exceeded the limits of my anterior-oriented
binocular vision. I could not turn my eyes to see the back of my own head, but I could use the
cellphone camera to visualize my dorsality. But this was not merely a question of vision. The
ability to “look back”—or look at and from the back, dismantles the commonly held assumption
of the selfie’s frontality in two ways. First, it runs counter to the physical orientation of the
camera lens that is articulated towards the world in front of it; and second, it can destabilize the
portrait’s frontal logic. The full extent of this frontal logic can be seen, as Richard Brilliant
points out, in state-specified standards of identification such as those held by the United Sates
Immigration and Naturalization service (Brilliant 41-43) where the body’s anterior (and more
specifically the face) establishes an indexical relationship between identity and person. On the
other hand, the dorsal logic of my cellphone enabled vision disarticulated the photographic
apparatus from its intended use. To invoke David Wills’ term, this “dorsal turn” signals a
resistance “to a technology that defines itself as straightforward” (Wills 6). The selfie enables a

3
“turning,” through which the camera lens looks back at the subject, or, as in the case of my
“shaving selfies,” look at the back of, or from behind the subject. In either case, the selfie
destabilizes the fixedness of figure and ground relationships as the body takes its image back
from the sovereign look of the frontal gaze. Thus, although the popular, mainstream idea of the
selfie involves an imagination of the face, in this dissertation I forward an expanded definition of
the selfie that involves practices and objects that are at the limits of selfie-culture.
While the term “selfie” might seem to have entered commonsensical parlance to such a
degree that its meaning might seem self-evident, the parameters of this project demand some
reflection on its meaning and nature. The addition of the word selfie to the Oxford English
Dictionary in 2013 was a much-publicized affair, and although the OED is by no measure a
guarantee of ontological certitude, it would serve us well to begin with the lexicographical
delineation of the selfie. The current dictionary meaning of the selfie is “a photograph that one
has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social
media” (Oxforddictionaries: n.d). This definition is surprisingly comprehensive, accounting for
the selfie’s visual status as a photographic image, its personalized mode of production and its
embeddedness in 21
st
century network cultures. The insertion of the word “typically” before
smartphone or webcam also allows for certain latitude about the scope of the selfie’s definition.
By and large, this dissertation agrees with the dictionary meaning of the term but focuses
more on the grey area that is signaled by the word “typically.” In many places in this
dissertation, the selfie is explored in its atypical forms. In this project, the selfie is best
understood as a mode of image-making that conflates the producer and subject of the digital
image. Further, the selfie is a photographic form that is deeply embedded in wireless
communication networks and the internet, and the possibilities of sharing the image

4
instantaneously through the devices that produce them. Thus, while cameras have been used to
take self (and group) portraits earlier as well, the selfie is a strictly digital form. There is a
popular tendency to read historically older practices of self-portraiture as predecessors of the
selfie. For instance, a photograph of the 19
th
century American photographer Robert Cornelius
(Fig.1) is often cited in popular accounts as the “world’s first selfie” or the “first ever selfie”
(Becker; Andreasson).

Fig. 1:Photographic self-portrait of Robert Cornelius.

5
The same descriptive strategy is used for the Cornelius photograph in The Public Domain
Review, and while I will not replicate the text of the entry here, the comments section is
particularly useful for our purposes. The comments on the entry feature arguments for and
against this image being a selfie. One of the comments by artist and photographer Karen ann
Donnachie (whose work I reference in my later chapters) counters the designation of this image
as a selfie. Donnachie writes: “This image is as much a selfie as Durer’s renaissance self-
portraits in oil […] the term ‘selfie’ should not be applied to just any photographic self-portrait,
it is a genre specific to this century. The selfie, unlike any preceding form of photographic self-
portraiture is necessarily networked, it is created with the distribution and replication (audience)
in mind. It is an act of belonging.” The responses to Donnachie’s statements are equally
revealing. One of the responses runs: “Whether you share the POS or not has nothing to do with
it. Selfie is all about ME, not about US. They are SELF PORTRAITS. Shortened to SELFIE so
that stunted intellects can believe they are part of some new movement without having to look up
self-portrait on google.” This brief (acerbic) exchange offers us a window into the construction
of contemporary discourses about selfies. My attempt in this dissertation is not to unearth a
genealogy of the selfie, but to locate the social forces that evoke such strong responses to the
selfie. Even the characterization of the selfie as a “POS” (piece of shit) or the product of “stunted
intellects” hints at the strong impact the selfie has had on contemporary society. I side with
Donnachie and others who believe that the selfie’s historical specificity as a strictly digital form
needs to be acknowledged to understand how the selfie has woven itself into practices of
everyday life and to understand what functions it performs within the fabric of digitally mediated
social life. As Donnachie writes elsewhere, “The collective quest to uncover the first selfie […]
confirms that we cannot imagine ever having lived without this phenomenon” (Donnachie 55).

6
The tendency to read any self-portrait, whether photographic or otherwise as a selfie is
anachronistic and betrays a desire to see the past through the prism of the present.
While the painted self-portrait is analogous to taking a step back and looking at a mirror,
the selfie implies a sort of a handheld mirror. Most selfies have a specific “hand-held” look to
them, which is literally because most phones are held by hand when the pictures are taken. Even
in case of selfies that are not held by hand, the quality of the image is marked by a close
proximity of the lens to the subject. A 2014 article in The New Yorker suggests that the
photographic self-portrait differs from the selfie since it requires “more consideration, more
composition, more psychological insight and aesthetic care” (Wender). However, this distinction
actively assumes aesthetics to be the sole prerogative of bona fide artists. Selfies might not
demonstrate the same amount of finesse or require the same technical skills as those employed
by professional photographers, but the use of filters and effects in Instagram and other selfie apps
and software definitely proves that consideration, composition, care or insight are definitely not
lacking among selfie users. If anything, the selfie is an image that is marked by an intricate
curation of the self. Like painted and photographic self-portraits, selfies also narrativize the self
and actively embed it in a time, a place and a social context. In this sense, the selfie is not merely
a visual object, but also a way of writing the self. The selfie’s most immediate form is the visual,
but it is always embedded in multiple forms of autobiographical representation.
While I do not suggest that the representation of the self in images is by any means new,
the selfie is a different mode of image making that emerges from the same digital environment
that has initiated phenomena such as YouTube, Google Maps and digital self-tracking. If the
medium of Dürer’s self-portraits was oil paint, and that of Cornelius’ daguerreotype was silver,
the medium of the 21
st
century selfie can very well be said to be data that can be aggregated,

7
traced and manipulated remotely. This is why I signal the importance of understanding the selfie
as a mode rather than a stable object whose meaning is fixed, unchanging and readily available.
Like the GPS enabled map user and the online shopper, the selfie conceives of a user of the
device as the subject of its visual form. Thinking of selfie-subjects as users allows us to account
for the potentially viral nature of selfies and to locate them within internet-enabled practices
steeped in fast and remote circulation. And thinking about mode alongside the object allows us to
test the limits of selfie culture, explore the edges at which they blur and merge with other
practices of digital life.
Cellular technology and the cellphone market have developed in leaps and bounds since
the early 2000s when I first saw and held a cellphone. “Viral Selves: Cellphones, Selfies and the
Self-Fashioning Subject in Contemporary India” has emerged out of a sense of fascination and
awe—not necessarily in awe of what the selfie promises or allows, but how quickly the selfie has
become an almost “natural” part of the ecology of the digital everyday both in India and
elsewhere. Although this dissertation is about selfies, there are greater theoretical stakes in this
project related to issues of the body and visuality, digital-technological culture, public space and
mobility, politics and governance. The task of this dissertation is to parse these various fields,
identify networks of relationships between and within them, and to situate the selfie as a
symptom of digitally mediated everyday life, while maintaining a balance between contextual
and formal analysis.

8
Locating the selfie in India
While the form of the selfie remains a constant running thread throughout the
dissertation, I am equally invested in locating its specific ramifications in contemporary India.
Although selfies are a global phenomenon, the Indian case offers us a way of examining how
digital media and a culture of sharing and participation has attached itself to pre-existing modes
and practices of everyday life. India, with its rapidly changing media landscape, and its
emergence as a booming smartphone market is a prime ground for such a study. From films to
advertising to politics, selfies have found their niche in the visual and technological aspects of
contemporary Indian public culture. As a moment of heightened inflow of global capital, the
contemporary moment expands the possibilities opened up by the period of economic
liberalization in mid-1990s India, when there was a shift from the Nehruvian socialism of the
earlier era towards a free-market economy that allowed the inflow of new businesses, new goods
and new media forms into the country.
1
Purba Das writes that the media culture of pre-
liberalization India was steeped in constitutional declarations of “unity in diversity,”
emblematized by the anthemic song “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” (1986), played regularly over the
national television channel, Doordarshan (Das 227). A look at India’s current media landscape
shows a very different picture. Not only is the monopoly of Doordarshan over the televisual
landscape gone, we now have a plethora of television channels, access to foreign television
shows and most importantly, an ever-growing presence of internet access and cellphone
coverage. If “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” was the anthem of pre-liberalization India, contemporary
India has moved to other anthems such as the hit song “Selfie le le re” (“take a selfie”) from the
Salman Khan starrer Bajrangi Bhaijaan (Dir. Kabir Khan, 2015), to the notoriously viral
number, Selfie Maine Le Li Aaj (2017) by “cringe-pop” YouTuber, Dhinchak Pooja. While these

9
songs and their videos by themselves are not hard evidence of political and economic trends,
taken together they signal India’s shift towards an increasingly privatized and customizable
experience of participating in public life (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Visualizing the Indian public in “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” (1986, top), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015,
bottom).

Against this backdrop, I examine the selfie in relation to political mobilization, urban
planning, policing and public safety. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s notion of affordances, I
argue that such uses and adaptations draw on the form of the selfie, but also re-shape it based on
India’s cultural and historical nuances. Levine defines an affordance as the “potential uses or
actions latent in materials and designs” (6). For her, forms are “portable organizing principles”
Fig. 2: Visualizing the Indian public in “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara” (1986, top), and Bajrangi
Bhaijaan (2015, bottom).

10
(7), and while the overall patterns or shape may remain familiar, historical and cultural
specificity are equally important. She writes: “when forms meet, their collision produces
unexpected consequences, results that cannot always be traced back to deliberate intentions or
dominant ideologies” (8). The affordances of instant imaging and sharing are of course present in
selfie-use worldwide, but the specific modalities of its impact and form in India can only be
understood through close reading—an attention “to many different forms and scales operating at
once” (Levine xi). In “Viral Selves” I look at specific case studies to examine how the selfie
assumes specifically local characteristics in India, how its ontology affects pre-existing social
structures and how its rhythms impact the everyday life in contemporary India.
Ravi Sundaram points out that there has been a particular technological strain of lived
experience in Indian cities since the late 1990s when “"Technology", once the preserve of
planning and scientific debates, now seeped into the everyday life of urban residents, their
debates, their conflicts, their dreams and desires” (Sundaram xiv). Sundaram draws a direct link
between technology and economic liberalization, which was a period of a significant shift in
India’s political, economic and technological climates. This is the same period that fostered the
introduction of cellphone communication in India. Sundaram’s point about technological
experience has less to do with becoming tech professionals (although India does boast of a strong
IT industry) and points more towards a naturalization of technological habits within existing
rhythms of urban life. As Sundaram argues later in his book, the story of technology and media
in India has not been one of unmediated embrace, but one that has given rise to uneven and
informal modes of associating with techno-culture including underground markets and piracy,
and forms of “making-do” and assemblage (jugaad). The cellphone has been the mascot of
India’s techno-cultural assemblage, fostering new kinds of communication practices, new

11
anxieties (for instance related to gender and access) and new kinds of livelihood practices (such
as mobile repair shops).
In The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics
and Daily Life (2013), Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron track the statistical increase in cell phone
use in India across spectrums of class, caste and gender. Although their study pre-dates the
emergence of the selfie phenomenon, Jeffrey and Doron map out the significant ways in which
cellphones had woven themselves into the fabric of India’s public sphere despite immense
differences in language, geography, religion and class. As they point out, by 2011 the mobile
phone had become “not a luxury but a necessity for tens of millions of people [and] the country
had far more mobile phones than it did toilets of any kind” (Jeffrey and Doron 6). Doron and
Jeffrey’s book is quite recent, but cellphone technology and markets have changed at an
astronomical rate since 2013. The biggest change has been the integration of faster wireless
internet access into cellphones, and while the average Indian consumer today might not own a
computer, he or she can still access the internet through the cellphone.
This integration of internet and telephony in India’s wireless ecology is significant
insofar as it is a precondition for the emergence of the selfie. The selfie’s popularity in India has
been concurrent with rise of new forms of communication and messaging afforded by social
media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram. As I explore later in this
dissertation, India’s selfie culture must be understood as part of this broader network ecology
that includes mobile telephony, the cellphone market and social media platforms. Accounting for
viral subjects in the context of Indian public culture also means recognizing the interwoven
nature of technology, politics and everyday life. However, this interwoven relationship is not
always a smooth or even one. Consider for instance, the Indian government’s recent attempts at

12
introducing unique IDs for Indian citizens—termed the “Aadhar” card, the system aims at
creating a database of Indian citizens based on biometric and demographic data. However, the
system has failed on many counts including a very recent data-leak fiasco (“Aadhaar security
breaches”) and cases of starvation deaths because of the failure to link ration cards (documents
allowing holders to access subsidized food and other essentials) to Aadhar cards (“In Jharkhand,
11-year-old”).
Aadhar cards do not belong to the same register of digital artefacts as selfies, but they do
reveal an attempt at framing citizens as data subjects first and foremost. This is not far removed
from Grant Bollmer’s conceptualization of “nodal citizenship.” Bollmer defines a nodal citizen
as one who “generates data to be uploaded and stored in accordance with norms [and] relates to
others by connecting and maintaining flows” (7). While Bollmer is thinking more in terms of
networks and how networks discipline users as subjects, existing state institutions themselves
replicate data standards and establish them as normative aspects of citizenship. For instance, in
2017 Microsoft announced that Skype Lite would be integrated with Aadhar to allow for
additional authentication (Nagpal; “Microsoft to launch”). Here the state’s own authentication
methods become part of a networked system of communication that is not based in the state’s
apparatus. While the Aadhar card is different from the selfie in its location as an agent of state
surveillance and sovereignty, it emerges from the same technocultural ecology that has fostered
the rise of the selfie in contemporary India. And while the selfie need not always be used in
directly political ways, it carries within itself a political potentiality that becomes most evident in
electoral campaigns and government sponsored schemes.
An account of the selfie in India needs to be bolstered with an understanding of
technoculture and governmentality. Doing this kind of media study requires us to conceptualize

13
media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both
technological forms and their associated protocols” (Gitelman 7). To state it in another way, we
need to look not merely at the media object (the selfie) but also its contexts—the tweets and
hashtags that accompany it, or the political environment in which it is deployed. This study of a
mobile culture requires an equally mobile vision that juxtaposes multiple discourses, zooms in on
cultural specificities and simultaneously connects them to tendencies beyond the geographical
boundaries of the nation. Thus, my study is deeply rooted in the idea of a vernacular globalism
that accounts for adaptation, repurposing and subversion. While India remains the main site of
study, parts of the dissertation make connections to network cultures and theories from across the
world, retaining a belief that the global and the local are not bound in a hierarchical relationship
but are mutually constitutive of each other.

Two Key Terms: “Viral” and “Mobile” Subjects
At their most basic levels, the terms “viral” and “mobile” in relation to media
technologies concern themselves with certain conceptions of speed, instantaneity and fleeting
presence. In relation to this dissertation, both these terms provide useful analytical frameworks to
study these social phenomena in terms of their medium specificity. There is a simple, but
important, distinction between virality and mobility that needs to be made at the outset.
“Virality” (and hence “viral media”) refers to a certain condition of circulation, whereas
“mobility” has to do with the ability of the device to physically travel along with the body of the
user—the former has to do with speed in the virtual space of the network, while the latter has to
do with speed in actual geographical space.
2
Often, in the case of mobile technologies such as
the cell phone, conditions of virality accompany the mobility offered by smaller and more

14
mobile devices, but not necessarily; i.e. virality is often coextensive with mobility, but not
necessarily corollary. For instance, Sony’s commercial video recorder, the DV-2400
(“Videorover”) introduced in 1967 was mobile in the sense that it allowed for great portability
and on-the-go video recording in comparison to its bulkier predecessors, but its images could
never have been viral in the sense that today’s YouTube videos are. Virality presumes a digital
presence—a mobility of the artifact within the network. The situation changes in case of cell
phones and portable computing devices, which are not only portable but also already connected
to the network, readily facilitating rapid circulation and exchange of information. In case of such
devices, mobility and virality are simultaneous, but not dependent on each other: co-extensive
but not corollary.
In Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, Tony Sampson ties the viral
condition to the fact of constant connectedness. Virality for Sampson is “all about the forces of
relational encounter in the social field” (4). I find this notion of relational encounters particularly
useful, as it allows for an examination of selfies as objects that arise out of the encounter
between the body, the screen and the network. Sampson when he writes that the “encounter is
not bound up in individual or collective representations but relates instead to a non-bonded yet
much folded monadological world of things” (19). This idea of a world of things already
prefigures the social as a “network” of relations, wherein artifacts, effects and affects “spread out
and connect everything to everything else” (Sampson 7). Following Tarde, Sampson says that
the “social is not given, it is made” (21). In this dissertation, I ascribe to a similar idea of the
social as a constantly unfolding set of relations. Further, I argue that rather than simply describe
a kind of media, the viral is a constitutive aspect of digital sociality. Virality denotes a potential
to spread, and in this selfies and selfie-takers are already potentially viral. The selfie-taking body

15
as a viral body does not align with the epidemiological denigration of the selfie as a contagious
form, and allows instead, for a conceptualization of selfies as social media. Here, the social does
not precede the media (images); rather media and their circulation constitute the social.
Heidi Cooley’s Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era
connects the question of mobile media to techniques of governance. I draw on Cooley’s work to
examine how selfies enculturate users in forms of self-governance through habit. Cooley’s
interest lies in the move from surveillance to tracking and the ways in which mobile media have
facilitated this shift. She writes: “because mobile devices are almost always in hand, they
encourage spontaneous and pervasive recording of routine transactions. Texts, mobile-image
sharing, updates, posts, and so forth, produce streams of data that provide a continuous account
of where a person is and what the person is doing” (xxxiii). Cooley brings the tracking functions
of such technologies down to the “level of habit and habit formation” (Cooley xxxiii). This idea
of habit is a useful analytic when considering the pervasiveness of mobile technology and can be
connected to some of the questions that I am interested in. For instance, in the case of the selfie,
the use of the cell phone is definitely connected to modes of self-governance and self-tracking.
The evidentiary drive that accompanies the selfie, one might argue, is normalized by the
everyday use of mobile technology. As a social artifact, the selfie is marked by a very palpable
sense of time and place—the individual self is constructed in relation to the body’s relationship
to physical space and historical time (“I was there at that time”). Cooley emphasizes this point
when she conceives of the network subject as “the consequence of ongoing impulses, synapses,
thumbnail images, tweets, and other forms of sign production” (51). The image emerges in the
form of a record—as a memorial artifact, but also as an experience that can be revisited and
transmitted through and within the network. Cooley writes that such practices constitute a sort of

16
an “autobiography” fashioned out of habitual usage (54). Eric Freedman makes a similar point in
Transient Media: Personal Media in Public Frameworks when he writes about the “life
technobiographic” which he describes as “life written through technology and approximated by a
data trail […] that calls for an understanding of how the self is situated within social relations
that inherently involve engaging with technology” (Freedman 4). Although he does not
specifically use the term “selfie” he says that the “self-portrait with camera […] may take us
further than many other images of self, literally embodying a higher form of sharing” (137). One
could argue therefore, that this factor—what Cooley and other scholars such as Adriana De
Souza E Silva and Mimi Sheller term “findability,” or locatedness imbricates the technological
subject in a network that is predisposed towards virality. “Findability” in the context of mobile
media then, means being embedded in a grid or a network where every action and every
movement leaves a trace—virality is that condition of the network that makes the leakage or
transmission of that trace possible at any moment.
As a networked form, selfie culture is both viral and mobile. Selfie-taking bodies
circulate both in physical and virtual space, leaving traces, making connections and transforming
their own fleshy materiality into digital code. The selfie-taking/making subject is always a
potentially viral subject that bridges the tangible world of physical objects and devices and the
invisible, wireless world of radio frequencies. Selfie taking subjects are what Nishant Shah calls
“technosocial subjects.” By technosociality, Shah refers to the merging of the organic and the
machinic, positing an idea of a permeable relationship that accounts for the “spills and overflows
of one into the other [and] blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual” (Shah 23, 24).
In its expansive relationships with technological devices, human bodies, geographical locations
and virtual networks, the selfie is a symptom of digitally mediated technosociality. This does not

17
mean however, that the selfie promises a world without boundaries or regulations. Instead, as
Grant Bollmer suggests social media become subject to “new forms of discrimination, inclusion,
and exclusion […] alongside those produced by national and state boundaries” (Bollmer 113).
This includes new pathologies, new legal challenges and new forms of solidarity building and
propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore such new, mediated social forms, possibilities and
problems that are encapsulated in the selfie. The chapters in this dissertation pay equal attention
to formal matters and context, with the awareness that both the possibilities and the problems of
the selfie are an effect of its affordances. Virality and mobility are key affordances of the selfie-
taking apparatus (camera| screen| body) and the task of this dissertation is to balance the general
form of the selfie with its particular resonances in contemporary India. Theory, after all, is the
struggle to find a language from the friction between the general and the particular.

Theoretical and Methodological Considerations (or how to study the selfie)
Given that the selfie is a very recent (and perpetually unfolding) phenomenon, one of the
major challenges of this dissertation has been archival. Much of what is said and circulated about
the selfie comes from popular journalistic writing that is either uncritically celebratory or
disparagingly dismissive. As noted earlier, such views constitute evidentiary material but need to
be subjected to rigorous analysis. In “Viral Selves,” I do not necessarily dismiss these
viewpoints, but consider them as nodes in a discursive map. This is a necessary maneuver for a
temporally unfolding, contemporary phenomenon that does not offer us the same fixity as an
historical archive of the past.
Having worked on an M.Phil. on a historical film project earlier in my academic career,
my previous approach to research involved spending hours scanning and photographing images

18
and articles from old magazines, sifting through hundreds of rolls of microfilms, and of course
watching rare films at the National Film Archives of India (Pune) on an old Steenbeck machine.
While film and other archives are often fragmented and throw up unforeseen surprises, there is a
spatial fixity to them. Such an archive is located in a place with a designated address; it houses
material and is managed by people. On the other hand, working on digital practices means,
essentially, working with a sprawl of fragmented resources that can often not be traced back to
any original source. In this work, I look at media discourses to locate the selfie’s embeddedness
in specific cultural contexts. However, the majority of this material is online and prone to
disappearance. As Lisa Gitelman points out “change itself is a paradoxically consistent feature of
the World Wide Web” (132). While an online document can be a “potential ally in explanation”
(Gitelman 132), the specter of link rot unhinges transactions of trust between readers and
authors, manifested in citation standards such as footnotes and linked URLs. Dealing with the
disappearance of seemingly stable online sources requires multiple means of digital capture—
from simple screen captures on the local machine, to piecemeal solutions such as using online
webpage captures (such as those found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), to more
sophisticated tools such as the Rhizome Project’s Webrecorder.
3
The name or the type of tool is
of lesser interest here than the specific modality of research that it engenders, with collecting and
capturing becoming an active part of the research process.
Working with online sources also presents another major issue. The archival problem of
contemporary digital media is not scarcity, but the sheer overabundance of material. In a telling
metaphor, Mark Andrejevic calls this the problem of “infloglut.” According to Andrejevic, this
problem is common to not just marketers and intelligence agencies, but also the average citizen
“attempting to read all of the news stories (or Tweets, or status updates, or blogs posts) that are

19
published on a given day” (12). Although techniques such as data mining, body language
analysis, sentiment analysis and neuro-marketing do exist to cut through this clutter of material,
they are often shortcuts that allow the user/researcher to bypass critical engagement or
understanding (Andrejevic 16-17). Again, precisely because online material is available in
overabundance, an additional burden of verifying the information is placed on the researcher.
Scholars such as Deborah Lupton and Nancy Baym point towards the unverifiability of much of
digitally produced data. Lupton argues that like other forms of qualitative or quantitative data,
digital data too is prone to bias and error (Lupton 62). Baym complicates the problem even
further; it’s not just that digital data may be erroneously selected or processed, they can
sometimes be completely false, as they can be “distorted by deceptive practices including bots
and purchased engagement” (Baym). Such dilemmas of verifiability and authenticity enforce a
move away from an overdependence on big-data methods. Johanna Drucker instructively points
out that in the language of big-data, data often passes off “as mere descriptions of a priori
conditions,” conflating the observation of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself (Drucker).
Given the immensity of visual material produced and circulated over the internet daily,
one could argue for a more statistically oriented study that can reveal patterns of usage and
trends in selfie culture. In fact, such projects are already under way, for instance in the Lev
Manovich-led “SelfieCity” project. The project focuses on six cities—New York, Sao Paolo,
London, Berlin, Moscow and Bangkok—to create a massive database of selfies taken in these
urban spaces.
4
The project’s visualization of selfie data allows visitors to the website to sort
selfies by pose, angle of the head, mood, age and of course, location. The SelfieCity project
aligns with Manovich’s understanding of cultural analytics, which he defines as “the analysis of
massive cultural data sets and flows using computational and visualization techniques”

20
(Manovich “The Science of Culture?”). However, as I explain in the conclusion of this
dissertation, such studies can often slip into the terrain of data-mining that flattens out historical
and local specificities. Relying on data-mining methods and statistical aggregation in the Indian
context, for example, would run into problems the moment one has to account for informal
modes, political formations, aspirations and anxieties that are by nature, unquantifiable. Thus, in
my study of selfies, I turn to critical models of thought and processes of close reading that are
rooted in the contexts in which the images emerge. While the technique of close reading is
usually associated with textual material, I use the method a little broadly to denote a close
analysis of both the visual content of images as well as the textual, cultural and political contexts
that surround them.
It must be mentioned at the outset, that a burgeoning field of “Selfie Studies” has begun
to emerge in the last few years. For instance, scholars such as Jill Rettberg and Negar
Mottahedeh have examined the selfie in relationship to other practices of digital life. Rettberg’s
book, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices
to See and Shape Ourselves (2014) is one of the first to examine the selfie as part of other
practices such as blogging, self-tracking and surveillance. On the other hand, Mottahedeh’s
book, #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (2015) examines
selfies as a part of a protest ecology that includes online activism as well as on-the-ground
action. Adi Kuntsman’s edited volume, Selfie Citizenship explores the political potential of the
selfie, connecting it to practices of citizenship, activism and surveillance across the world. Ego
Update: A History of the Selfie (2015), a volume edited by Alan Beiber, is another crucial
resource for my study of selfies. The essays in the volume (including Donnachie’s essay
mentioned above) focus on a range of issues including the networked nature of the image,

21
questions of aesthetics and identity. Brooke Wendt’s The Allure of the Selfie: Instagram and the
New Self-Portrait (2014) looks at the selfie’s networked nature and its relationship with new
forms of communication and image making including hashtags and filters (one of Wendt’s
chapters in the book is also included in Ego Update). Academic journals have also begun to
include new and emerging research on selfies. It impossible to list all individual articles within
the space of this introduction, but two journal issues deserve mention—a special section on the
selfie edited by Theresa Senft and Nancy Baym in International Journal of Communication
Studies (Vol.9, 2015), and a special issue on selfies edited by Katie Warfield, Carolina Cambre
and Crystal Abidin in Social Media+Society (Vol.2, Iss.2, 2016). The location of these special
issues in reputed, peer-reviewed academic journals points to the kind of attention the selfie is
beginning to garner in academic circles. As a nascent field, Selfie Studies attracts researchers
from varied backgrounds and approaches including art history, political theory, film and media
studies, digital culture and ethnography. This is also reflected in the creation of a “Selfie
Research Network” and a corresponding Facebook group; the group is a vibrant community of
scholars that includes some of the aforementioned authors including Wendt, Kuntsman, Senft,
Baym, Bieber, Rettberg, Donnachie and Manovich. Rather than a unified field of theory, Selfie
Studies as it stands now, is defined solely by the object that it studies. However, there does seem
to be a shared consensus about the selfie as a networked, digital form that marks a shift in the
history of photography.
My own approach to the field has been influenced by my training in film and media
theory, cultural studies and critical theory. Thus, while drawing on the work produced within the
field of Selfie Studies, this dissertation is also influenced by studies of visual culture,
photography and cinema. Visual studies pioneer W.J.T Mitchell, has written about a “pictorial

22
turn” in the humanities (1994, 2002) in recent times. Here, Mitchell refers to a specific visual
operation that has permeated the imagination of the everyday, which is the core of the study of
visual culture. In relation to this, Mitchell says that visual studies is “more than just the study of
images or media, but extends to everyday practices of seeing and showing, especially those that
we take to be immediate or unmediated” (“Showing Seeing” 170). I seek to bring this line of
visual studies into conversation with public culture in India to see how India’s contemporary
mediascape including film, television, advertising, digital media and even art practice is
symptomatic of what Mitchell calls the “visual construction of the social” (170). A study of
contemporary Indian visual culture is central to the ways selfies have become part of India’s
media ecology, especially the way in which they are popularly read as “immediate and
unmediated” products of digital culture. This requires cutting across various fields of
communication culture including social media, advertising, reality television and film.
This project’s commitment to close reading of images also necessitates an engagement
with prior studies of photography and cinema. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and
On Photography and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida are key texts that I engage with. Sontag’s
declaration of photography as the “ethics of seeing” (On Photography 1) and Barthes’
phenomenological ruminations on the relationship between death and the photograph inform my
reading of selfies as political images and my examination of selfie-deaths. While political selfies
and selfie-deaths only form parts of this dissertation, these works offer a vocabulary to bridge the
old and the new. I am attentive to the selfie’s status as a new and different form of photographic
practice; but reading them as “social” images still requires attention to questions of power,
ethicality and affective impact. The challenge for Selfie Studies is to strike a balance between the
nature of selfies as photographic images and their form as digitally encoded data. Bringing older

23
theories of photography into conversation with studies of social media poses a challenge in terms
of vocabulary and tone. One can say with certainty, that Sontag and Barthes would not have been
concerned with questions of viral circulation and the black-box nature of digital interfaces.
However, that is a factor of historical location and chronology; even when images circulate over
digital networks, they do not cease being carriers of power, affect and ideology.
I also draw inspiration from and Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography,”
especially Benjamin’s conceptualization of a non-human camera optics. Benjamin envisions
camera technology and photographic reproduction as something that can “capture images which
escape natural vision” (“Little History” 220). While the camera’s vision has become a
naturalized in our visual vocabulary today (exemplified for instance, in the acceptance of CCTV
footage as a marker of realism), the task of this dissertation is to defamiliarize norms of seeing
and showing.
The selfie is what the work of photography looks like in the age of personal, live
streaming. Instead of process photography and darkroom enlargements, we now deal with
touchscreens, pinch-to-zoom effects and tapping filters for algorithmically enabled
enhancements. The chapters in this dissertation are dedicated to deconstructing images and
examining the ways in which photographic vision comes to be accepted as normal. For this
reason. I also engage with Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
(2006) to examine the ideas of frame and framing, and D.N Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film
(2007) to reflect on the nature of the virtual image. These conceptual travels become key in an
examination of the selfie, since it is an image form that is placed at the intersection of new
techniques of digital imaging and older traditions of photographic practice.

24
The second broad area of research that I engage with is the study of digital media
technology and ideology. For me, this is a key epistemic maneuver that allows us to think outside
the realm of the visual. While visuality is key to this study, selfies by nature are algorithmically
fueled, networked forms. While I could easily have called this the study of “new media,” I
deliberately opt for “digital media technology and ideology” to foreground the political
ramifications of seemingly neutral technological forms. In this I follow Galloway, Thacker and
Wark who call for a move away from the temporal labels of “old” and “new” and stress the
importance of examining “media and mediation as conceptual objects in their own right” (1-2).
Apart from Bollmer and Cooley’s work mentioned above, recent work on digital interfaces such
as Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006) and
Wendy Chun’s work on digital media and ideology (Programmed Visions: Software and
Memory, 2011; Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 2016) are key to my
understanding of digital media cultures. I borrow Munster’s phenomenological approach to
digital interfaces and examine how selfies and cellphones engage the entire body of the user.
Munster’s work also aligns with mine in her move away from Cartesian understandings of a
rational user. I agree with Munster wholeheartedly when she declares that we need to “treat the
matter of humans and the materiality of technologies as open-ended propositions that are
continually in the process of being made and unmade” (Munster 13). My account of selfie
culture conceptualizes the selfie-taking apparatus as a threefold relationship between human
bodies, device interfaces and digital networks. Wendy Chun’s work has allowed me to think of
software and algorithms more broadly as systems of encoded power. In Programmed Visions,
Chun conceptualizes software as a kind of a general economy of new media. Software, as Chun
astutely observes, “reconceptualizes society, bodies, and memories in ways that both

25
compromise and extend the subject, the user” (Programmed Visions 6). This concept allows one
to account for the algorithmic nature of social media. Indeed, one is forced to ask whether the
social in “social media” is a matter of algorithmic coding. In obverse, we could perhaps
conceptualize governance and governmentality as algorithmic forms that function through codes
of bureaucracy, social norms and habit. Chun’s work has been influential in my thinking about
cellphone culture and selfies, especially in examining how we become habituated into processes
of “sharing” and “liking” that seem playful or banal but hold strong political potential.
I also draw on theories of affect and subjectivity to examine how the selfie impacts
notions of selfhood. In “An Inventory of Shimmers,” the introduction to The Affect Theory
Reader, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg delineate eight main trajectories or orientations
to the theorization of affect ranging from theories of embodiment, to non-Cartesian philosophical
traditions, psychoanalytic inquiry and politically engaged work. Although I don’t go into all of
these in detail, Seigworth and Gregg’s map of these different trajectories draws our attention to
the multiplicity of meanings embedded with the general rubric of “affect theory.” The authors
provide a useful starting point to think about the limits of the term “affect” when they define
affect it as “visceral forces” which emerge in a state of in-between-ness. For them, affect is that
“which can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension” (Seigworth and
Gregg 1). Thinking of social media forms and digital networks as affective networks allows us to
account for seemingly innocuous things like liking and sharing (and more acerbic ones like
trolling) that, although technologically powered, evoke strong bodily and psychic responses.
Bringing this into conversation with selfie culture offers us new possibilities of accounting for
the viral circulation and strong responses (both positive and negative) to the selfie. As Mark B.N
Hansen points out affectivity is constitutive of the relationship between the human user and the

26
interface (130). Although Hansen writes in the context of digital artworks, the idea of a
constitutive affective relationship between selfie takers, their viewers and the interfaces that
connect them can help us account for specific modalities of the selfie phenomenon such as
celebrity culture and political mobilization in which the selfie becomes key to the circulation of
desires and ideologies.

Plan of the Work
This dissertation consists of three chapters, bracketed by this introduction and a
conclusion. Each chapter is structured around one key idea that is central to my understanding of
the selfie. The first chapter, “The Aesthetics of the Selfie: Digitality, Interfaciality and the Image
of the Self,” extends the argument that the selfie is a product of informational aesthetics. Despite
frequent claims that it lacks aesthetic value, the selfie is an aesthetic form that is produced
through the interaction between information and communication technologies and the
democratization of the photographic domain. I argue for a conceptualization of aesthetics as a
form of lived relation between human subjects and their material world. Based on this, I define
the selfie’s aesthetic as a “surface aesthetic” that is co-extensive with the emergence of sleek,
interactive, touch-screen surfaces, and faster, accessible platforms for image manipulation. The
chapter explores how the selfie’s “surface aesthetic” can be seen in the contemporary moment in
the new products launched by three mobile phone companies—Oppo, Vivo and Gionee. These
smart phones are advertised as “selfie-expert” phones (though only Oppo uses the term), with the
mobile phones photographing function becoming as important, if not more, as the basic
telecommunication function. At the same time, I connect the selfie’s interfacial aesthetic to the
politics of the face in the Indian context. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of

27
“faciality” outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, I explore how the interconnections between the
technological form of the selfie affords the articulation of fantasies and desires through the idea
of the “perfect selfie.” In particular, I explore how selfie-focused cellphone advertisements and
advertisements for other products such as fairness creams and toothpastes exploit the idea of the
perfect selfie as a signifier for social and financial mobility. I argue that, in the Indian context,
the selfie’s “interfacial” aesthetic becomes intricately bound to culturally specific notions of
beauty, class and success. This chapter also examines how the selfie articulates new formations
of celebrity culture that reflect fantasies of class mobility. In the final section, the chapter turns to
an examination of practices of insertion and pastiche—what Lev Manovich calls the “cut and
paste logic” of new digital media practices (The Language 131). This section compares the work
of two artists—Gitanjali Rao and Adrita Das (who draw heavily on selfie culture both
metaphorically and formally) with a recent innovative scheme of “selfie-stamps” floated by the
Indian postal service. This comparison between art practice and government scheme extends the
understanding of the selfie’s aesthetics as a process of constant negotiation between digital
interfaces, human bodies and cultural institutions.
The second chapter, “The Fatal Image: Space, Death and the Selfie,” argues that the
selfie’s relation to technological communication is not just a matter of image and surfaces but is
also deeply related to space and mobility. As Lev Manovich points out, mobile telephony and
networked communication have led to the emergence of “augmented space”—a notion of
physical space that is layered with data and interactivity (“The Poetics” 1-4). The selfie’s
“instant” production and distribution place it in a frictional relationship with public urban space,
where the selfie’s propensity for distraction has led to a panic around the phenomenon of “selfie
deaths.” Recent statistical reports pit India as the country that records the highest number of

28
selfie fatalities. The chapter begins by picking up the statistical nature of selfie-death reportage
but diverges from them to forward a more nuanced understanding of the selfie-death
phenomenon. I explore how the reportage of these deaths create a discourse of selfie pathology
that fold in pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism with the suggestion of selfie-related
physiological disorders and accidental fatalities. I ground my study in an exploration of the
urban space of Mumbai that has been recently in the news for alleged demarcations of no-selfie
zones. I compare these reports of no-selfie zones with ground-level observations of these sites to
expose a lag between news discourses and policy implementation. I also look at other recent
regulations that ban selfie (such as those levied by the Tourism Ministry and the Indian Railways
in 2016) to argue that perceptions of selfie-related harm are reflective of a Foucauldian “political
anatomy” (Foucault 138) that seeks to regulate selfie-taking bodies within discourses of self-care
and the law. In this, I read news media as a particularly potent force that produced moral panics
and enforces institutional actions around the selfie. In effect, the panic around the selfie as an
agent of death itself becomes a “virtual image,”—one that is neither true nor false, but instead
expresses deep-seated connections between technology, space and the regulation of life.
The third and final chapter is titled “"Being With": The Selfie and Solidarity Politics.”
This chapter is especially invested in an exploration of the selfie’s affective potentials, especially
as it relates to questions of solidarity building and political mobilization. Through an engagement
with Jean Luc-Nancy’s notion of “being with” I explore how the selfie encapsulates ways of
being in the world. In this, I move away from readings of apparent Narcissism in all kinds of
selfie practice, arguing instead that the framing of a sole body in the image is not necessarily
equivalent to social isolation. Rather, selfies of isolated bodies can also be expressive of larger
community ideals, solidarity and support. Therefore, the selfie is also ripe for forms of political

29
mobilization and civic action that work through the power of affective suggestion through the
network. The seemingly leisurely act of clicking a selfie and then uploading it in support of a
cause or a political party is a form of affective labor in which the selfie diffuses the relationship
between leisure and work. This also means that the selfie is more than just a photographic form;
it is an informational form that fuses linguistic and symbolic functions through metadata such as
geolocation, hashtags and captions. This chapter focuses on three broad areas where these
various modalities of selfie-action can be seen—protest politics, civic action and electoral
politics—and has close conceptual links with Mottahedeh and Kuntsman’s works mentioned
earlier in the introduction, conceiving of technological and aesthetic frames as constitutive of
“the social” and “the political.” In other words, social and political formations are not seen as
pre-given categories and are, instead, conceptualized as a product of relational networks. This
also has close resonances with Bollmer’s proclamation that “the social does not precede the
media that call it into being, and media are not autonomous determinants of the social” (Bollmer
14). Instead, as Bollmer suggests, “they exist as a material form that crosses countless other
processes and procedures, intersecting daily life, institutional power, modes of governance,
cultural imaginaries, historical contingencies, and lived resistances” (14). Following this line of
thinking, this chapter directs its attention to protest movements such as the social-media driven
“Kiss of Love” as well as civic actions that use the selfie, the textual caption and the hashtag as
expressive functions. A major chunk of the chapter also focuses on explicitly political use of the
selfie seen for instance in the pro-democracy didactic functions of the Election Commission of
India, and in the use of the selfie in the 2014 General Elections that brought the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) and its leader Narendra Modi to power. I also turn my attention to some schemes
floated by the BJP-led government that are advertised as beacons of its commitment to social and

30
economic development. The government’s girl-child empowerment program (“Beti Bachao, Beti
Padhao”) and its sanitation drive (“Swachh Bharat”) in particular have adopted the BJP’s
penchant for selfie-based advertising. Through an examination of selfie schemes such as “#Selfie
with Daughter” and “#Selfie with Sauchalay” (toilet) I demonstrate how iterations of selfie
solidarity that emerge out of protest and civic action differ in intent and impact from more
politically motivated selfie schemes. Selfie schemes such as “#Selfie With Daughter” and
“#Selfie With Sauchalay” feel seemingly “non-political” and the reactions that they elicit from
the public are often coded in the language of leisure, or progressive participation in the nation’s
affairs. The case studies in this chapter have been selected to interrogate the constitutive
paradoxes of India’s complex political realities, where the rhetoric of technological development
often stands at odds with a conservative moral and political ethos. Following such debates, this
chapter seeks to examine the ways in which the selfie operates as a form of affective political
labor in contemporary India, where it has not only been mobilized for electoral politics, but has
also been selectively used as a sign of “progress”—often technological progress that has also
masquerades as progressiveness. While such reactions of solidarity seem natural and organic,
they are often a function of what Michael Hardt has identified as a central facet of the
informational age—“the creation and manipulation of affects” (Hardt 95).
This tripartite structure of the dissertation focusing on aesthetics, politics and space is by
no means an exhaustive study of the selfie. However, this three-pronged approach cuts across
issues such as the relationship between human and machinic bodies, the interweaving of
surveillance and tracking and the relationship between digital formations and governmentality.
The chapters are designed to tackle larger theoretical and formal questions related to the selfie by
grounding them in the specific cultural and political peculiarities of the Indian polity. Thus, the

31
intellectual journey of the dissertation begins from the belief that theoretical models are always
contextual and mutable. “Viral Selves” is an effort at arriving at a theoretical understanding of
selfie culture, but one that can account for the specificities of geopolitical location and local
nuances. While this dissertation adds to a steadily growing body of work around global selfie
cultures, it also recognizes that speaking of selfie culture in the Indian context must also account
for the unevenness of technological access, disparities of class and “vernacular” adaptive
practices. In this sense, the work offers an insight into the place of selfie culture, its fantasies of
mobility and its evocation of anxieties in within what has now come to be called “Digital India.”
NOTES

1. For a detailed analysis of India’s shifting media landscape in the face of globalization and
economic liberalization see William Mazzarella’s Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in
Contemporary India (2003).
2. In Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces, Adriana De Souza E
Silva and Mimi Sheller write that “we no longer enter the internet—we carry it with us. We access and
appropriate its diverse affordances while moving through physical spaces. Mobile phones, GPS receivers,
and RFID tags are only a few examples of location-aware mobile technologies that mediate our
interaction with networked spaces and influence how we move through these spaces” (Silva and Sheller
4). The devices that we use for everyday internet access and imaging move along with us in physical
space.
3. Released in 2016, Webrecorder is a free service that allows users to record sessions of their
interaction with a website. Unlike a static snapshot, Webrecorder preserves the dynamic links within the
website, as long as the user interacts with them. This is particularly important in a research project like
mine, where selfies and other “small” objects such as GIFs, Tweets and Instagram stories can disappear
very quickly, or get buried underneath the massive production of such artefacts.

32

4. See the Selfie City website for more details about the project (http://selfiecity.net/).

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Image Sources
Fig.1: PetaPixel (https://petapixel.com/2013/12/05/pioneering-photographer-robert-cornelius-
credited-worlds-first-selfie/).
Fig.2: (Top) YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jf6pwtPqCs). (Bottom)
YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF6sF85yV9s).

39
Chapter 1

The Aesthetics of the Selfie: Digitality, Interfaciality and the Image of the Self

“In visual culture, surface matters, and it has depth.”
Guiliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media

Introduction: Surfacing the Self(ie)
This chapter examines the selfie as a technology of the surface—both the surface of the
(mobile) screen, as well as an interface between the human user and the network.
I argue that the selfie is a product of “information aesthetics.” I borrow the term information
aesthetics or info-aesthetics from Lev Manovich who describes it both as the “aesthetisation of
information tools” (“Information” 1) as well as “those contemporary cultural practices that can
be best understood as responses to the new priorities of information society: making sense of
information, working with information, producing knowledge from information” (“Introduction”
6). This definition counters the traditional idea of aesthetics as having to do with the categories
of “the beautiful” and “the sublime.”
1
Instead this definition of information aesthetics allows us
to consider forms of experience and responses that arise out of the material conditions of
technology and media. These experiences can include art practice but need not be limited to
them. The concept of information aesthetics leads us to the terrain of the everyday and the
routine, into the realm of habitual use and the incorporation of aesthetic sense as the normal
rather than the sublime. In relation to data visualization, Lev Manovich introduces the term “anti-
sublime.” For Kant, the sublime meant that whose immense scale could hold the viewer in thrall.
So, the sublime is “a pleasure that only arises indirectly” (Kant 75) and therefore in some senses
it is unrepresentable. Manovich says that data-visualization does the exact opposite: it “map(s)
such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human
perception and cognition” (“Introduction” 8). This idea of the anti-sublime can be extended

40
beyond data-visualization proper. To push this idea, I suggest that digital photography is a form
of data-visualization, something more than just “writing with light.” As a form of digital
photography, the selfie has emerged alongside increased possibilities for visualizing, organizing
and manipulating data, and its aesthetic is co-extensive with the emergence of sleek, interactive,
touch-screen surfaces, and faster, accessible platforms for image manipulation. While the photo-
graphic function is not totally dissolved by the selfie’s digitality, the optical process is now
passed through an algorithmic filter. This emphasizes the fact that digitally produced
photographic artefacts are no longer merely visual. Instead the images become containers for
other kinds of data along with the visual, the most prominent being metadata that contains
information about the device, the aperture and focal length settings, color information and also
geolocation (Fig. 1). As opposed to analog images, digitally produced images become more
readily manipulable, both at the level of the visual surface, and the level of metadata and code. If
the emergence of photography “made it possible to assemble knowledge about the “public body”
of the individual” (Azoulay 97), then the merging of the photographic apparatus with internet
technology and code-level manipulation have made images central to contemporary cultures of
surveillance and tracking that have resonances in fields as diverse as advertising, corporate
decision making and political control.

41

Fig. 1: (Top left) An image captured with a cellphone camera. (Bottom) The same “picture” as it appears in a hex-
editor. (Top middle) A “datamoshed” version of the same image after manipulating a few lines of code. (Extreme
right) Metadata for the photograph that includes device and optical information as well as geolocation data.

The image above illustrates this algorithmic nature. The picture on the top-left is the
pictorial (optical) manifestation of the captured image. As viewers, we access the image retinally
in terms of shape, color and form. But the image itself is formed by code. Digital images are at
the base, digital files and this digitality is exposed when, for example, the image is opened with a
hex-editor as seen in the image at the bottom.
2
The image on the top right is a digitally edited
version of the same picture, created through a destructive process in which the code has been
meddled with. This “datamoshed” image reveals the algorithmic underpinnings of digital
images.
3
As David Rodowick has pointed out, such “virtual representations derive all their

42
powers from numerical manipulation” (Rodowick 9). A chemically produced photograph can
only be accessed optically, while a digital photograph can be opened and accessed both as visual
image and code. On the extreme right of the image above, we can see one of the ways in which
the “portrait” function of the image is undergirded by other kinds of information about the device
with which it was taken, the settings that were used and the location where the images were shot.
While not immediately visible on the surface of the photograph, this kind of information is
accessible beneath the visual layer and remains open to quantification and manipulation.
The visual image is only the optical aspect of digital file. Therefore, as digital practice,
the selfie is also a form of data-graphy, and its aesthetic derives from digital affordances. As an
info-aesthetic artifact, the selfie relies on the surface as interface. The interface is a fetish-object
that needs to be seen and touched, and at the same time it makes algorithmic processes visible in
pictorial form. This ranges from app icons to digital images that perform quite different functions
but are common in that they are graspable as visual signs that simplify complex numerical
operations. Just as an icon makes it possible for a human user to navigate through the interface
and initiate algorithmic commands, a digital image such as a selfie also allows algorithmic
processes such as tagging and sharing to take place through the pictorial surface. To explore this
aspect of the selfie’s doubled nature, this chapter makes two interconnected maneuvers. First, I
consider the selfie’s ontology of the surface and its larger connections with digital imaging
practices. Second, I trace how this ontology weaves itself into Indian public culture through a
consideration of the cellphone market, software “app” ecology and finally the selfie’s impact on
film, television and advertising. This two-pronged approach allows us to consider the selfie at
both a theoretical level, as well the ways in which its ontological status causes subtle shifts in
public culture at large. In what follows, I undertake a theoretical consideration of the selfie’s

43
interfacial aesthetic and locate its effects as a form of “facial” logic (Deleuze and Guattari) that
imbricates human subjects within assemblages of power, control and desire. The facial logic of
the selfie as I will argue later in this chapter, is not merely related to human faces in their
representative potential, but also acts as a boundary mechanism that delimits individual
subjectivity within the disciplinary cultures of the datafied society.

Body/Face, Camera/Phone: Selfies as Facial Machines
In the previous section I proposed that the form of the selfie is integrally connected to the
digital interface, usually the surface of the cellphone. Furthermore, we can argue that the selfie is
not solely a product of the camera phone which is the optical arm of the selfie’s apparatus.
Rather, the camera phone is part of the entire selfie apparatus. Karen ann Donnachie points out
how the camera-phone precedes the selfie by at least ten years in the chronology of digital
imaging. Instead, Donnachie proposes that the selfie’s emergence has much more to do with “the
development of an unprecedented, intrinsic desire to photograph oneself” (Donnachie 59).
Donnachie detaches the form of the selfie from the front facing camera but admits that the
current form of the front-facing camera equipped smart phone is strongly related to the recent
popularity of the selfie. In doing so, Donnachie makes the camera-phone a symptom of the selfie,
rather than attributing the camera-phone as a cause for the selfie’s emergence. This causal
unmooring of the selfie from the technology of the camera-phone forces us to look elsewhere to
make sense of the selfie phenomenon. Donnachie takes recourse to Brian Droitcour’s emphasis
on the desire to take selfies as a kind of networked belongingness— “the selfie inscribes the
body into a network” (qtd. in Donnachie 63).
4
Similarly, art historian and selfie scholar Alise
Tifentale also uses the term “the networked camera” to describe the selfie-taking apparatus. For

44
Tifentale, the networked camera is a hybrid that combines “an image-making, image-sharing,
and image-viewing device” whose functionality is supported by the camera-phone, wireless
internet and online sharing platforms (Tifentale 75-76). Both Donnachie and Tiefentale point
towards a wide range of conditions that make the selfie possible. This arrangement of the selfie
apparatus indicates a habituation of interfacial existence—one in which the interface as an object
becomes enmeshed into everyday routine and habitual practice. By default, the selfie is an
interface technology that is deeply connected to the technology of the networked communication
device— usually the cellphone, but also tablets and computers that now merge the photographic
function with the telecommunication function. If the selfie, as Droitcour suggests, “inscribes the
body into the network,” then the networked, camera-enabled communication device becomes the
gateway for the fusion of organic and digital bodies. As Anna Munster points out, this
interfaciality is both an “anthropomorphization of the machine on the one hand, and the
technological makeover of the organic by digital technologies on the other” (Munster 132). In
Munster’s view, interfaciality is a specific arrangement of relations between humans and
computers and this becomes primarily an aesthetic question in which the human is rendered
machine like and the machinic is given a facial form (think of emojis, for example).
The specific form of the selfie’s information aesthetic then, is an interfacial-aesthetic.
Going back to Donnachie’s point about the existence of camera phones prior to the selfie, one
might rephrase the historical formulation this way: although selfies rely on the cellphone camera,
the interfacial retinue of the selfie is not limited to it. The selfie also requires network access and
image sharing platforms, the integration of in-phone apps that can edit images and a more
sophisticated facialization of the cellphone. Interfacialization as Anna Munster points out, is also
a kind of facialization in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari describe it (Munster 21). For

45
Deleuze and Guattari, faciality is a process of deterritorialization, whereby the signifying regime
is taken over by the face. For them, the face is “an absolute deterritorialization” that
distinguishes it from the head of the organism and renders it as if it were a landscape—surface-
like (Deleuze and Guattari 172). Or, in other words, the face becomes a regime of signification
that takes over the imagination of the body. Likewise, Munster’s point about interfacialization as
a form of facial assemblage signals a similar territorialization of the digital by the technology of
the interface.
Branden Hookway writes that the surface is different from the interface in that the
interface is a form of relations while the surface is that which is “above or upon (sur-) a given
thing [and] refers first of all back to the thing it surfaces, rather than to a relation between two or
more things” (Hookway 4, 12). While Hookway’s distinction is useful in thinking through the
multiple layers of surfaces that can form an interface, there is one slight problem with this
formulation. When technologies become facialized in the Deleuzean-Guattarian sense, the
distinction between surface and interface no longer holds. Brenda Laurel for instance, argues that
the interface is a “contact surface” that “reflects the physical properties of the interactors, the
functions to be performed, and the balance of power and control” (The Art xii-xiii). While
Laurel’s focus is on human computer interaction (HCI), the same logic can be extended to the
cellphone. Think for instance of the evolution of cellphone design. For the sake of comparison,
one can take the Kyocera VP-210 and the first-generation iPhone as an example. Both phones are
paradigmatic of shifts in cellphone culture—the Kyocera VP-210 released in 1999 was the first
cellphone with an integrated color camera for video telephony and still photography,
5
while the
iPhone released in 2007 was integral in the commercialization of the touchscreen as a

46
smartphone standard and was responsible for the aestheticization of the touchscreen. A quick,
side-by-side visual comparison of the two phones makes things clear (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: (Left) The Kyocera VP-210 Visual Phone. (Right) A first-generation iPhone.

While the Kyocera VP-210 includes a camera, its overall design still replicates the syntax
of the traditional telephone, with an alphanumeric keypad filling in the role of the rotating dial.
On the other hand, the iPhone on the right has no such keypad. Although Apple did not invent
the touchscreen surface, the iPhone revolutionized the smartphone market by making the
touchscreen an industry standard, and by replicating the aesthetics of apple’s Macintosh GUI
(graphic user interface) in the arena of the cellphone. One key distinction between the two

47
phones is the role played by the screen within the phone apparatus. In the Kyocera, the screen is
only a part of the interface (the keys are also part of the interface), but the iPhone collapses the
screen and the interface into one. iPhones and almost all new touch-screen phones are all surface.
While the touchscreen is not native to the selfie’s conditions of possibility, it emerges out
of the same interfacial logic. Touchscreen surfaces allow for the integration of the input surfaces
of digital devices (for instance keypads) into the visual display itself. The coalescing of
“touching” and “seeing” into one touchscreen surface has allowed for new relationships between
user and the device to emerge. For instance, Nanna Verhoeff and Heidi Rae Cooley see
touchscreen devices as initiators of the navigational gesture as a cultural form of meaning
making (Verhoeff and Cooley 113-114). Selfie taking mechanisms (both inbuilt camera
functions, as well as specific apps such as Instagram and Snapchat) regularly employ such touch-
based gestures as part of selfie practice. The technology of the selfie relies not only on the
phone’s front facing camera, but also its “mirror-type” screen projection and the embedded
software capabilities for in-phone image editing—the use of filters, cropping and enlarging and
brightness/contrast adjustments that all assume a touchscreen surface. The interfacial aesthetic of
the selfie creates a triangular relationship between the human user, the camera and the display
surface. In that sense, the selfie is an imprint of the relationship between the selfie-taking
body/face, and the capturing mechanism of the camera/phone (Fig. 3).

48

Fig. 3: A web-comic by Asaf Hanuka interrogating the facial nature of the relationship to cellphones

In the image above, Israeli comic-book artist Asaf Hanuka illustrates this facial nature of
the relationship between the human user and the cellphone. Hanuka’s comic does not use the
term “selfie” (the comic is wordless) but is clearly informed by selfie culture. In a scene
reminiscent of the famous television scene from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983),
Hanuka’s nine-panel web-comic shows his face melding into the cellphone screen. In
Cronenberg’s film, Max Ren’s (James Woods) face fuses with the television screen that becomes
a pulsating, seductive surface. Hanuka’s face in the comic is similarly drawn to the phone that

49
literally sucks his face into its screen. While the overall tone of the comic is techno-pessimistic,
it illustrates a facial imagination of the relationship between the human user and the phone
screen. By the time we move to the fifth and central panel of the comic, the phone screen
becomes Hanuka’s face. The relationship between phone user and the phone is mediated through
a facialized logic. In this logic, the screen surface is an abstract facial-machine that is malleable
and can reflect the identity of its user. The screen is a surface that promises the (future) presence
of a face. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, in facial assemblages, “even a use-object may come
to be facialized,” as for instance in cinema, where the close-up pertains as much to a knife, cup,
clock, or kettle as to a face or facial element” (Deleuze and Guattari 175). This logic holds true
for cinema, as much as it does for other screen-based practices. In the digital media environment
of hyper-connectivity and screen saturation, the interfacial aesthetic becomes the pre-dominant
logic of media technology. While we increasingly use internet enabled devices to look at
ourselves, our devices too can “watch” us.
6
If “networked cameras” are the eyes of our digital
devices, then the devices become more and more like faces—or as Munster argues, the
“semiotics of information no longer requires that the logic of the face lines up with the sign of
the face” (Munster 130). The selfie is a culture of the face even in the case of selfies that do not
feature human faces. In selfies that feature shadows, feet or other body parts instead of the face,
these other signs of the human user are accorded the status of the face. In such images, the
shadow or the foot stands out and claims its status as an “index” of the user’s body. The sign of
the face (i.e. a particular human face) performs a special function—that of signifying a particular
person. The logic of the face is to identify the sign as the marker of the person. As Richard
Brilliant puts it, recognition of the face is the “most important key to identification based on
appearance” (Brilliant 10). The face says, “I am this person” or “this face is that person.” But in

50
meta-data enabled, algorithmic systems, the function of identifying (logic) can take place without
the actual face of the person (sign). Human-to-human recognition requires the visual element (or
the “graphical” in GUI), but machinic recognition can bypass the constraints of representation.
The human face is one of the many nodes of identification and tracking, or in Deleuze and
Guattari’s terms, it is “deterritorialized” by other signs such as geolocation, IP addresses and
device IDs. Even in facial-recognition systems, that are employed both in institutional settings
(for example, in state-surveillance) and as aspects of play (for instance, Facebook’s facial photo-
tagging, or Snapchat filters that transpose digital artefacts onto human faces in real-time) the face
is not seen as a totality, but as a measurable dataset—a set of fiducial points (points of reference)
that can be measured and calculated.
7
Thus, in machinic vision the sign and logic of the face are
dislocated from each other. An image of a hand and that of a face have equal importance as
points of (biometric) data; machinic recognition can distinguish them as separate body parts, but
they may have similar meta-data values that can be tracked back to the same user. Following
this, the selfie can be said to be an inter/facial machine that usually features a human face but is
not always marked by it. As an iconic form in the history of representation, the human face
remains the most popular element of selfies, but in the digital apparatus the face no longer
remains a privileged index of the self. In this, the selfie can be seen as a visualized arrangement
of relationships between the interface and the human body. As “digital” self-portraits, selfies are
inter/facial-machines.

“Welcome to Selfiestan”: A Vernacular Interface
The idea of an inter/facial machine is central to my understanding of selfie culture in
India. One of my core concerns in this chapter is locating how this inter/facial machine inflects

51
the national imagination. I make a brief divergence here, to draw out the complexities of this
inflection. One of the ways in which the modern nation-state has come to be imagined is the
iconicity of the map. While the map may seem an almost “natural” way to imagine the nation,
Benedict Anderson points out how it performed the role of a technology of visualization that
marked “dots on paper sheets […] determined by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated
flight of the crow” (Anderson 171). The map is a technological surface that flattens geological
unevenness and cultural difference. In relation to cartography and cinema, Tom Conley (2007)
argues that maps perform two functions—first, they are a guarantee of location, and second they
are a “sign of prevarication” (Conley 4). In this second respect, Conley argues that maps can
“invent new or other spaces” (4), assigning to the map a fantasy function. With regard to
nationalism, the invention of spaces through maps involves a fixing of the cartographic sign with
national identity, in much the same way that the front-facing head and shoulders portrait (or the
passport photo) becomes the sign of an individual’s identity. The map becomes the “face” of the
nation, and at the same time allows other ideological mappings onto itself. A case in point would
be the iconic image of “Bharat Mata” (Mother India) which first originated in 1905, as a painting
by the Bengali painter Abanindranath Tagore. As Sumathy Ramaswamy points out, the original
image initially emerged as “Banga Mata” (Mother Bengal) and was modeled on “the everyday
Bengali woman” (Ramaswamy 15), given the historic context of the anti-colonial movement
following the partitioning of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905 (15). Later renditions of Bharat
Mata, popularized through calendar and poster art, avidly adopted by the Hindu right-wing as the
“commodified fetish of nationalist devotion” (Brosius 170), have little resemblance to the
original image other than the divine stature endowed to the nation-state (Fig. 4).

52

Fig. 4: (Left) Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata (1905). (Right) A contemporary rendition of the Bharat Mata
image.

This image of Bharat Mata image has close links with the cartographical surface. Both
the map and the anthropomorphized “Mother” are examples of a cartographic-facial machine.
The technology of the map allowed for an iconization of the nation as a facial machine; between
the years of Abanindranath Tagore’s original painting and the contemporary period, print-
technology (and later digital-imaging technology) allowed for the rapid proliferation and
consumption of an idea of India through the visual image. In these later renditions of Bharat
Mata, the cartographic aspect lies in the background—almost nature-like, over which the ideal
nation-Goddess can be mapped. While seemingly neutral, cartographic technique and print

53
technology are localized in this move towards facialization. I foreground the map because of the
powerful ways in which the technological artefact becomes a naturalized way of viewing the
nation. The map, of course, serves a different function than the cellphone. But a comparison of
the two offers us a method of tracking how technologies become integral to the imagination of a
national culture. Like the map, the cellphone is a global technology (the map of India is Indian
but the map itself is not). Likewise, the cellphone is a technology that travels globally, but has
had very local inflections in Indian society from the late 1990s onwards, when questions of
economic liberalization and globalization began to impact the fabric of Indian society.
The opening up of the market following the period of economic liberalization in the mid-
1990s reflected changes in India’s telecommunications sector. The National Telecommunications
Policy of 1994 and the New Telecom Policy of 1999 pursued privatization aggressively. The
Internet and mobile phones made their debut in India in this same period, and by the late 1990s,
private cellular networks had become big players in the Indian economy. Robin Jeffrey and Assa
Doron point this out when they cite the example of Reliance, one of the biggest
telecommunications companies in India. Despite shady business dealings, Reliance steadily took
over the cellular network market, acquiring licenses for providing basic telecom services in the
1995 Indian Telecom Spectrum Auctions (Jeffrey and Doron 54) and then expanding its hold
over the market through innovative advertising slogans. Perhaps nothing sums up the cell
phone’s hold over the Indian imagination more than Reliance’s marketing slogan that included
the “mobile” as the last of the basic needs after bread, clothing and shelter (55). The slogan ran
“roti, kapda, makaan aur mobile” (food, clothing, shelter and mobile) which itself played on the
basic tenets of the Nehruvian Socialism of the previous era and was also the title of a successful
Indian film titled Roti, Kapda Aur Makan (Dir. Manoj Kumar, 1974). Reliance’s advertising

54
slogan made it clear that Indians were no longer living in an age where the three basic needs
were enough. The Indian citizen now had to have access at least to this one commodity service,
echoing Reliance founder Dhirubhai Ambani’s statement, “make a phone call cheaper than a
postcard, and you will usher in a revolutionary transformation in the lives of millions of Indians”
(Jeffrey and Doron 54). By 2011, as Jeffrey and Doron point out, the “cellphone had become not
a luxury but a necessity for tens of millions of people—the single largest category of consumer
goods in the country” with the nation having “far more mobile phones than it did toilets of any
kind” (6).
Fast forward to 2017—Gionee, a Chinese cellphone company launched a new ad
campaign for its A1 model in India. The Gionee A1 was not the first selfie-specific phone the
company had launched, but the A1 ad campaign was unique in the ways that it brought in the
language of the nation into the slogan, “Welcome to Selfiestan.” The slogan plays on the term
“Hindustan” which is the Indo-Persian variant of the name for “India.” An advertising campaign
was launched with a video starring brand ambassador Alia Bhatt, a Bollywood actress, and
billboards featuring Bhatt and Indian cricket team captain Virat Kohli popped up all over the
country (Fig. 5).

55

Fig. 5: (Top) Screengrab from the “Welcome to Selfiestan” video featuring Alia Bhatt. (Bottom) Gionee print ads
featuring Virat Kohli on display at a cellphone showroom in Guwahati (image courtesy Aradhana Singha). The
Virat Kohli image has the tagline “Selfiestan Humara” which is a play on the popular nationalist song “Saare
Jahan Se Accha” written by Muhammad Iqbal in 1904. The song, which became an anthem for nationalists during
the anti-colonial struggle begins with the line “Saare Jahan Se Achha, Hindustan Humara” (Our Hindustan, better
than all the world).

Gionee and its competitors (most prominently Vivo and Oppo) are Chinese companies.
According to the IDC (International Data Corporation) Report of May 2017, more than half of
the Indian smartphone market is now served by Chinese manufacturers. The report also states
that about 62.2% of the devices shipped by Chinese vendors were equipped with primary
cameras of 13 megapixels resolution and above.
8
The devices that are being advertised in local

56
idioms as selfie-specific phones with high quality cameras are often imported from vendors
outside of India or are produced locally by non-Indian vendors. These devices that welcome the
user to “Selfiestan” have their provenance elsewhere. So, the localization of selfie culture here is
not a question of provenance of the device, but one of adaptation and practice. As Ravi
Sundaram points out, the relationship between the local and global in contemporary India is
porous, with one layer including the new media empires and the other consisting of the “dynamic
informal and often illegal media space of urban India” (Sundaram 57). The incorporation of local
trends and desires into advertising campaigns and cellphone design is not informal (or illegal),
but it displays a recognition of informality that is institutionalized though corporate decision
making and strategy. For all practical purposes, this imagination of India as a “cellphone nation”
9

maps out an imagination in which technological artefacts and practice—first the cellphone, and
now the selfie—are seen as part of a national if not cultural trend. Like the Bharat Mata image
that localizes the technology of the map, the idea of “Selfiestan” localizes selfie culture. We are
faced then, with a vernacular interface in which selfie culture becomes, to borrow Miriam
Hansen’s classic definition of the vernacular, a combination of “the quotidian, of everyday
usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and
translatability” (Hansen 60). In this vernacular inter/faciality, the technological device and its
surfaces appear neutral but are adapted to local needs and trends through usage and practice. The
Indian smartphone market with its new focus on the selfie shows how invitations to interfaciality
and imaging have become entrenched in contemporary Indian public culture (Fig. 6). An
examination of cellphone advertisements can act as a useful way of locating these trends. As
Arvind Rajagopal points out, advertisements visibilize the merging of “aesthetics and utility” and
explicate how corporate players “negotiate social contradictions while expanding markets”

57
(Rajagopal 17, 18). Cellphone advertisements and selfie-focused advertising aid in
“accumulating surplus through representations of desired values” (17), which in case of the
selfie, is directly connected to social standards of class and body types.

Fig. 6: Oppo and Vivo selfie-specific phones advertised as part of a special sale outside a showroom in Trivandrum.

Facializing India (or the invasion of the selfie experts)
Gionee’s move into the Indian market was not without competition. Along with Gionee,
two other Chinese phone manufacturers, Vivo and Oppo also started operations in India offering
lower-cost Android alternatives to Apple’s iPhone. All three companies have centered their

58
recent phone releases on the selfie. Some recent releases even feature dual front cameras (Vivo
V5 Plus and Oppo F3 Plus) in addition to a rear camera, or dual front and dual back cameras
(Gionee S10) with the promise that the same image shot by two high-resolution cameras would
result in a higher-definition selfie. Before the A1, Gionee came out with the S6s smartphone that
was advertised as having a “selfie flash.” Almost at the same time, Vivo released its V5 model
that also featured a front flash that was advertised as the “Moonlight Selfie.” A comparison of
the two advertisements shows a striking similarity in the way the selfie is conceptualized by the
two manufacturers.
The Gionee ad begins with a photoshoot of Alia Bhatt. The scene is set in a photo studio
where a professional photographer and his assistants are taking picture of a posing Alia Bhatt.
The set features a professional lighting setup, with umbrella flashes giving the shoot an air of
professionalism. The sound design emphasizes this with whistling flash sound effects peppering
the soundtrack over the song and dialogue. A power outage forces the photographer to cancel the
shoot when Bhatt steps in saying she can shoot without light. She whips out her Gionee
cellphone and proceeds to shoot high resolution photographs of herself, trumping the
photographer at his own game. The lyrics of the song pick up at this point: “flash a little skin,
flash a little skin, flash a little skin baby” serving a semiotic function in which the camera’s flash
and the flashing of skin are made co-dependent. The advertisement thus creates an equivalence
between electronically produced, studio-quality light and the visibility, but also the
aestheticization, of the body. At the end of the advertisement, Bhatt asks the audience, “who
needs light?” signaling that the cellphone camera has announced the death of the professional
photographer (Fig. 7).

59

Fig. 7: (Top Left) Screen grab from the Gionee S6s ad showing Bhatt clicking a selfie with her face lit up by the
front flash. (Bottom) Promotional image from the Gionee website showcasing the S6s’ selfie capabilities. (Top
Right) A Gionee hoarding at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

The Vivo V5 advertisement features its brand ambassador, Bollywood star Ranveer
Singh in a short narrative-driven advertisement. The scene is set in a foreign location (Budapest)
where Ranveer and a potential lover are about to part ways. The girl, played by Argentine model
Leslie Cordoba, is scheduled to leave for an undisclosed location in the morning and Ranveer
suggests they make the most of the night. The rest of the advertisement features shots of the
couple visiting areas in the city, dancing and clicking selfies. When the girl leaves, Ranveer
sends her the selfies they had shot together over the phone, delivering the message “please don’t
go” through signboards in the background of the pictures. This motivates the girl to come back to

60
Ranveer at the end of the film, when there is a cut to the phone itself. A voiceover declares the
phone’s features: “20 megapixel moonlight camera…perfect selfie” (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Selection of screen-grabs from the Vivo V5 ad. (Top Left) Ranveer and Leslie click selfies throughout
Budapest. (Top right) Leslie receives 25 photographs from “Ranveer India.” (Middle left and right) The message
“Please Don’t Go” is presented subliminally through neon signs in the backgrounds of the photographs that
Ranveer has clicked. (Bottom) The phone is showcased at the end of the film as an interface for romance.

Both the Gionee and Vivo advertisements showcase the cellphone and the selfie as a
promise of a plentiful, upwardly mobile lifestyle. Despite narrative differences, the two

61
advertisements foreground sleek surfaces, effortless connectivity, mobility and advanced
imaging technology as pathways to success and happiness. The choice of two relatively new and
young Bollywood stars is also interesting; it is as if the brand ambassadors themselves point
towards the fantasy of youth and mobility in a world of seamless access to desire. These
advertisements play with an aesthetic of coolness that is reflected in Bollywood films such as Dil
Chahta Hai (Dir. Farhan Akhtar, 2001). As Ranjani Mazumdar points out this is the “aesthetics
of the design catalog” (Mazumdar 143), a post-liberalization, cosmopolitan India that is marked
by “a series of designer living spaces, conveying a lifestyle mythology of the urban elite” (147).
This imagination of an economically empowered class is marked also by “air travel, car travel,
leisure, art, discos, music, fashion, style [and] attitude” (142). We encounter this aesthetic in both
of the advertisements for Gionee and Vivo, where attitude and fashion, global travel and
consumption mark the spaces of the characters with an even, unbroken access to material goods
and the promise of happiness. The interface of the phone becomes a symbolic marker of a fast,
upwardly mobile, middle class that is Indian, but also global—a function of what Pramod Nayar
calls “mundane cosmopolitanism” or the “agglomeration of the global within our reach through
the mobility of products and services from across the world” (182). This is a far cry from the
early days of the mobile phone in India, as seen for instance in Reliance’s “roti, kapda, makaan
aur mobile” print ads with its barebones approach to the mobile phone as a basic need (Fig. 9).

62

Fig. 9: (Left) Reliance’s “basic needs” mobile advertisement (DDB Mudra Group, 1998). (Right) Excerpted
screenshot from Gionee’s S6s ad featuring a sleek interface (Mullen Lintas, 2006).

Oppo, the third major player in the selfie-phone market in India has chosen a similar set
of strategies for its advertising campaign. The company has roped in a retinue of Bollywood stars
including Hrithik Roshan, Sonam Kapoor and Deepika Padukone. Oppo has named its series of
phones “selfie expert,” clearly demarcating that they would be entering the Indian market with
selfies as their unique selling point. In a press release announcing the roping in of Roshan and
Kapoor, Sky Li, the Vice President of Oppo states, “we encourage consumers to be experts in
photography and be trend setters like our brand ambassadors who have influenced us with their
astounding pictures.”
10
Thus, even the choice of brand ambassadors is framed within the logic of
the photogenic—the end result of photographic craft and practice becomes the production of an

63
ideal (photogenic) image that the brand ambassadors exemplify. This connection of selfie-
photography to the celebrity image becomes clear in a commercial titled “Selfie Secrets by
Hrithik” that features Roshan demonstrating the selfie capabilities of the Oppo F1. Roshan
speaks to an unseen female interlocutor who asks him why he prefers Oppo, to which he replies:
“an actor’s life is beyond just shootings. Nobody wants an autograph nowadays, everybody
wants a selfie […] you’ve gotta look great every single time.” He goes on to describe the Oppo
F1 as his “entire styling entourage.” The interface of the phone becomes a central visual element
in the advertisement. At times, we also see Roshan behind the interface as he demonstrates the
phone’s “beautify feature.” The same strategy is repeated in two other Oppo advertisements—a
TV commercial for the F1 starring Roshan and Kapoor, and a print ad for the Oppo F1s featuring
Roshan alone. In the TV commercial Sonam Kapoor clicks a selfie on the street and the
movement freezes with the sound of the shutter. We see Kapoor’s image on the screen of the
phone and a cut brings us to Roshan who then goes on to try out different editing options over
the image. For instance, the “vivid” mode appears as a pane of glass that he holds up in front of
her face, while the brightness mode is demonstrated by displaying a studio lighting setup that
brightens up Kapoor’s face. In the print ad, we see Roshan emerging out of the screen of the
phone in contrapposto, one foot inside the screen of the phone and finger pointing towards the
lush interiors of a living room (Fig. 10).

64

Fig. 10: (Top Left) Roshan demonstrates the F1’s “beautify feature” in Selfie Secrets by Hritik. (Bottom Right)
Roshan holds up the “Vivid” mode as a pane of glass over Kapoor’s face in another F1 commercial. (Right) Roshan
emerges from the screen of the phone in this train interior ad for the Oppo F1s on display on the Delhi Metro.

The imagination of the selfie in these advertisements is marked by a predominance of the
interface. The interface behaves here, a little bit like the mirror in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus
(1950) that allowed the eponymous hero of the film to travel between the world of the living and
the dead. In these advertisements, the interface is a reflective, but also porous surface that allows
seamless travel between the digital and physical worlds. As an interfacial form, the selfie in this
imagination is a transformation “from interior state to exterior relation, from inward to outward
expression” (Hookway 9). The promise of the selfie in the Gionee, Vivo and Oppo
advertisements is one of transformation of physical and social conditions through technology.

65
Software’s algorithmic logic is occluded by the graphic user interface— “vivid” and “beautify”
modes are not panes of glass to be touched and held, but complex operations of software that
make mathematical decisions that are presented as a visual aesthetic. As Wendy Chun writes,
“interfaces are based on a fetishistic logic. Users know very well that their folders and desktops
are not really folders and desktops, but they treat them as if they were—by referring to them as
folders and as desktops” (Programmed Visions 67). The idea that the selfies created by these
phones are a reflection of “the real you” as an Oppo F5 ad featuring Deepika Padukone puts it
(Fig. 11), is hinged on a central conceit—the equivalence of the digital face composed by code,
as the “real” human face. Faces that pass through “vivid” and “beautify” operations become
transformed through code. “Beauty” becomes a calculable category, a result of algorithmic
decisions that remain hidden behind the graspability of icons, buttons and gestures. In this, the
“beautiful” face becomes a mathematical construct that can be achieved through pre-defined
cultural standards against which the image of the user can be compared and modified.

Fig. 11: Oppo F5 ad featuring Deepika Padukone with the slogan, "Capture the Real You."

66
Crucially, all three phones feature some variant of a beautification mode. Both Vivo and
Gionee call this “Face Beauty,” while Oppo calls it the “A.I Beauty Technology.” At the base,
the function of these technologies is to pare down the complexities of digital image editing to a
set of easy-to-learn, customizable GUI-based actions—a sort of a simplified Photoshop. The
ubiquitous use of the term “photoshopping,” derived from Adobe’s flagship image-editing
software to refer to photo-manipulation, points towards the inundation of contemporary visual
culture by software. In her work on the relationship between the representation of women’s
bodies and Photoshop, Meredith Jones coins the term “media-bodies” which are “boundary
crossers: neither fully fabricated nor fully connected to fleshy life, [and therefore] part of two
worlds” (“Media-Bodies” 31). In more recent work Jones considers the cosmetic procedure of
labiaplasty as a kind of “Photoshop with a scalpel” (“Expressive Surfaces” 36) that transforms
the vagina into an expressive surface. She writes that the desire to be Photoshopped destabilizes
the Cartesian binaries of depth and surface and is “more than just a longing to be visually
improved; it can be interpreted as a wish to exist in two and in three dimensions, to gain capacity
and become able to operate on more than one plane” (“Expressive Surfaces” 45). Jones’ idea of
mediated bodies wrings “Photoshopping” out of its proprietary provenance (Adobe Photoshop)
and allows us to understand it as a more generalized mode (lower-case photoshop) of imagining
the body as a manipulatable surface on which fantasies and desires can be projected. The beauty-
modes of phones released by companies such as Gionee, Oppo and Vivo are a kind of
photoshopping that allows for the digitized “real you” to always be the “best face forward” (Fig.
12).

67

Fig. 12: Screenshots from phone manufacturer and review websites showcasing their respective beautification
modes. (Top) Gionee, (Center) Vivo, (Bottom) Oppo.

68
But what standards are employed in these photoshopping techniques? Cellphone
manufacturers would have us believe that such beautification modes are inherently the best
choice, that they have been created through rigorous research and years of experimentation. For
instance, Oppo’s website claims that “A.I Beauty Recognition Technology”—the result of years
of R&D—“identifies shapes and facial structures based on a global database” and combines the
wisdom of professional photographers and make-up artists who were “consulted during the R&D
process.”
11
On another page on the website, we are presented with a grid of images that are
superimposed with the text “Global Image Database of Human Faces” (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13: Image from Oppo’s ad campaign depicting a “Global Image Database of Human Faces

The representative image on Oppo’s website gives no clue of how images were selected
and what kind of research went into the databasing process.
12
At best, such an image presents a

69
“United Colors of Benneton” variant of racial diversity, and the use of the term “global” in the
title sidelines questions of inclusion and exclusion. The term “global” reiterates the
advertisements’ fantasy of global capital, uninterrupted access, and an even, seamless planetary
surface that never excludes anyone because it is premised on sameness. What such selfie
cellphones and apps present us with is an abstract face, that while appearing to be the face of an
individual, is basically a reproduction of itself ad infinitum.
In another non-Indian ad for the Oppo F5, the “A.I Beauty Recognition Technology” is
personified through a reassuring male voice that tells the model that it recognizes her
individuality and will customize the image to fit her perfectly through its facial recognition and
image database capabilities. At the end of the advertisement, the A.I reassures her, “through my
eyes you will see how beautiful your uniqueness is.” The realization of self-image is made
possible only through a gendered, machinic vision. Algorithmic logic becomes a promise of
constant happiness, self-realization and a sense of completeness that becomes coextensive with
impeccable technology and sleek, reflective surfaces. The selfie-expert phone serves as the
canvas upon which the “wish to exist in two and in three dimensions” is sketched out, fueled by
a corporate logic and a flattening out of the terrain of cultural and racial differences. The
interface becomes not merely a surface that allows commands to be sent to the device, but a
fantasy space to be inhabited (Fig. 14).

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Fig. 14: The Oppo F1 ad featuring the A.I engine directly addressing the model/audience with a promise of cosmetic
perfection.

Such algorithmic production of the “perfect selfie” or the “best face” is a process of
facialization in which the promise of perfection occludes logics of selection and marginalization.
As Deleuze and Guattari write: “It is not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy

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of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible” (Deleuze and Guattari
175). For them, the abstract machine of faciality is an imperial one that tries to “crush all other
semiotics” (182). The algorithmically recognized “best face” contains other forms of facial and
non-facial construction. While this imperial Face is not necessarily the face of “modern White
men” as Deleuze and Guattari postulate, it nonetheless contains within it “the semiotic of
capitalism” (182). The “perfect selfie” and the “best face” are an overcoding
13
of the human by
the Face of capitalist consumption that marks non-conforming faces by degrees of deviance from
itself. Oppo, Vivo and Gionee are by no means alone in this. For instance, in 2015, the Indian
cellphone manufacturer Micromax released its “Canvas Selfie” model that included “face
slimming,” “skin smoothening” and “makeup application” modes that led one review to call the
Micromax Canvas Selfie “a shockingly sexist phone” (Dixit). In one of the advertisements for
the phone, a young girl wakes up in the morning to a message from her boyfriend asking for a
photograph of her. The girl quickly takes a selfie but is visibly dissatisfied with her appearance.
She then goes on to use the phone’s beautification functions to create a satisfying,
“Photoshopped” version of herself, that can well be imagined as the result of a culture of skin
whitening through fairness creams and skin bleaching. As her boyfriend messages her back
writing “gorgeous!” the lyrics in the background go: “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I’m so in love
with me.” At the end of the advertisement, we see her selfie framed within the interface of the
phone, alongside the text “Canvas Selfie Can Instaglam” directly suggesting the kind of
networked visual practice (Instagram) that the phone was targeting (Fig.15).

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Fig. 15:Screengrabs from the Micromax Canvas Selfie advertisement. (Top Left) The girl is concerned about her
complexion in the image. (Top right) The phone’s beautification modes including “slim face,” “smoothen skin,”
“teeth whitening” and “fade dark circle” functions. (Bottom left) Adjusting Complexion through the phone’s
interface. (Bottom right) Ending screen with the slogan “Canvas Selfie Can…Instaglam.”

The desire to possess a certain type of face that is imagined as “perfect” is produced
machinically, both by the interface of the machine and the abstract machine of faciality that
marks it ideologically. This facial regime is not necessarily produced by selfie apps and selfie-
expert cellphones, but they help normalize it through habitual and routinized use. If
authoritarianism functions by making one Face the center of following (the figure of the
charismatic leader for example), neoliberalism functions by distributing its Face among its
subjects. The logic of authoritarianism centers the figure of the leader as the face around which
propaganda can proliferate and agendas can be mobilized. On the other hand, neoliberalism
functions by obfuscating its status as neoliberalism; the neoliberal facial machine is woven into
the practice of everyday life, blending work and leisure into one distinguishable mass.
14
The
desire for a perfect face, or a certain type of face/body is nothing but the overcoding of desire by

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capital, neoliberal aspiration disguised as individual desire. Implications of the “best face” also
have a strong racial aspect in the Indian context, where the desire to look good often translates as
having fair skin.
The obsession with fair skin in India is, in fact, one of the sites where we can locate the
obverse of the selfie’s facial machine. If the Micromax Canvas Selfie advertisement is one end of
this spectrum, the other end can be found in the fairness-cream industry. In 2014, Pond’s, the
multinational beauty-product manufacturer started an advertising campaign in India focusing on
the selfie. The campaign was titled “Selfie Ready” and encouraged participation over social
media. The campaign was focused on Pond’s “White Beauty BB+Fairness Cream” (BB stands
for blemish balm/beauty balm) that Pond’s claims, is a “ fairness cream and a foundation [that]
protects against UVA and UVB rays while working from inside to lighten dark spots and
circles.”
15
In their important work on colorism, racism and the fairness cream industry in India,
Radhika Parameswaran and Kavitha Cardoza write that the fairness cream industry’s expansion
from the late 1990s onwards took place during the period of economic liberalization in India, that
opened up the country’s borders to new commercial players and new products. This was when
multinational companies including Pond’s “added skin-lightening products to the range of
cosmetics they sell in India” (Parameswaran and Cardoza 216, 236). Parameswaran and Cardoza
draw a crucial link between the rise of an industry based in epidermal discrimination and a
neoliberal ethos that promises “outer/physical and inner/emotional transformation” through
consumption (241). Shehzad Nadeem echoes similar concerns when he writes, “‘fairness’ is a
key modality through which exclusion operates in globalizing India […] skin color functions as a
form of symbolic capital that shapes life chances” (Nadeem 225). The Pond’s “Selfie Ready”
campaign combines the colorism of the fairness industry with the corporate logic of selfie-

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advertising. In incorporating a contest into the advertisement, the Pond’s campaign makes the
selfie a benchmark of looking good.
The Pond’s campaign was promoted through an ad jingle called “The Selfie Song.”
Following Parameswaran and Cardoza’s argument that advertising’s status as “an orchestrated
and imaginative process that can "materialize the social categories of the consumers it names"”
(Parameswaran and Cardoza 233), I suggest that “The Selfie Song” provides us some crucial
clues about the “semiotics of fairness” (232) that are at play in the campaign. The video features
a young working woman trying out dresses in front of a mirror, attending a wedding, hanging out
with friends, and at work in the office. At the beginning of the advertisement, we see her using a
tube of Pond’s White Beauty BB+Fairness Cream that helps her get through the week. The days
of the week, Monday through Saturday are marked out on the screen as we see the ever-smiling
woman waltzing through her picture-perfect world. The song accompanying the visuals goes:
“Always Selfie Ready, Whether its day or night, Whether I’m with someone or alone, I take the
camera in my hand, the world watches me and cries… So Stylish, So Steady, She’s always selfie
ready. [Chorus] How does she do it? 24x7 lookin’ so fine, its a very special secret, a solution to
look good all the time” (my translation). At the end of the song the advertising voice declares:
“Want to be selfie ready? Use Pond’s foundation plus fairness cream, for instant coverage and
radiant skin everyday. Upload your selfie on www.selfieready.ponds.in, or share it on Facebook
or Twitter with the hashtag #Selfieready and stand a chance to be on the Pond’s billboard” (Fig.
16).
16

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Fig. 16: (Top) A still from The Selfie Song video. (Bottom) A compilation of images that were uploaded with the
hashtag “#PondsSelfieReady” on Twitter.

The lure of the advertisement is twofold. The use of the cream is advocated as a way of
looking good—“selfie ready […] 24x7.” The promise of the contest is to end up adorning a
Pond’s billboard. The campaign had set up a website where the selfies could be uploaded, and
entries were also uploaded on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag “#PondsSelfieReady”.
17

In the Pond’s campaign, “epidermal politics” (Parmeswaran and Cardoza 217) becomes attached
to fantasies of mobility, happiness and constant visibility. As Parameswaran and Cardoza point

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out, the obsession with fairness in India does have pre-liberalization resonances; yet advertising
narratives that recount the conversion of epidermal transformation to social and emotional power
provide a close parallel to “India’s ascent from a third world nation to a powerful player in the
global economy” (241). Fairness and bodily transformation become linked to fantasies of upward
mobility exemplified through figures such as former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, and former
Miss Universe Sushmita Sen who put a certain “fair” image of Indian femininity on the world
map in the mid-1990s. Advertisements for fairness products capitalize on this idea of a fair-
skinned, professionally successful woman, and the integration of the selfie into the fairness-
machinery accentuates this logic. As if the epidermal fantasy of the fairness industry were not
already Facial, it is now supplemented by a selfie unconscious.
18
Advertisements such as the
Pond’s Selfie Ready campaign emphasize that one needs to look “fair” to look good in a selfie
(See Fig. 17), and simultaneously needs the selfie to prove that one looks good. In this scheme,
the selfie and the fairness cream become subjacent to each other.

Fig. 17: Excerpt from an infographic from a report by the consumer research company Nielsen in collaboration
with Oppo demonstrating what is considered to be a “perfect selfie” among its respondents. Optics, interface
technology and fantasies of bodily perfection are linked in these responses.

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The selfie has also been used by other brands such as Colgate that launched a selfie
campaign for its “Visible White” toothpaste in 2014 (Fig. 18). To promote its product, Colgate
released a Facebook app that automatically whitened the teeth for user images. The tagline for
the campaign was, “Are you selfie ready?” The App was supposed to simulate the purported
whitening effects of the toothpaste, and in typical contest mode, promised its users a selfie
“autographed” by Sonam Kapoor (Bollywood actress and brand ambassador for Oppo). In
advertising campaigns like the ones launched by Pond’s and Colgate, there is a predominance of
fantasies of bodily perfection (whether epidermal or dental). Skin, teeth and even whole bodies
are facialized by machines of desire. Like a Möbius strip with no clearly defined inside or
outside, the facial machine leads from the selfie’s condition of constant visibility to fantasies of
impeccable bodies and back in an endless loop.

Fig. 17: Promotional image for the Colgate Visible White teeth-whitening Facebook app.

Fig. 18: Promotional image for the Colgate Visible White teeth-whitening Facebook app.

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This brief divergence into the world of India’s beauty industry serves to point out the
ways in which the “global” language of algorithmically sutured visibility is effectively
vernacularized in the Indian context. Selfie expert phones such as Vivo, Oppo, Gionee and
Micromax do not produce the desire for fair skin, slim bodies and pearly-white teeth; but they do
weave themselves into the specific contexts of facial politics in India, linking cultural specificity,
global capitalism and the rise of routinized technologization in a chain of signification. If selfie
phones, apps and advertisements enculturate users into a state of constant visibility, there are
ways in which users voluntarily and deliberately use this condition of visibility to mark out their
space within the (audio)visual culture of contemporary India. In the next section I mark out some
of the ways in which selfie culture plays out in relation to the ethos of entrepreneurship and
broadcasting of the self. The question of looking good might be a matter of surface aesthetics,
but “surface,” as Giuiliana Bruno reminds us, “matters, and it has depth” (Bruno 5).

The Work of Being Watched: Theaters of the Self(ie)
The selfie’s condition of constant visibility has close ties with previous media forms such
as reality television and YouTube broadcasting. According to Mark Andrejevic, “the work of
being watched” is premised on the idea that ubiquitous surveillance can be beneficial and even
“fun” (Andrejevic 8). The work of being watched, which Andrejevic equates with reality TV, is a
“form of production wherein consumers are invited to sell access to their personal lives in a way
not dissimilar to that in which they sell their labor power” (6). The selfie partakes in reality
television’s nature as the work of being watched, but there is one crucial difference. Despite its
amateurish look, reality television has by now, been institutionalized into a major televisual
form. Thus, while the display of personal and seemingly unmediated spaces remains reality

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television’s staple mode of functioning, its incorporation into standard television programming
means that its means of production is still entrenched in professional production practices. On
the other hand, even when the selfie is brought into the fold of television programming’s
corporate logic, its mode of production is always in the hands of one user/subject, unlike a
television show that is produced by a team. This is an effect of digital, networked media’s
emphasis on the individual user, seen for example, in myriad stories of entrepreneurial success
enabled by the monetization of views on YouTube. As Wendy Chun writes “'friending” practices
have made the Internet itself a market of YOUs” (Updating to Remain 4). Thus, while social
media broadcasting also involves the work of being watched, there is a dispersal of television’s
monolithic transmission logic. In the era of social media, anyone can be a producer and
distributor at the most atomistic level of the new-media market—the individual user.
Indian television was quick to adapt to the selfie’s realignment of relations between
producer and spectator. In 2015, MTV India launched a new show titled The Great Selfie
Challenge. Although it was launched by a satellite television channel, The Great Selfie
Challenge was a show that displayed a convergence of multiple modes of media. Short videos of
the show were uploaded onto the MTV India website and the show’s five participants maintained
their own social media presence through platforms such as Instagram and Facebook as well. This
social media presence was formally necessary given the show’s focus. The Great Selfie
Challenge advertised itself as a travel show and allotted each of the five participants a budget of
Rs. 1 Lakh (approx. $1500) to complete seven selfie-related tasks across the country within a
period of two weeks. As the MTV India website puts it: “By the end of these 14 days, there will
be 35 epic selfies that will leave an indelible mark in selfie history! […] The 5 selfie takers have
no travel plans or itinerary. They decide where they go next based on the selfie challenge that

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they receive.”
19
The show’s scoring system was based on the economy of “likes,” with every like
on Instagram or on the MTV India website fetching the participants fifty points each. Thus, even
while the show was produced by MTV, it required peripheral labor from the participants
themselves. At the same time, the show was sponsored by Panasonic, that partnered with MTV
to promote its Eluga S smartphone (Fig. 19). In this way, the show merged modes of corporate
decision making and individual entrepreneurship that deviated from the traditional model of
reality television.

Fig. 19: (Left) Promotional Facebook banner for MTV’s The Great Selfie Challenge. (Right) Image from the MTV
India website featuring the Panasonic Eluga S smartphone that sponsored the show.

The show catapulted its winner, Clince Varghese into some measure of celebrity.
Varghese won the show with over 25 million votes and was dubbed India’s “selfie king” (Sapru
2017). Varghese dons many hats—lead singer of a rock band named “What’s in the Name,” a
voice over artist who lends his voice to advertisements and a professional emcee. After winning
The Great Selfie Challenge Varghese was also signed up as VJ for MTV’s Trackstar II.
Varghese’s selfies for The Great Selfie Challenge were always couched in the language of
creativity. For instance, for one of the tasks that involved taking a selfie with the Taj Mahal,
Varghese took an image of the monument framed between his legs as he jumps high in the air.

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The image was accompanied with the caption, “While tourists prefer pics of them holding Taj in
their hand & posing in cliched styles, I chose to fly over the most revered symbol of love”
(vjclince, Instagram: May 17, 2015). For another task that involved clicking a selfie at one of
India’s international borders, Varghese took a selfie at Dhanushkodi, the seashore border
between India and Sri Lanka. The selfie was clicked by holding the selfie stick between his feet
as he lay down on the beach, blowing into a conch shell held in his right hand, while his left hand
is touched by the waters that separate India from Sri Lanka (Fig. 20). Such tactical use of the
selfie goes against the idea that the selfie is spontaneous, nondeliberative form. Instead, in the
hands of social media celebrities such as Varghese, selfies are carefully planned and thought out,
with framing, performance and text forming part of the expressive retinue. As Paul Frosh points
out, taking selfies requires “the attainment of limbic and manual dexterity […] and the
calibration of the body to technical affordances and desirable representational outcomes” (Frosh
1614). If selfies are best understood as “cumulative and serial” (Rettberg 33) then the
“representational outcomes” that make it into the Instagram feed, go through a process of
deliberation that be seen a form of curating the self.
But Varghese’s selfie-life extends well beyond the show. Varghese maintains a strong
social media presence over Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter that is regularly updated.
Social media presence is a necessity given his line of work and this is not merely about clicking
commemorative selfies, but about constant updates and uploads. One of the ways that Varghese
does this is by clicking in-flight selfies and shooting airport arrival videos during his travels
which he describes as part of his “signature” style. The airport arrival videos are short clips of
him pushing a trolley while doing an athletic jump that usually end with an extreme close up of
his face while waving the sign of the horns with his hands. On the other hand, the “signature in

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flight happy selfies” are shot from the front end of the plane, Varghese’s grinning face in the
foreground with the rest of the passengers at the back; these are usually still images but there are
video variants as well.

Fig. 20: (Top Left) Varghese’s Taj Mahal selfie. (Top right) the selfie clicked at Dhanushkodi. (Bottom Left)
Varghese’s “signature in flight happy selfie” and (bottom right) screen grab from an airport arrival video.

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The in-flight selfie also landed Varghese in trouble when he was apprehended by the
police in November 2017, while trying to shoot one such video aboard a Jet Airways flight from
Cochin to Mumbai. Varghese usually starts his videos declaring “Boom Shakalaka Boom” and as
he was shooting the video declaring “let’s hijack this plane with happy vibes” he was mistakenly
overheard by the airways staff saying, “hijack this plane with a happy bomb” (Nandgaonkar).
Varghese was released after questioning and considerable flight delay, but the idea of the “happy
bomb” perhaps encapsulates his approach to the selfie and social media most appropriately. For
Varghese, social media is a theater of the self that involves constant performance and visibility
(Fig. 20).
For Varghese and other social media celebrities, the selfie becomes a way of constantly
uploading the self and the interface becomes a lived space that is integral to their online persona.
As Brenda Laurel argues, the creation of personas in social media is done for both, oneself and
for others through “acts of collage” and the proliferation of smart-phone cameras has become
central to both the creation and communication of this persona (Computers 137, 138). Laurel
points out both the etymological origin of the term persona— “mask” for Latin, as well as its
contemporary dictionary meaning— “the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or
perceived by others” (Computers 137). Although one of the affordances of social media is
relative anonymity (or at least distance), the creation of celebrity personae moves in the exact
opposite direction. Online celebrity is rooted in hypervisibility—in the work of being watched
every upload is a gestural addition in the collage of the self. Instagram feeds and other platforms
for selfies work on the logic of repetition and seriality, and as Jill Walker Rettberg argues,
understanding social media artefacts such as selfies requires a cognizance of this seriality
(Rettberg 33). In that sense, the Instagram feed is a collage of images (both still and moving) that

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provides a carefully constructed narrative about the user—individual images become “gestures”
in this collage that add to the total narrative. Selfies thus become what Frosh calls “gestural
images” that are representative of a “kinesthetic sociability” that connects interfaces, bodies and
actions (Frosh 1608).
The creation of an online persona is facialization par excellence, as the mask and the face
are folded into each other. The inter/facial self exists through a cycle of uploading and updating
that become an index of the self. This is not the same as the indexicality of the photographic
image, but rather a process of becoming—the updated profile is proof of online life. As Wendy
Chun points out, in new media’s ethos of accelerated capitalism “users have become creatures of
the update. To be is to be updated” (Updating to Remain 2). This extends both to updating
hardware and software, as well as updating the self through the profile.
20
Social media platforms
such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are theaters of the digital self and the selfie is the
symptom of digital being. The selfie’s dictum of “best face forward” works because of this
conflation between face and mask. Like reality television, but to a more extended magnitude, the
selfie destabilizes the temporal and spatial arrangements of celebrity-hood; in the age of instant
sharing, seemingly everyday moments hold the potential for fame. Selfies normalize celebrity
culture— “hits” are replaced by likes and shares, allowing for a much more rapid transmission of
persona. Just as in reality television, the selfie promises that “everyday people can be
transformed into real celebrities thanks to the power of this network” (Andrejevic 213). Selfie
expert phones and beautification apps are symptoms of this normalization of selfie culture.
Looking good as a two-dimensional image is the labor of belonging to this economy of
normalized celebrity.

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Another aspect of this economy can be seen in non-digital practices of beautification and
self-presentation. For instance, Mumbai-based fashion blogger and model, Scherezade Shroff
provides “perfect selfie” tips in a blogpost and a YouTube video. On her website Fashionalized,
Shroff spells out a number a number of tips for the perfect selfie. For instance, she writes:
“LOOK YOUR BEST […] Tweeze your eyebrows, wear some gloss or lipstick, conceal your
dark circles or pimples or wear a cool pair of sunglasses” (Shroff). Another tip goes, “FILTERS
ARE YOUR FRIENDS […] heres the truth... Even if your gorgeous you can't always look nice
and everyone has flaws. Instagram filters are great and when you start experimenting with them
you will realise that some work for you more than others” (Shroff). In her 2014 YouTube video
titled “How to take the Perfect Selfie” Shroff also has a retinue of other tips including app and
filter recommendations, using a monopod (selfie stick) and a Bluetooth clicker, taking multiple
shots before choosing the one to upload, as well as tips for facial expressions. Such tips reveal an
understanding of appearance as a function of both human and digital skin and point out the co-
dependence of the flesh/face and the inter/face. “Looking good” becomes a function of both
taking care of physical appearance and passing the image through filters that make the image
adhere to social standards of beauty. The filter “defamiliarises our lives” (Rettberg 26) by
manipulating color, contrast and focus and in that sense, the filter becomes essential to the
(machinic) attainment of the “best look.” “Perfect selfie” tips such as the ones put forward by
Shroff codify “looking good” as a combination of physical appearance, filter functions and
hardware capabilities.
In 2015, a college in the western-Indian city of Ahmedabad took this one step further
when it hosted what was touted as India’s first selfie class. Held in the L.J Institute of Media and
Communication, the five-day workshop was conducted by Radio Jockey turned social-media

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entrepreneur Aditi Raval, who has been described as Ahmedabad’s “selfie queen” (P. Das).
21

The workshop was sponsored by Oppo and advertised with the tagline, “It’s time to be "Selfie-
ish"” (Fig. 21).

Fig. 21: (Left) Promotional web-banner for the workshop. (Right) Coverage of the workshop on the news channel,
NDTV.

Participants were charged a fee of Rs. 2500 (approx. $39) but were assured selfie-sticks
and t-shirts in return. Two participants would also have a chance to win an Oppo N3 phone that
featured a motorized, rotating camera. On her website, Raval writes: “When you have 16MP
motorized rotating camera that can be rotated up to 206 degrees with the tap of a button or touch
of a fingerprint sensor located at the back of the phone, what else is required to be a perfect
Selfiegrapher?” The workshop included a professional photographer to impart tips on lighting,
framing and camera angles, and a psychiatrist who was roped in to speak about the psychological
aspects of selfie culture (Raval “India’s First”). But by and large, the implications of something
like a workshop or a class to take selfies replicates the logic of selfie apps and phones. Even as
the workshop speaks in the language of camera angles and lighting, the imagination of the
perfect selfie remains tied to a conception of the body as image. One of the Facebook posts

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shared by Raval for instance runs: “everyone wants to look good...Nobody appreciates the
presence of a photographer when they have a Smartphone. Gone are the days when honeymoon
couples asked people passing by to click photos. In 2015 people themselves capture the best
moments of their life.”
22

In selfie-tips imparted by entrepreneurs like Shroff and Raval, the desire for the selfie-
image is couched in the language of self-dependence and the promise of happiness. This is not a
far cry from selfie-smartphone advertisements like the one for the Vivo V5, and even fairness-
cream advertisements such as the Pond’s commercial mentioned earlier. In each of these cases,
the selfie becomes an interface that promises change through personal transformation. In this
entrepreneurial logic, the promise of happiness is coded as an image. In the work of being
watched, personal identity becomes capital and transformation is the labor of becoming visible.
I’m not suggesting that all forms of being watched are the same. Celebrity social media
profiles (including political celebrity, as I explore in Chapter 3) shows a much more calculated
use of strategy. However, the gap between the celebrity profile and the profile of the “everyman”
is one of scale and strategy and not platform. Varghese, Shroff and Raval form a new class of
celebrity that is not the same as that of the silver screen or the fashion spread. Note how each of
them describe their online personae: “Happy Soul ! MTV VJ/ Singer/ Corporate Anchor/
Motivational Speaker, Blogger Winner of MTV Great Selfie Challenge 2015 1000+ Live
Performances” (Clince Varghese, Instagram), “Independent Media Personality of Gujarat, Social
Media Infotainer, Film Reviewer, Producer. Glamour of Radio - thats what they used to call me
:)Free Soul” (Aditi Raval, Facebook), “Youtuber...Model...Blogger...Dreamer...” (Scherezade
Shroff, Facebook). Such descriptions foreground the relationship between success, personal
dreams and desires and social media. If reality television worked by promising a “lottery of

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celebrity” (Andrejevic 68), then social media and selfies normalize celebrity. The selfie is not
just a document of one’s moment in time, it is a codified digital gesture shared for the
consumption of others. In this theater of the self, the selfie is less a spontaneous imaging act of a
shutterbug, than a curated collage of the persona produced through repetition. Even without the
selfie as a visible image, such celebrity can be called selfie-celebrity, as long as we understand
the selfie as a mode that participates in the online collage of the self.
The transformation of the celebrity “event” into the repetitive celebration of the self is not
always about the positive reinforcement of potential celebrity. I want to end this section by
pointing towards the YouTube personality Pooja Jain who goes by the moniker Dhinchak Pooja.
“Dhinchak” is a Hindi slang word that is not easily translatable in English, and its meaning lies
somewhere in between the regions of ostentation, cool and bling. Dhinchak Pooja is an amateur
singer who has been described both as a “cringe-pop star” (Pattanaik) and a “YouTube 'star'”
who cannot “sing in tune, or even stick to tempo” (BBC “Dhinchak Pooja”). Yet, despite the
discordant and aurally displeasing nature of her music, Pooja has over 15000 followers on
Twitter, over 279000 followers on Facebook, over 12000 followers on Instagram, over 342000
subscribers on YouTube and even landed up with a wildcard entry to the eleventh season of Bigg
Boss, the Indian version of the reality show Big Brother. In cases like this, “stardom” is a factor
of countable views and likes rather than abstract qualities such as talent and charisma. Often,
such content circulates more precisely because of its lack of musical quality.
In May 2017, Pooja released what is probably her most widely talked-about song, “Selfie
Maine Le Li Aaj” (“I have taken a selfie today”). The song consists of Pooja’s monotonous
vocals playing over a repetitive electronic track, the voice and the musical beat clearly out of
sync. The lyrics of the song are also repetitive consisting of the refrain, “Selfie maine leli aaj,

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Selfie maine leli aaj, Sar pe mere rehta taj, Selfie maine leli aaj” that translates as “I have taken
a selfie today, I have taken a selfie today, there’s always a crown on my head, I’ve taken a selfie
today.” Some lines in the song reflect once again, fantasies of luxury and money, for instance
driving an Audi and having dinner in expensive hotels (“Audi mein main ghumti hun, subah
sham or raat mein […] Karun dinner har sham main, vip hotel taj mein”). Others point towards
the selfie as a daily activity that comes with this kind of luxury—“Selfie lena hi mera kaam, na
interest kisi baat mein […] Roz karun main dp change , acha sa filter lagake” which translates as
“Taking selfies is my job, I’m not interested in anything else […] I change my dp (display
picture) every day, putting a nice filter on it.” The video of the song is peppered with
photographs of Pooja at various locations in Delhi, with some video content featuring a largely
still Audi (Fig. 22). Dhinchak Pooja is by no means a “selfie-guru” and her music circulates
virally, mostly through negative publicity.
23
Yet the song stands in as a metaphor for the
aspirational qualities associated with the selfie form. Varghese, Shroff and Raval represent the
clean surface of selfie-celebrity, and while I am not suggesting that Dhinchak Pooja is
revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, a figure like her defies the “smiley
entrepreneurship” of the selfie in its more accepted forms. Dhinchak Pooja is not a failure if we
go by the figures; but she is equally difficult to slot within the same notion of selfie-celebrity as
the other figures discussed here.

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Fig. 22: Screen-grabs from the YouTube video of “Selfie Maine Le Li Aaj.”

In this version of selfie-celebrity, the selfie (both as mode and object) is closely related to
detritus of digital culture such as the meme. Like the meme’s “hypermemetic logic” (Shifman 4),
Dhinchak Pooja’s online-persona circulates virally, allowing her to insert herself into the flat
plane of selfie-celebrity. The moniker “Dhinchak” is the obverse of “Happy soul,” “Free Soul”
and “Dreamer.” If Varghese, Shroff and Raval represent the flat, happy affects of neoliberal
facialization, Dhinchak Pooja is its unpredictable, carnivalesque extreme. Figures like Dhinchak
Pooja serve to remind us that the logic of insertion that the selfie works with does not always
have even, predictable results. Filters can defamiliarize and beautify, and viral circulation can
ensure high visibility, but this does not automatically translate into upward mobility, instant fame
and the promise of happiness as the selfie advertisements discussed in the last section would
have us believe. Instead the selfie’s insertion into public discourse remains perched somewhere
in between the regions of art, performance and kitsch.

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Conclusion: An Aesthetic of Insertion
The selfie’s aesthetic of insertion is a direct effect of its nature as a technology of the
surface. This is not a unique property of the selfie and is, in fact an affordance of digital media.
Lev Manovich points out that the development of graphical user interfaces (GUI) led to the
emergence of a “"cut and paste" logic” (The Language 131). This extends to both interactions
with the operating system through cut, copy and paste commands, as well as image manipulation
and editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP. In the case of image manipulation
software, the visual appearance of the image can be changed through complex algorithmic
functions that are hidden behind simplified mouse gestures and click-through steps. The practice
of image-morphing for example, is one of the ways in which algorithmic operations become part
of contemporary visual culture. The aesthetic of insertion is a conversion of algorithmic culture
into visual culture. In this, the inter/face becomes a screen of fantasies, a tableau for transforming
mathematical possibilities into visual probability. This extends to a wide range of visual artefacts
and practices including, but not limited to, the circulation of morphed images of film stars as
pornographic material, to changing the color of one’s skin or teeth through selfie apps. In
treating the human eye as an interface, Friedrich Kittler writes that eye introduces the “imaginary
into images” through its unique ability to “pick out shapes in a world view infiltrated by accident
and noise” (Kittler 118). The “cut and paste logic” of digital media allows for the imaginary to
be visually played out on the surface of the image. Older forms of photo-manipulation also
displayed some of this visual surfacing of the imaginary, seen as for instance in the everyday
practices of photomontage, collage and double-exposure in Indian studio photography examined
by Christopher Pinney.
24
In his work Pinney describes how studios routinely produce
photographs of their patrons with Bollywood film stars through multiple exposures (Pinney 210).

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However, the coming of the digital has changed things drastically. The availability of
smartphone apps and photo-manipulation software has not only impacted the speed of producing
and circulating these images but has also made them more routine. Digital imaging makes the
visualization of fantasy images a matter of habituated mouse and GUI gestures. Here, insertion
works both through the logic of cut and paste as well as by inserting fantasies of physical
transformation and mobility into the temporality of the everyday. This aesthetic of insertion
works both in the realm of art practice as well as more institutionalized forms of imaging. Two
Indian artists, Geetanjali Rao and Adrita Das have picked up the selfie as a powerful metaphor to
comment on the idiosyncrasies of life in contemporary India.
In 2016, Gitanjali Rao started uploading a series of images of herself, photoshopped in
with famous personalities on her Facebook profile. The series was dubbed “Wishfies: Wish
fulfilment series”— selfies Rao wished she could take with her idols. This soon gathered
attention on social media and press coverage. There are images of Rao photoshopped with
revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, with artists such as Frida Khalo and
Amrita Sher Gil, with Susan Sontag and with the Indian actresses Smita Patil and Madhubala. In
each of these Rao positions herself, arm outstretched as she poses in costume, her image edited
to suit the look of the older photographs. In other images, Rao eschews any mimicry of
photographic indexicality and simply draws herself with comic book characters and creators—
there are images with Phantom, with Asterix and Obelix and with Marjane Satrapi (Fig. 23)

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Fig. 23: Clockwise from top left—with Susan Sontag, Cheguevara and Fidel Castro, Phantom and Smita Patil

In some ways Rao’s images are all impossible. Her co-subjects are all dead and gone or
exist only as print material. The images are a visualization of fantasy and hence deliberately
anachronistic. But in her performance of costuming and make-up, and her use of Photoshop’s cut
and paste logic, Rao re-enacts the principle of inter/facial life in which fantasies of the self are
crystallized on a two-dimensional surface. The imagined temporality of the fantasy is spatialized
on the two-dimensional surface, creating a visualized image of the self that is co-extensive with
the historical or narrative time of her co-subjects. Rao claims that she bought her smartphone and
took her first selfie three months before starting the series (Tripathi). While the final images are
composited, there is a process of actually taking a selfie and turning it into a representational
image. The final images (except the ones that are completely drawn) layer not just chunks of
different images, but different temporalities themselves. Rao’s images might border on the
farcical, but they display much of the same logic of insertion as the selfie.

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In contrast Adrita Das’ work uses the selfie less as a scene of wish fulfilment, and more a
motif to comment on the idiosyncratic nature of digital life through an exploration of forms such
as the GIF (graphic interchange format). In 2015, Das who goes by the moniker Das Niaz for her
online work, started a Tumblr blog titled Gods Taking Selfies. Unlike Rao’s work where it is the
selfie taking subject that is the focus of the image assemblage, in Das’ work it is the cellphone
itself. While Rao inserts herself into the image to explore the aspects of performing and curating
the self through the selfie, Das’ work inserts the cellphone, looking at selfie-taking practices
from the outside. Further, her work highlights the selfie’s relationship to other digital image
practices such as the meme and the animated GIF. The selfie’s connection to the animated GIF is
particularly interesting when considering that the Oppo F1 Selfie Expert was released with a
“Super GIF” feature that allows the selfie to be exported as a series of frames that are animated.
Kate Miltner and Tim Highfield point out that the GIF is marked by “malleability and versatility
[and] their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning” (Miltner
and Highfield 1). As two-dimensional digital images, the GIF and the selfie are both polysemic
forms that are “isolated snippets of larger texts” (1). Das herself defines GIFs as “small loops of
unpredictable imagery that could easily lift someone's mood, effortlessly making their way into
people's lives and subconscious when even the most elaborate of art forms could not move them”
(Vieira).
A quick look at the front-page of the Gods Taking Selfies Tumblr site displays these
qualities in Das’ work. On the front page itself, we are met with an animated GIF that features
the Hindu deity Hanuman repeatedly appearing and disappearing from the bottom of the banner.
In Hindu imagery, Hanuman is often portrayed tearing open his chest to display Rama and Sita.
Das’ Hanuman GIF replaces the deities with the original Instagram logo, which is a rendition of

95
the Polaroid OneStep camera (Pachal). Das draws on different textual registers and temporalities
to create an image that comments on the nature of contemporary imaging culture. The cellphone
camera (or its platforms) is a recurring motif in Das’ work in this series. On the Tumblr site for
Gods Taking Selfies Das writes: “Gods Taking Selfies began as a personal project in 2015 after
coming across many archived miniature and mughal paintings that seemed like photoshopping a
smartphone was inevitable.”
25
Das combines her interest in miniature paintings, religious
iconography and calendar art with the language of the selfie to present a unique commentary on
the nature of selfie culture in India. Das describes the series as “a subtle remark about our
culture, in some ways like a glitch in the time machine that may make the viewer think and laugh
about themselves’ (Frank). Humor is an integral part of the work and is woven in throughout the
series, not only in the content of the images, but also structurally as part of the digital nature of
the work. For instance, right-clicks are disabled on the site and are met with the message, “All
right click downloads have been cursed personally by Lord Shiva.” (Fig.24)

Fig. 24: (Left) The banner for the Tumblr site showing the Instagram logo within Hanuman’s chest. (Middle) A
miniature-style painting with the subject depicted clicking a selfie in the mirror. The caption of the image says: “A
‘Casualie’, (noun): The act of taking a selfie as though by accident, with no intention of looking pretty.” (Right) An
image of the Hindu deity Krishna with his consort Radha clicking a selfie. The screenshot also displays the right-
click disabled message as “All right click downloads have been cursed personally by Lord Shiva.”

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On Behance, Adobe’s creative portfolio site, Das writes that her digital work draws on
the visual language from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Thailand and Japan and
includes “Buddhist murals from monastries, Persian miniature paintings, Persian frescos from
Middle East, Mughal Paintings of Shahs, Begums, Miniature painting from Jaipur, India,
Japanese miniatures” (A. Das, Behance). Incidentally her work has also drawn the ire of Hindu
right-wing groups that have accused it as a “denigration of Hindu culture” (Hindu Janajagruti
Samiti). The point in such reactions seems to be a banalization of Hindu visual culture (not to
forget that not all of these images draw on Hindu iconography). But as Kajri Jain points out,
Hindu iconography has always circulated within a popular, mass-produced idiom—what Jain
calls “bazaar art” that can be purchased in a variety of formats: “high-gloss calendars […]
smaller prints […] inexpensive stickers, postcards, magnets, key rings, and pendants” (Jain 3).
Das’ work extends this popular idiom by reimagining it in the context of not a market economy,
but a “GIF economy” that works through popular communication practices of exchanging image-
based media. In bringing the images of deities into the realm of electronic communication and
exchange, Adrita Das’ work points towards the blurring of the iconic and the banal.
If Rao and Das’ respective works explore insertion within the frame of the digital artwork
and use it as a mode to comment on selfie-culture in contemporary India, there is a more
institutionalized form in which the aesthetic of insertion plays out. This has less to do with art-
practice, and more to do with an aestheticization of the everyday that the selfie is a symptom of.
In 2011, the Indian postal service started a “My Stamp” scheme that allowed customers to print
an image of their choice onto pre-existing templates such as national monuments, flowers and
festivals. This preceded the emergence of the selfi, but in 2015 Prasar Bharati, the Indian public
service broadcasting agency declared through its Twitter account that the postal department

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would be launching a scheme called “My Stamp” that would allow people to convert their selfies
into postage stamps (Fig. 25).

Fig. 25: Prasar Bharati tweet declaring the “launch” of the My Stamp scheme.

Thus, during its initial launch at the INDIPEX 2011 World Philately Exhibition, the
scheme was not advertised as a selfie scheme; this happened only later, coinciding with the boom
in selfie culture in the ensuing years. Despite this association with a digital form, the procedure
for obtaining a selfie stamp is remarkably analog—a customer has to go to the post office with a
valid photo ID, fill out a form, pay a sum of Rs. 300 ($4.72 approx.) and provide a soft copy of
their photograph. If a hard copy is provided it is scanned on the spot, or if the customer does not
have a camera, their photograph can be clicked at the post office. Thus, the images do not
necessarily need to be “selfies” technically speaking, but could also be passport format
photographs, group photographs, or even images of flora and fauna (India Post). The official
wording of the My Stamp Scheme in the Indian Post website and on site at the post offices in
fact, still do not use the term selfie. The repackaging of a personalized stamp scheme as a

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“selfie” scheme in the press and popular media points towards the idea of the selfie as a mode of
presentation that can be adapted to different contexts (Fig. 26).

Fig. 26: (Left) The “My Stamp” counter at the General Post Office in New Delhi. (Right) A “My Stamp” sheet
featuring the “Cineraria” template and my selfie.

The idea of a personalized stamp or a selfie stamp is an inflection of the aesthetic of
insertion—if gods can be GIFs, the ordinary individual can now take the place of the icon on the
stamp. The two-dimensional surface of the stamp, like the selfie becomes a canvas of fantasies
albeit one that is to be printed and posted rather than shared with the click of a mouse. Art
historian James Elkins writes that stamps “are little universes, compressing the larger worlds of
art and politics into a square half-inch” (Elkins 4). If the logic is carried through, the Indian “My
Stamps” are the compression of inter/facial culture and the aesthetic of insertion into a
previously existing form of public imagery. As symbolic forms, “selfie stamps” visualize the
folding in of the public and the private in the age of social media. But such institutionalization of
selfie culture is not always a smooth process of integrating the old and the new. The selfie

99
provides new avenues for personalization and new forms of commercial culture, but it also
represents a fracture in the public sphere. With this in mind, the next chapter explores how the
selfie has become a major concern and a hotbed of debate in questions of public space, safety
and death in contemporary India.

NOTES

1. According to Immanuel Kant, both the beautiful and the sublime are aspects of aesthetic experience.
But unlike the beautiful, the sublime cannot be attributed to an object.
2. According to the Linux Information Project a hex editor “is a type of program that allows a user to
view and edit the raw and exact contents of files, that is, at the byte level, in contrast to the higher level
interpretations of the same contents that are provided by other, higher level application programs”
(LINFO).
3. Datamoshing or databending is “the process of manipulating the data of media files in order to
achieve visual or auditory effects when the file is decoded” (Tucker).
4. Droitcour’s original article, “A Selfie is Not a Portrait” can be found on his blog Culture Two
(https://culturetwo.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/a-selfie-is-not-a-portrait/).
5. See http://wirelesswatch.jp/2014/07/09/world-first-camera-phone-the-kyocera-vp-210/ for details
about the release history of the Kyocera VP-210.
6. For instance, in 2013, news surfaced that Samsung Smart TV’s were vulnerable to a new kind of
risk. At the annual Black Hat Conference 2013, held between July 27th and August 1st at Las Vegas,
Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor of the security firm iSec Partners revealed a bug in the firmware of
Samsung’s Smart TVs. Using a few lines of code, Grattafiori and Yavor proved that it was possible to
hack into the television’s firmware and “use the TV's web browser to compromise the front-facing
camera, take over the DNS settings and inject virus-like code into other applications” (Lee). Most
remarkably, the hacker could actually manipulate the television’s camera to watch the user without his or

100

her knowledge. Thus, embedded camera systems in network enabled devices function as machinic eyes
that can view the user, as much as the user views them.
7. In their paper on “Deep Face,” Facebook’s face detection algorithm, Taigman et.al. write that the
conventional face detecting pipeline “consists of four stages: detect align represent classify”
(Taigman et al. 1). As several recent reports have shown, facial recognition technology is far from perfect
and often suffers from racial bias (Ferro 2016; Breland 2017).
8. See “China-based Vendors Now Contribute More Than Half of Indian Smartphone Market in CY
Q1 2017: IDC India” (16 May 2017) in the IDC website
(https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP42557317).
9. Cellphone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in
India” is the alternative title for the Hachette India version of Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron’s The Great
Indian Phonebook: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life published by
Harvard University Press. Both versions were released in 2013.
10. See “OPPO ropes in Hrithik Roshan and Sonam Kapoor as Brand Ambassadors in South Asia
Region” (Jan 15, 2016) on the Oppo website
(https://www.oppo.com/in/about-us/press/oppo-ropes-in-hrithik-roshan-and-sonam-kapoor-as-brand-
ambassadors-in-south-asia-region).
11. See “OPPO launches the F5, a Selfie Expert with Groundbreaking A.I. Beauty technology that will
‘Capture the Real You’” on Oppo’s website
(https://www.oppo.com/in/about-us/press/oppo-launches-the-f5-a-selfie-expert-with-groundbreaking-ai-
beauty-technology-that-will-capture-the-).
12. Such databases of human faces indeed do exist. One prime example is the database titled “Labeled
Faces in the Wild” a project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that was launched in 2007
(http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/). Labeled Faces in the Wild was set up with the explicit purpose of
conducting research in facial recognition technology. A longer list of sixty plus databases can be found on

101

the Kairos Human Analytics Blog (https://www.kairos.com/blog/60-facial-recognition-databases). Most
of these are maintained for specific research projects. Oppo’s “Global Image Database of Human Faces”
draws on a similar idea of facial database but remains dubious as it does not specify which specific
database it draws from and what parameters for selection has been used.
13. Andrew Robinson provides a useful interpretation of “overcoding” as it appears in Deleuze and
Guattari’s work. He writes: “‘Overcoding’ consists in the imposition of the regime of meanings arising
from this fixing of representations on the various processes through which social life and desire operate.
Overcoding also […] entails the destruction of anything which cannot be represented or encoded”
(Robinson).
14. One area where this distinction can be clearly seen is the varying use of masks as propaganda
material and advertisement strategy. Nitin Govil and Anirban Baishya point out this difference through a
comparison between Burger King’s advertising strategy that used masks of the Burger King mascot, and
the use of masks in the 2014 Indian electoral campaign where the Bharatiya Janata Party distributed
masks of its Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. While in both cases the masks were meant to
create a sense of pervasive presence, the Modi masks posited the political leader as both “mascot and
beacon” (Govil and Baishya 10). On the other hand, the Burger King masks pointed to a brand but not a
particular person and implied an intermeshing of corporate logic with the consumer’s private space. The
Modi masks foregrounded right-wing Hindu ideology, whereas the Burger King masks hid ideology
behind a façade of playfulness.
15. See the product description for Pond’s White Beauty in the Pond’s India website
(https://www.ponds.com/in/products/collection/white-beauty/white-beauty-all-in-one-bb-fairness-cream-
spf-30-pa.html).
16. The video is available on YouTube. The original lyrics are a mix of Hindi and English.
17. The website www.selfieready.ponds.in is now closed, but archived pages can be accessed through
the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/*/selfieready.ponds.in).

102

18. Here, I draw on Guattari’s definition of the unconscious as “something that we drag around with
ourselves both in our gestures and daily objects” (Guattari 9). Guattari uses the term to qualify his use of
the concept of the “machinic”—those processes and structures that produce the images and words that
populate our world (9).
19. See “What is the Great Selfie Challenge” on the MTV India website
(http://www.mtvindia.com/selfie/show.php).
20. The obverse of this logic can be found in the fatalistic vision of social media put forward by the
Rotterdam avant-garde art collective WORM, in their online service called “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.”
WORM promises a return to “real” life by deleting social media connections of its users. The suicide
machine severs online connections made on Twitter, LinkdIn and MySpace. Facebook disconnections
were stopped after Facebook Inc. served a cease and desist letter to WORM.
21. See item 3 on the “Events” page at the Institute’s website (http://ljimc.org/events).
22. This post was shared by Raval on her Facebook wall on May 8th, 2015 but mentioned that the text
was “published by LJ Institute of Media and Communications.”
23. In fact, the phenomenon of negative publicity leading to “cringe-celebrity” is rampant in South
Asia. One can find close parallels in the Pakistani singer Taher Shah (BBC “Why Pakistan's singing”) and
two self-styled YouTube filmmakers from India—Mr. Rajkumar from the north-eastern state of Assam
(Mukherjee), and Santhosh Pandit from the southern-Indian state of Kerala (Sreedhar).
24. The third chapter of Pinney’s Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs is titled
“Chambers of Dreams” and shows how both studios and their patrons share a language in which
photography is a process of making the realms of fantasy and devotion visible.
25. See “About” in the Gods Taking Selfies Tumblr site (http://selfiegods.tumblr.com/about).

103

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Image Sources
Fig.1: Author.
Fig.2: (Left) Brandday (http://www.brandday.net/efsane-eski-model-cep-telefonlari-p2-
aid,16.html ). (Right) Digit (https://www.digit.in/slideshows/15-top-mobile-phones-of-
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Fig. 3: The Realist, Facebook
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(http://ekagantuk.blogspot.com/).
Fig.5: (Top) YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZk-UsDUiFE).
(Bottom) Image courtesy Aradhana Singha.
Fig.6: Author.
Fig.7: (Top Left) YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZdSWtDT3E).
(Top Right) Author. (Bottom) Gionee (https://gionee.co.in/smartphones/s-series/gionee-
s6s).
Fig.8: Composite of screen grabs from YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVabQniBBKg).

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Fig.9: (Left) Afaqs!
(http://www.afaqs.com/advertising/creative_showcase/index.html?id=2464&media=Print
&type=Indian). (Right) YouTube screen grab excerpt
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZdSWtDT3E).
Fig.10: (Left top and bottom) YouTube screen grabs
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIZdSWtDT3E). (Right) Author.
Fig.11: YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMbVKa9gUHA).
Fig.12: (Top) Gionee (https://gionee.co.in/smartphones/s-series/gionee-s6s). (Middle)
GadgetDiary (http://www.gadgetdiary.com/vivo-v5-best-selfie-camera-
smartphone.html/vivo-flash). (Bottom) Techbot Inc (http://techbotinc.com/oppo-vivo-
gionee-selfie-fad/).
Fig.13: Gadgets Now (https://www.gadgetsnow.com/gn-advertorial/a-i-technology-amps-up-the-
selfie-game-and-we-are-super-excited/articleshow/61778898.cms).
Fig.14: Composite of screen grabs from YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTFho0b668A&t=16s).
Fig.15: Composite of screen grabs from YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUWpM2ZjJs).
Fig.16: (Top) YouTube screen grab (https://youtu.be/lD695Bd7WjA). (Middle and bottom rows)
Screen grab from Twitter photos search with the keyword #PondsSelfieReady.
Fig.17: News 18, composite of screen grabs
(https://images.news18.com/ibnlive/uploads/2017/03/Opppo-Selfie-Survey-
Infographic.jpg).

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Fig.18: Lighthouse Insights (http://lighthouseinsights.in/colgate-visible-white-selfie-facebook-
campaign.html/).
Fig.19: (Left) MTV Stuntmania, Facebook
(https://www.facebook.com/mtvstuntmania/photos/a.338053799578688.100029.1963766
77079735/958614737522588/?type=3&theater). (Right) MTV India
(http://www.mtvindia.com/selfie/resources/images/spot-eluga.jpg).
Fig.20: Clince Varghese, Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/vjclince/?hl=en).
Fig. 21: (Left) RJAditi (http://www.rjaditi.com/be-a-selfiegrapher/). (Right) YouTube screen grab
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiB4u2L3z8M).
Fig. 22: Composite of screen grabs from YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frw6uu3nonQ).
Fig.23: Gitanjali Rao, Facebook album, “WISHFIES - Wish fulfilment Selfies”
(https://www.facebook.com/gitanjali.rao.161/media_set?set=a.638795776274543.107374
1843.100004323787869&type=3).
Fig.24: Gods Taking Selfies (http://selfiegods.tumblr.com/).
Fig. 25: Prasar Bharati, Twitter (https://twitter.com/prasarbharati/status/664363207226593280).
Fig.26: Author.

•

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Chapter 2

The Fatal Image: Space, Death and the Selfie

Introduction: Technology, Space, Death
In January 2017, a story in The Quint, an Indian online news-portal, reported the death of
two young boys who collided with a train and died while taking a selfie in New Delhi. Featuring
interviews with victims’ families and statistical infographics, the report highlighted the selfie as a
major contributor to deaths in India (Gupta) (Fig.1). The Quint’s story was the latest in a series
of news reports that focused on a purported selfie-death epidemic that had swept India. The seeds
for this had been sown in a 2016 report in Pricenomics, a website that describes itself as a
platform that “turns data into great stories.” Titled “The Tragic Data Behind Selfie Fatalities,”
this report written by Zachary Crockett built on earlier news-reports in the online travel
magazine Condé Nast Traveller (Quinn and Rickman) and the entertainment website Mashable
(Rizzo). Declaring selfies to be a leading cause of fatality, both Condé Nast Traveller and
Mashable said that selfies were more dangerous than shark-attacks. Mashable cited a total of
twelve selfie-related deaths in 2015, as opposed to eight by shark attacks (Fig.2). The
Pricenomics report undertook a more detailed statistical analysis of selfie-deaths by age, gender,
circumstance and region and named India as the country with the most number of selfie-related
deaths since 2014— about 49 deaths, almost 40% of the total number of deaths worldwide
(Fig.2). Statistical figures such as the ones put forward in Pricenomics are often cited in Indian
news-reports that focus on selfie fatalities. With its booming cellphone market and its pre-
eminent presence in statistical reports, India has emerged as a site in which the selfie’s potentials
for death and hazard are localized in a unique way, with fatalistic reports of narcissism and
obsession and a “selfie epidemic” often being made in televised and printed reports (Fig.3).

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Fig. 1:Screenshot collage from The Quint's report highlighting selfie fatality in India.
Fig. 2: Mashable's "sharks v. selfies" infographic (left) and Pricenomics' country-wise distribution of selfie-deaths,
showing India at the lead.

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In this chapter, I examine the modalities of selfie-related hazards in India, where an
uneven technological modernity marks the discourse of selfie-deaths. I argue that anxiety around
selfie-deaths is a product of the collision between traditional forms of spatial regulation and often
uncontrollable, technologically layered spaces. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the
“production of space” and Lev Manovich’s concept of technologically “augmented space,” I
argue that the anxiety about selfie fatalities in “public” spaces is a both a product of the
conflicting uses of space as well as a “producer” of space. For Lefebvre, production can occur in
space, but space itself can be produced (State 186). Examining recent examples of marking off
public places as no-selfie zones in India, I suggest that anxieties around selfie-taking generate a
discourse of ideal, planned urban space which is highly regulated and controllable. However,
while calls for regulation produce an abstract imagination of planned and regulated space,
“abstract space cannot be conceived of in the abstract” (The Production 307). According to
Fig. 3: A news-report in India Today highlighting a "selfie epidemic" leading to selfie deaths in India.

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Lefebvre, this abstract idea of space can be grasped “only by means of a practice that deals with
it” (The Production 307). Selfie-taking as a performative practice, pushes against the limits of
planned urban space. Incidents of death destabilize the planner’s imagination of a transparent
cityscape that can be fully regulated and controlled. In this discourse, the selfie emerges as a
medium of death; at the same time selfie-deaths themselves are a highly mediated phenomenon,
as the public experience of the selfie-death always takes place through media conduits such as
newspapers, television and the Internet. The phenomenon of selfie-deaths in India must be read
as a product of this frictional relationship between abstract/planned space (rife with zoning and
regulation), the social space of everyday practice and media discourses, and augmented,
technological space that envelops both spaces.
I argue that the popular perception of the selfie as a deathly technology is part of a larger
anxiety about cellphone technology, ubiquitous photography and the management of public
space and human bodies. While such technologies augment the conduct of everyday life and
become intrinsically habituated and routinized, they can also destabilize the regulatory aspects of
technological governance. As a product of networked cellphone technologies, the selfie is
uniquely perched at the interstices of governmentality,
1
regulation and ubiquitous media
technology. Therefore, any analysis of selfie-deaths must move beyond questions of statistical
citation and numbers and engage in a wider reading in which larger questions of aesthetics and
ethics are at stake. The triangular relationship between death, technology and public space that is
encapsulated in the phenomenon of selfie-deaths can hardly be explicated by statistical data
alone. This does not mean that selfie deaths don’t occur, but rather that one needs to go beyond
trusting data at face value.

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Death and the Camera-Image
Scholars of the mechanically produced image have long imagined an intrinsic linkage
between death and the photograph. In his now iconic essay “The Ontology of the Photographic
Image” André Bazin conceptualized photography as a means of “embalming time” (Bazin 8).
Drawing a direct link between older forms of the preservation of the self after death (such as
mummification), Bazin identifies a deathly undertone to the photographic process; even though
photographs need not necessarily take death as their subject matter, the very possibility of human
death remains, for Bazin, a major underlying motivation for the photographic endeavor. Roland
Barthes offers a similar postulation in Camera Lucida when he writes “death is the eidos of the
photograph” (Barthes 15). “Each photograph,” as Barthes puts it, “always contains this
imperious sign of [my] future death” (97). Like Bazin, Barthes understands death as the
motivation behind photographic image making, with professional photographers being “agents of
death” (92). As relatively “early” theorists of the photograph, Bazin and Barthes began to
establish a link between the mechanically produced image and the mediated experience of death.
For Barthes, the photograph had become the center that contained death in the modern world—a
function that was earlier the sole purview of religion (92). Susan Sontag also echoes this idea
when she conceptualizes the photograph as an artifact that is haunted by death. She writes:
“photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own
destruction” (On Photography 55). Not surprisingly, both Bazin (7) and Sontag (On
Photography 120) use the metaphor of “death masks” to characterize the practice of
photography.
Michael Renov points out that in the work of psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan,
“death is figured as a negativity, a discursive void” that can only be partially worked through via

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language and images (Renov 120). In other words, death is something that eludes full
representation. Yet at the same time, death continues to be at the center of media representations.
As Laura Mulvey points out, the link between photography and death was exacerbated in the
twentieth century, “as photography expanded into news reporting, developing […] into a record
of disaster and death” (Mulvey 64-65). Susan Sontag makes a similar point in Regarding the
Pain of Others (2004) where she draws a direct connection between the development of lighter,
portable cameras and the emergence of death as a prominent subject matter in photography. She
writes: “once the camera was emancipated from the tripod, truly portable, and equipped with a
range finder and a variety of lenses that permitted unprecedented feats of close observation from
a distant vantage point, picture-taking acquired an immediacy and authority greater than any
verbal account in conveying the horror of mass-produced death” (Regarding 24). Sontag’s
statement was made in the context of World War II, but subsequent events such as the Vietnam
War and the Syrian refugee crisis have reinforced the relationship between photography and the
reportage of death Indeed, the mass experience of death in the modern world has been mediated
through the visual image—both still and moving (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Eddie Adams’ Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the public execution of a Vietcong activist (1968) during
the Vietnam War (left) and photograph of Alan Kurdi a dead Syrian child (2015). Both images have become
emblematic of the scale of death in their respective historical contexts.

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However, this relationship between photographic imagery and the representation of death
pointed out by Mulvey and Sontag differs crucially from the selfie-death phenomenon. Images of
war and humanitarian crises take death as the subject of photographic representation. This is not
the same in case of selfie-deaths. In fact, most selfies that circulate on the Internet as examples of
“fatal selfies” are images taken before the death of the photographer-subject (Fig.5).

Fig.5: An Indian Express report of a selfie-death in Karnataka, India. The image shows the victims in the location
where they died. The image however, is taken before their actual death and functions as a symbolic referent for the
fatality itself.

There is some formal resemblance between images such as these and what Barbie Zelizer
calls images of “certain death” in photojournalism. In About to Die: How News Images Move the
Public, Zelizer explains that images of certain death “verbally and explicitly marks individuals as
having died after their picture was taken” (Zelizer 173). She points out a clear reliance on textual
supplementation through “titles, captions, adjoining texts, and the verbal information” in images
of certain death (173). This can be seen in many instances of virally circulating selfies that are
purported to have been taken before the death of their subjects.
2
Most of these examples rely on

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textual signifiers and captions such as “deadly selfies,” “taken right before death,” “haunting
selfies” etc.
However, the formal resemblance between journalistic images of certain death and “fatal
selfies” ends at the textual level. The crucial difference here lies in the relationship between the
photographer and the photographed subject. Zelizer explicates that “about to die” images in
photojournalism often work in a subjunctive mode, in which the “as if” (i.e. the suggestion of
death) in the image leads to an inference of the “as is” (the objective reality of death) in the
image. She explains that this is central to the representation of death and dying in
photojournalism, that often favors the subjunctive mode over graphic depiction of death, both for
dramatic and ethical reasons. As she points out, the specific genre of the “about to die” image
exposes a pattern of editorial decision making in which “The decision to show an about-to-die
image reflects a corresponding decision not to show evidence of death” (Zelizer 28). There are
several levels of separation between the dying subject and its final, published image—the
camera, the photographer, editors, printers to name a few. In other words, death-as-
representation assumes a distance between the photographer/camera and the photographed death.
But, in the “fatal selfie” the photographer and subject are collapsed into one and death evades
representation in the image. Therefore, a wider reading of the selfie death phenomenon must
account for a factor that has not been considered by theorists such as Barthes, Bazin and
Zelizer—the death of the photographer.
Of course, hazard and fatality of photographers is not unique to selfies, and there has
been a longer historical link between the vocation of photography and incidences of death and
hazard. This aspect of death and hazard is crucial for understanding how the selfie comes to be
seen as a hazardous form but has more to do with the nature of technological supplementation

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and the relationship between the body’s biomechanical imbalances and physical space. Any
discussion of the selfie as a hazardous form, has to begin with a comparison with similar
technologies that have preceded it. The popular comparison between sharks and selfies
mentioned earlier fails primarily because the terms of the comparison are not equal; the selfie-
death imagines death as the product of personal failure to care for the self, while in case of the
shark attack, death is imposed by an external biological agent. Indeed, if selfies as agents of
death and personal danger can and should be compared to anything, it is not to sharks, but older
forms of photography. Here, I refer to photography as it is understood traditionally—a process
that involves recording pictures with a device that has been built specifically for that purpose,
whether the images themselves are meant to be still or moving images. So, in a sense I am
talking about the cellphone camera’s predecessors—the box camera, the motion picture camera,
the point and shoot camera and the single-lens reflex camera (both analog and digital).

The Photographer’s Body: Extension, Equilibrium, Vulnerability
One of the most influential theoretical assertions about the co-dependence of the human
body and the technological device was made by Marshall McLuhan in his seminal text,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Here, McLuhan claims, “all technologies are
extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed” (McLuhan 90).
Although McLuhan speaks of a certain kind of fusing of the biological and the machinic, the
very idea of an “extension” is marked by an externality to the human body. Seen in this light, the
camera is basically an extension of the human eye; yet, it is external to the body. A close cousin
of the extension is the prosthetic, but there is one major difference. The prosthetic seeks to
supplement a lack in the body and therefore by design, the prosthetic becomes one with the body

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rather than external to it. For example, the prosthetic leg restores equilibrium to the body’s
destabilized center of gravity by replacing the leg that was once attached to the body. On the
other hand, the extension does not presume a disabled body, but functions instead, on a logic of
acceleration— “to increase power and speed” as McLuhan puts it, rather than to restore it. It is
because of this logic of acceleration that the extension always perches itself on the precipice of a
destabilization; speed instead of equilibrium; an increase rather than a maintenance of the status
quo. As an extension of the faculty of vision, the camera invites the human body to participate in
its usage rather than integrating itself into the body’s physiological structure. Traditionally,
photographers have had to bend, squint and lean to be able to record images (at least before the
LCD screen replaced the viewfinder as the optical supplement of choice). This invitation to
attach to an external object destabilizes the photographer’s body—the photographing body is in a
sense, a body that is always prone to falls and injury.
Anxieties about the danger of camera usage have also been reflected in popular and
journalistic writings about photography. As early as 1900, an article in The British Journal of
Photography asserted that “the practice of photography entails personal risks absent in many
other callings” (“Personal Danger” 34-35). Another article in the same journal three decades later
also warned of spontaneous combustion in cameras (“When Sparks Fly” 146-147). A more
recent article from 1985 (“Danger Photographers” 11-13), also reiterated some of the similar
concerns raised by the articles from 1900 and 1936. Thus, the association of the photographer’s
profession with personal danger seems to be a consistent theme that emerges from the nature of
the profession itself. While articles such as these, focus mostly on the nature of chemical dangers
presented by the early photographic process, what lurks in the background is the idea of physical

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threat to the body, as much biomechanical as chemical, which arises from the cameraman’s
awkward positioning in physical space.
An early fictional example of such biomechanical hazard can be seen in Buster Keaton’s
1928 film, The Cameraman, where Keaton plays the eponymous cameraman (first a still
photographer and then a newsreel cameraman) who braves physical dangers to procure his
images and impress his love interest in the process. Although most of the film is dedicated to this
romantic pursuit, the figure of the cameraman as someone who takes on physical danger serves
as the primary premise. The film begins with an intertitle that lauds the bravery of the newsreel
cameraman—“the daredevil who defies death to give us pictures of the world’s happenings”
(Fig. 6). This intertitle is followed by staged shots of cameramen amidst explosions in
battlefields, and of another cameraman perched high up on a tower taking aerial shots of the city.
The figure of the cameraman is narratively framed as one that is always haunted by the specter of
bodily hazard.

Fig. 6: Opening intertitle of The Cameraman, pointing towards the hazards of the photographic profession.

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Michael North analyzes Keaton’s film by comparing it to Dziga Vertov’s iconic Man
with the Movie Camera (1929) and examines how despite differences in location, approach and
intent, the camera’s agency itself allows certain formal similarities to emerge between Keaton’s
film and Vertov’s. One of the interesting things that North points out about Vertov is the alleged
experiment of “having himself filmed while jumping from the roof of a summerhouse” (North
44, 45). In other words, Vertov’s experiments equate the real-life cameraman with the
“daredevil” portrayed in the beginning of Keaton’s film. While Keaton’s fictional on-screen
representation of danger and Vertov’s alleged confession seem to be worlds apart, they
collectively point towards a certain potential for hazard that is mechanically imposed on the
camera-wielding human body.
Such notions of hazard in photography persist to this day. Medical professionals, such as
Rosenthal and Forst for example, believe photographers are prone to ergonomic risks that arise
from “handling heavy equipment as well as work in awkward postures in dangerous positions”
(“Health Hazards” 577) and that while digital photography reduces the chemical dangers of early
photography, it still opens the body up to musculoskeletal distress. They further cite that “the
number one cause of acute morbidity and mortality for photojournalists is motor vehicle
accidents” (577). Online articles and safety guides for photographers reiterate some of the same
concerns about biomechanical dangers and the threat of imbalance while shooting in non-studio
environments (Mason; Oosterhoff). What seems to be at stake in these discussions, both in
medical journals and popular photography trade resources, is the idea that the photographer’s
vocation forces the body to engage with physical space in postures and movements that are not
natural to it. For instance, an article on the photographer John Annerino in the American
magazine Popular Photography (April 1992), describes his work by using the headline “Shudder

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Speeds+Death Stops.” Focusing on Annerino’s book High Risk Photography, the article hints at
the relationship between physical hazard and the photographer’s vocation and states, “"the thrill
of photography" is as much a physical as a visceral experience” (“Shudder Speeds” 92). The
problem of biomechanical hazard and occupational fatality in photography then, is a problem of
figure and ground relationships, where the human body as a physiological entity is forced to
negotiate an uneven (and often unpredictable) physical environment because of the nature of the
machine. As an external device or an extension, the camera imposes danger on the wielder’s
body.

From Cameras to Cellphones: Hierarchizing Hazard
If the camera as extension destabilizes the body’s axis of perpendicular stability, why is
the selfie and not photography in general, seen as a threat that must be regulated? For every
Condé Nast Traveller and Mashable article about selfie-related death, there is comparable
statistical information for professional photographers as well. In fact, one of the most illustrative
examples comes from an organization called “The Photo Society”, a group of photographers who
contribute to the National Geographic magazine. The organization’s website features a “Reality
Check” section where they highlight the dangers of their work. Taking into account forty-five
photographers, the section compiles a list of the number of hazardous incidents (both fatal and
non-fatal) in the form of a chart, with each number representing an individual incident. For
instance, the section cites twelve instances of falls, one scaffolding collapse, one landing on a
rock ledge after a 90-foot fall, two snow burials in an avalanche and two falls into a crevasse
(Fig.7). These numbers are not completely dedicated to biomechanical hazards and there are
instances of arrest, intimidation, infections, PTSD and robbery as well. However, they serve well

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to highlight the fact that bodily hazard is inherent to photography, whether in natural or studio
settings. The one factor that does separate selfie-related deaths from deaths of National
Geographic photographers is the discourse of utility. While the professional photographer’s
practice is seen to be oriented towards a larger social end, there is ostensibly no such orientation
in case of the selfie.
3
One can easily discern the language of utility in the mission statements of
The Photo Society photographers. Titled “Why We Do It” the mission-statement section of their
website lists why the photographers take photographs for a living, with the cited reasons ranging
from aiding FBI agents in understanding human trafficking, raising awareness about malaria,
wildlife conservation and influencing national environmental policy.

Fig. 7: The Photo Society’s infographic of death and hazard related to the photographic profession.

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The serious photographer’s vision and craft therefore, are always seen as being oriented
outside the self, whether we talk about National Geographic photographers, wedding
photographers or “amateur” enthusiasts of photography as an art-form. In other words, the ethics
of the photographer as it is popularly understood, parallels the optics of the photographic
process. The optical relationship between machine, photographer and subject can be expressed as
A: B: C, where A is the photographer, B is the Camera and C is the Photographed Subject.
This relationship imagines a world that can be seen, documented and understood objectively
through images captured by a discerning cameraman. On the other hand, the selfie obliterates
this tripartite structure and seemingly posits a one-to-one relationship between the camera and
the world (B: C). In other words, the selfie’s structure does not obliterate the photographer
strictly speaking but collapses the photographer with the photographed world (Fig. 8). By turning
the gaze of the camera on to the photographer, the selfie then endows image making with a
solipsistic function rather than a utilitarian one. In terms of a utilitarian understanding of
vocation then, the selfie is practically useless.

Fig. 8: In traditional photography (top) the camera (B) acts as a plane of separation between the photographer (A)
and the photographed world (C). In case of the selfie (bottom), the photographer (B) and the world (C) are not
separated.

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This does not mean that the deaths of serious photographers are more desirable than the
deaths of selfie-takers. However, the rhetoric of utility that can seem to justify physical danger
and biomechanical hazard in case of the death of a National Geographic photographer breaks
down in case of a selfie-death. The death of a National Geographic photographer is seen as a
“sacrifice” and therefore, utility becomes an ethical and moral principle. The aesthetics and
ethics of selfie-taking need to be read within the larger framework of law and regulation on the
one hand and space and hazard on the other. The human body is the contested site that emerges
at the intersection of these two sets—law/regulation and space/hazard, upon which one can begin
to build a rubric for understanding the import of selfie-related deaths.

Pathologies of the Self(ie)
Medical journals and popular medical anxieties can provide us a starting point for
thinking about how hazard is conceptualized in case of selfies and how that compares to deaths
in the photographic profession. Rosenthal and Forst’s article “Health Hazards of Photography”
mentioned earlier for instance, addresses safety issues arising out of professional photography.
The authors write: “In the 1990s, more than 500 news media workers were killed […] They
[photographers] assume awkward postures or stand in dangerous locations (e.g., at heights, on
ledges) to capture a desired angle. They suffer falls, crush injuries, and sprains in these tasks”
(“Health Hazards” 578). Compare this to a recent article by Subrahmanyam et al. in 2016, in
which they write: “Selfie related precipitated deaths have come to light since 2014. Persons
taking selfie are so engrossed in the art that they loose track of time, place, and surroundings and
endanger themselves […] Caution must be printed on all smart phones "Selfie taking o.k, but not
loosing life". Interestingly till date India ranks number one in selfie related deaths”

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(Subrahmanyam et al. 52,55; sic). While the two articles are discursively similar, unlike
Rosenthal and Forst who approach the issue from the point-of-view of ergonomics, road-safety
and chemical hazard, the authors of the 2016 article seem to be working with an apriori
assumption of selfie pathology. The authors state that “Selfie addicts may want to bolster their
ego or show of their grandioseness to the world or they want to project their self admiration and
aggrandisement by doing so (sic)” Subrahmanyam et al. 53). However, at no point do they
provide a probable cause or diagnosis for this apparent pathology and the article remains stuck at
the level of the statistical.
Another article by Chugh et al. also imagines the selfie as a pathological phenomenon
that has led to the emergence of an elbow-related disorder that they call “The Selfie Elbow.” The
description of the disorder itself seems to be very similar to lateral epicondylitis or “tennis
elbow.” Nonetheless, the “selfie-elbow” terminology foregrounds the technological artifact of
the cellphone and the cultural practice of selfie-taking as pathological in themselves. The authors
even come up with a program called “S.E.P.T.U.M”— “Selfie Elbow Prevention & Treatment
Unimpeachable Methods” which is basically set of preventive and ameliorative measures that
have very little specificity to the selfie itself.
4
What is most curious however, is their description
of selfie-taking as an “avid sport [which] too has its share of injuries” (Chugh et al. 376). But the
authors fall short of providing a valid physiological analysis of the cause of selfie-taking, and
they then take recourse to psychology, citing an alleged American Psychiatric Association
(APA) meeting in Chicago where selfie-taking was declared a mental disorder. The authors
write: “The disorder is called selfitis, and is defined as the obsessive compulsive desire to take
photos of one’s self and post them on social media as a way to make up for the lack of self-
esteem and to fill a gap in intimacy (Chugh et al. 377).

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The idea of “selfie-addiction” seems to have become popular in news-circles with several
reports declaring selfie-taking as an addiction (“Selfie Addiction”) and others writing about the
alleged “selfitis” disorder (Pal; also see Fig.3 earlier in the chapter). The diagnosis provided by
Chugh et.al. seems to fall in line with this popular journalistic projection of the selfie as a
psychologically and physiologically harmful activity. Interestingly though, the term “selfitis”
that is used by Chugh et.al. does not appear in the website of the APA. In fact, a keyword search
with the term “selfitis” in the APA website leads one to a message that reads: “Disorder Not
Found: Selfitis. No, selfitis is not in the DSM-5, but there are plenty of real mental disorders that
need and deserve treatment” (American Psychiatric Association; Fig. 9). Despite the possibility
that correlations between mental illness and selfies might exist, the medical community seems to
be divided about the issue and the idea of “selfie addiction” or “selfitis” remains, at best, at the
level of speculative science even as it uses technical language to describe purported symptoms
and prognoses.
5

Fig. 9: Screenshot of the APA website where a keyword search for "selfitis" does not yield any results. The use of
the term "selfitis" can also be seen in the India Today television news report in Fig. 3 earlier.
)(

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What is most significant for us however, is the location of these articles (Rosenthal and
Forst; Subrahmanyam et al.; Chugh et al.) in journals of medical science. This location of selfie
discourse in medical journals lends authenticity to the pathologization of the selfie in the popular
imagination, even when the medical community seems to be divided on the issue. As Carolyn
Marvin’s work on the early days of electrical technology demonstrates, written texts and printed
discourse remain central to the establishment of an “expert” culture in the field of science and
technology. In relation to early electrical technology, Marvin writes: “Control of technical
language was a means for experts to establish themselves as arbiters of the domain of
technological reality and, from that strength, to seize the larger domain of social reality” (Marvin
49). The printed discourse about the selfie in medical journals puts physicians and psychiatrists
in a similar position as that of the electrical experts of the 19
th
century. In other words, medical
journals create the modes whereby the larger domain of social reality about the selfie’s potential
for harm is posited. The psychopathology of the selfie is causally linked to the selfie’s
physiopathology. The selfie as a “pathological” entity then, is actively framed through technical
language, expert opinion and statistical data. Pathology—both psychological and physiological
becomes the first step in the process of imposing a regulatory logic on the selfie.
This tendency for regulation can even be seen within writings in medical journals. For
instance, in the Journal of Travel Medicine, Flaherty and Choi suggest that the urge to document
one’s travels is the primary cause for the taking of selfies and point out “the lack of situational
awareness and temporary distraction” (Flahery and Choi 1) as one of the main reasons why the
selfie opens the body to potential hazard. Flaherty and Choi’s article frames medical
professionals as caregivers who are responsible for making travelers aware of such situational
risks, and clearly reflects how medicinal practice intersects with perspectives, if not yet policies,

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of caregiving. A response to this article by Bhogesha et al. in the same journal lauds Flaherty and
Choi’s writing by stating: “At a time in history where the amount of travel is ever increasing, it is
very relevant to caution on such narcissistic and reckless tendencies” (Bhogesha et al. 1). The
response draws attention once again to India’s “dubious distinction” in the sphere of selfie deaths
and point towards a regulation by the Indian railways whereby the taking of selfies near railway
tracks has now been banned, with possible punishments of up to a year of jail time. Here,
caregiving and self-care are transposed to the field of legal prevention and disciplinary justice.
Preventive measures, both in the form of civil society action and state-sponsored regulation runs
corollary to the selfie’s pathological status. In this perspective, the selfie is not seen merely as a
hazard to physical and mental health but as a public nuisance that must be controlled and
regulated.

From Pathology to Regulation
We now have two axes on which to plot the map of the selfie-death phenomenon—utility
and pathology. To use a geometric metaphor, uselessness and pathology form the two other
angles of the triangle of which regulation in public space is at the vertex. The “political
anatomy” (Discipline and Punish 138) of this triangular arrangement seeks to arrest the selfie-
taking body within structures of discipline such as self-care and the law.
6
For instance, recent
Government advisories in Japan and Russia have actively sought to restrain selfie-taking. In
Japan, selfie-sticks have been banned by the West Japan Railway Co. (aka JR West) in the 1195
stations that make up its network (Casey). The signage provided by JR West uses a standard
prohibition symbol that is used across the globe—a red circle with a diagonal line from top left
to bottom right on a white background (Mogg; Fig.10). ( )

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Fig. 10: JR West’s “no-selfie” signage.

The symbol literally “incarcerates” the selfie taking body within its ambit. The selfie-
taker is represented as a generic humanoid figure in black with the top half of the body sticking
out of the circle, selfie stick and arm extended outwards and almost touching electrical wiring
above it. The bottom half of the body remains behind the circle, giving the overall image an
appearance of a body that has been “arrested” by the circle of the law. In other words, in its
visual coding, the image represents a body that is both vulnerable and transgressive and thus,
must be circumscribed by the law. Other subsidiary images along with text under this main
image represent the kind of accidents that may happen due to the use of selfie-sticks in railway
platforms. “May cause accidents”, “risk of electric shock”, “may injure others”—the text, in the
voice of the corporation and state as caregivers, spells it out clearly for its subjects.

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A similar textual and graphical approach has been taken by the Russian government in its
pamphlet on selfie safety. Released in 2015 by the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Internal
Affairs the pamphlet takes up a didactic approach that exemplifies active state intervention in the
matter of selfie deaths.
7
Like the JR West signage, the pamphlet makes use of simple graphical
forms and stick figures to illustrate the dangers of taking selfies along with explanatory text. For
instance, one of the images represents a driver taking a selfie in a car with the text “Selfie while
driving can make your trip comparatively shorter (can kill you soon).”
8
Some other images are
accompanied by text that refers to individual instances of selfie deaths. One image of a selfie-
taking figure on a railway track is titled “Selfie on the railway track is a bad idea if life is dear to
you” and is then followed a description of the death of a teenager by electrocution on the railway
tracks in the Ryazan region while taking a selfie. Similarly, other instances of people dying of
gunshots and falling off electric towers while taking selfies pepper the pamphlet. In both the
Japanese and Russian cases, the selfie-taking human body is represented within the prohibition
symbol, one that both announces hazard while at the same time problematizes the act of clicking
a selfie. Death by falling, death by electrocution, death by gunshot—in each case, the selfie is not
necessarily the cause of death, but a circumstance that surrounds the death. Forensically
speaking, the cause of death is an “injury or disease that generates a pathological alteration in the
body that leads to the individual’s death [such as] blunt trauma of the head, or a gunshot wound
of the thorax” (Schmitt et al. 19). Within the ambit of this description, the selfie itself does not
constitute a cause of death but is one of the circumstances that contribute to the manner of
death,
9
which in each of these cases is accidental.
10
This confusion between cause and manner of
death clearly reveals a clear problem of definition, in which the relationship between selfie-
taking and accidental deaths while taking selfies is not firmly established.

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(Un)Defining the Selfie-Death
A recent data-driven study titled “Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and
Preventing Selfie Deaths” by Lamba et al. attempts to circumvent the problem of defining the
selfie-death. The study, undertaken jointly by researchers from Carnegie Melon University and
Indraprasta Institute of Information, Delhi has assumed importance in the Indian context, as it
often appears in citational form in news reports that report a “selfie-epidemic.” The Quint’s
video report mentioned in the beginning of the chapter for instance, ends with a map of India
with the text “India has the most number of selfie deaths in the world” and Lamba et al.’s study
is cited as an authenticating source (See final frame in Fig. 1). It also appears in a Times of India
report on selfie deaths in India, where the study conducted by “a university abroad” is seen to be
concrete proof of the epidemical scale of selfie-related deaths (Tahseeni).
Lamba et al. use the neologism “killfie” to denote a fatal selfie. The authors define a
“selfie-related casualty” or a selfie-death as: “a death of an individual or a group of people that
could have been avoided had the individual(s) not been taking a selfie. This may even involve
the unfortunate death of other people who died while saving or being present with people who
were clicking a selfie in a dangerous manner” (Lamba et al.). This definition of a selfie death
encompasses a wide gamut of possibilities including the deaths of selfie-takers as well as of
those around them. However, note the phrase, “[…] had the individual(s) not been taking a
selfie.” The selfie death is only defined in the negative. Even as the authors bypass the problem
of cause and manner of death, the selfie is only posited as a circumstantial factor in these deaths.
The authors accomplish an important task—that of digitally identifying fatal selfies and
dangerous situations using an algorithmic approach. But, in seeking to automate the process, the
authors end up using a dataset mined from Twitter and online news articles, and then classifying

141
and categorizing the images based on factors such as the nature of the risk (related to altitude,
water-based surroundings, road-safety, etc.) and demographic distribution (by age, country, etc.).
At best, “Me, Myself and My Killfie” remains limited to the classification of selfie-related risks
and demonstrates how data-mining and algorithmic automation can be used to sort through
images and then classify them. The authors end by writing that they “believe that the study can
inspire and provide footprints for technologies which can stop users from clicking dangerous
selfies, and thus preventing more of such casualties” (Lamba et al.). Those hopes are not
materialized in their current work that remains limited to a nosological function and does not
fulfill the etiological promise of the title. Although their work is subtitled “Characterizing and
Preventing Selfie Deaths,” the authors fail to provide an understanding of how to prevent selfie-
related deaths, or for that matter, what constitutes danger and fatality in the first place.
In other words, prioritizing singular causation and classification enforces the replication
of facts already known from data sources such as newspapers and social networking sites. The
question then is less about the means of tracking numbers of deaths, but rather, how to place
those deaths within questions of technology, space and control. The idea is to pit numbers and
reports of selfie-related deaths against what is on the ground. This is not to say that selfie-related
deaths have not taken place in India, or that news-stories and studies are categorically false.
However, they need to be read dialectically alongside questions of regulation. Attempts at
regulating selfie-taking bodies are more complex than it appears at first sight and anxieties about
selfie deaths (expressed both as numerical or narrative retellings) are not exactly proportional to
attempts at regulation.

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Mapping the Selfie-Death in India
A prominent manifestation of the anxiety about selfie deaths (and selfie culture in
general) in the Indian case was seen in a 2016 episode of We the People, a talk show on the news
channel NDTV. The selfie-special episode was titled “I, Me, My Selfie: The Selfie Mania—
Narcissism Or Self-Expression?” and included panel discussants from different fields such as
photographer Raghu Rai, graphic artist Geetanjali Rao, BJP’s head of the IT cell Amit Malvya,
psychiatrist Shyam Bhat and eminent social scientist Shiv Visvanathan. The diversity of the
panel of experts reflects how discussion and debate about the selfie in India invites stakeholders
from different fields, and how making sense of the selfie is still an open and ongoing process.
The description of the episode on NDTV’s asks whether the selfie is “harmless fun or hazardous
fad.”
11
The episode was typical of We The People’s discussion format with a panel of “experts”
and an audience being moderated by the host, Barkha Dutt. The episode began with a “selfie-
POV” shot of the host, as she introduced the topic while shooting herself on a cellphone mounted
on a selfie-stick (Fig.11).

Fig. 11: The “selfie POV” opening shot of We the People’s selfie-special episode

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This differentiated the beginning of the episode from the show’s usual opening. We the
People’s preferred mode of starting is a shot of the host sitting amongst the audience, as if to
signify that the “we” of the title of the show includes the host, the audience and the panel of
discussants. When the episode, “I, Me, My Selfie” begins, this “we” is replaced by the “I” on the
level of the image’s surface. While this is a rather small detail, it deserves mention in terms of
the aesthetics of the selfie that relies on turning the camera onto the self.
12
Just as the selfie
imagines a singular, isolated subject, the opening shot of the episode imagines a singular speaker
in the form of the anchor, instead of the usual mode of presenting the anchor as a speaker among
many speakers. This hints at the kind of discussion that was to follow in the episode with a
strong focus on issues of obsession, narcissism, hazard and death. Dutt begins by giving a “grim
reminder [that] the selfie is not all about fun and games” since “half of the world’s selfie related
deaths took place in India in 2015 alone.” Of course, this is not the episode’s only focus—it does
look at questions of aesthetics and politics as well. But the question of selfie “obsession” and
hazard are foregrounded very strongly here. At one point in the show, Dutt speaks to a man
named Gurukripal Singh, whose son Ramandeep had died of a gunshot while taking a selfie
(Fig.12).
13
The presentation of the victim’s parents as concerned members of the public
highlights the dangers of selfie-taking by using the emotional appeal of the torn family. Thus, the
episode juxtaposes anxieties about obsession and narcissism with the question of hazard at a
wider social level. As a popular talk show on one of India’s foremost 24-hour news channels,
this episode of We the People emerges as a symptom of a conflicted relationship of the Indian
public to the selfie.

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Fig. 12: “Mourning” the selfie-death in We the People.

Some of these anxieties about hazard and death that appear on We the People can also be
mapped on to actual sites. Of these, the city of Mumbai has assumed prominence in the news
with several reports citing sixteen areas in Mumbai as being tagged as “no-selfie zones” (Mehta;
Gayle). One of these news reports on NDTV prominently uses a map of Mumbai to graphically
illustrate the areas of the city that have been designated as no-selfie zones (Mehta; Fig.13). This
idea of the “zone” points towards a concept of urban mapping wherein public space is opened
out to architectonic regulation.

Fig. 13: “Mapping” no-selfie zones in Mumbai.
)(

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The very notion of a “zone” indicates a marking-off—a designation and therefore, every
zone demarcated as such, is a zone of law. Demarcating spaces as “no-selfie zones” is also an act
of laying down what individual bodies can do or not do in public. In that sense, public space (or
space inscribed by the law) comes into collision with individual space. Collision, because a law
is by design, a boundary that can be broken and is thus bounded;
14
individual space because
every body, as Henri Lefebvre tells us “is space and has its space” (The Production 170). For
Lefebvre, there is “an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the
body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space” (170). In other words, if the body can
be understood as space, then the cellphone, the camera or the selfie stick can be seen not just as
technological extensions of human faculties, but also spatial extensions that push against the
boundaries of planned, abstract understandings of space. A good graphical example of this is the
JR West signage discussed earlier, where the image of the selfie stick literally pushes against the
“red” circle of the law (See Fig. 10 earlier in this chapter). The “no-selfie zones” in Mumbai
then, are a forceful re-inscription of the law on a pre-existing map of public space. In corollary,
this is a regulation of not just spaces, but bodies and their extensions.
Therefore, the regulation of selfie-taking bodies must be read alongside other kinds of
safety regulations involving public spaces—road safety and injunctions against the use of mobile
phones while driving, for example. In Mumbai, one can see a similar effort to regulate road
safety and cellphone usage by Mumbai Police. Mumbai’s police force maintains an active
presence on Twitter and has been using the online platform extensively to disseminate
information about its schemes and measures. In fact, after the much publicized and widely
covered selfie-related death of two people in the Bandra area (“Mumbai police to identify”
2016), Mumbai Police came up with a public awareness campaign on Twitter, focusing on selfie

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safety. However, the messages and images circulated during this campaign need to be read
alongside other traffic and road-safety measures. What emerge strongly in these measures are
two contradicting ideas about the relationship between technology and space—technology as
augmentation and technology as risk. Selfies, and by extension cellphones, become deeply
imbricated in both these ideas. In other words, cellphone usage including selfie-making becomes
equated with other kinds of road-safety risks such as driving under influence.

Between Risk Management and Augmented Spaces
In his influential study of risk and risk management, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck
defines the “risk society” as one that is based on the “political and economic 'management' of the
risks of actually or potentially utilized technologies” (Beck 19-20). Beck then goes on to offer a
novel conception of risk by opposing it to danger. He writes: “Risk may be defined as a
systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by
modernization itself” (21). Measures such as demarcating zones and placing injunctions on
selfie-taking in public places reflect this managerial approach to the hazards of scientific
development. If mobile phone communication, and wireless communication in general augment
the conduct of everyday life, then these technologies can be read as both the source and the
subject of risk management. In fact, selfie-related risk is a subset of risks related to mobile-phone
communication and technological augmentation. The idea that technologies augment human life
is enmeshed in the idea of the extension. McLuhan’s phrase “the extensions of man” offers an
idea of augmented humanity, whereby every technology can be seen to augment existing human
faculties. However, in relation to cellphones and wireless communication it is not merely human
faculties that are augmented, but physical space itself.

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Lev Manovich elaborates on this idea his important essay “The Poetics of Augmented
Space.” Manovich identifies the spaces of new media technologies as “augmented spaces” which
are “physical spaces overlaid with dynamically changing information” (Manovich 2). He
proposes that augmentation transforms physical spaces into “dataspace” (5) and he also identifies
“cellspace” as one of the modes of creating dataspaces. For Manovich, cellspace “is physical
space that is “filled” with data, which can be retrieved by a user via a personal communication
device” (4). Manovich’s notion of cellspace conceptualizes space itself as being augmented by
technological extensions; this notion is undergirded by a very “atmospheric” notion of space. In
other words, space, for Manovich, is both built architecture and its atmospheric surroundings that
have been saturated by constant flows of dynamic information.
A very recent example of this “atmospheric” understanding of cellspace can be seen in
the speech of Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) at the
company’s AGM on September 1
st,
2016 in Mumbai. Announcing the introduction of Reliance’s
“Jio”, a 4G LTE service, Ambani said: “Data is the oxygen of digital life. Jio is more than just a
business. It is a commitment to enrich the life of every Indian” (“Reliance Jio 4G launch”).
While the use of the “oxygen” metaphor is part of Reliance’s older marketing strategy of
equating its communication services with basic human needs,
15
it nonetheless reflects the extent
to which the atmospheric understanding of saturated cellspace has become entrenched in the
contemporary Indian imagination. The metaphor is apt, since wireless communication systems
are wave-reliant technologies that can connect different devices and users precisely because the
physical environment is indeed saturated with radio waves that carry signals. If “cellspace” is
space that is saturated by radio waves, then physical space itself has the potential for
communication at any given point of time. Human bodies inhabiting augmented spaces are

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forced to negotiate between this potential for constant cellular communication and the challenges
of spatial movement—a cliff, a moving car, a manhole for example. In other words, movement
through physical spaces enforces the management of bodily hazard ensuing from distraction, i.e.
the simultaneous inhabitation of physical space and cellspace. This has had some impact on the
ways that phone manufacturers have approached the problem of selfie-deaths. For instance,
Samsung has released a public interest advisory about selfie safety through an advertisement that
features Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways of India. The
advertisement shows a motorcyclist lying dead on a roadside in a puddle of blood. The music for
the advertisement is drawn from Mani Rathnam’s 1995 Tamil blockbuster Bombay featuring
music by A.R Rahman. As the melodramatic music begins to play we are shown flashback
scenes from the man’s life, mostly moments shared with his family. The text on the screen reads:
“The moments you hold so dear can all disappear with one silly selfie. Don’t risk your beautiful
life, Stay Safe on the Road.” At the end of the advertisement, Gadkari appears on screen and
declares that India features at the top of the list of selfie-fatalities in the world and exhorts
viewers to use their phones responsibly on the road. This advisory/advertisement comes close in
the heels of Samsung’s strategies in the Indian market involving the incorporation of special
modes for car and bike driving and one for walking on the street. The walk mode, like the “S-
Bike” mode is an “India only” feature that warns the user about their environment through real-
time alerts. These features are developed by Samsung's “Make for India” initiative that has as
resonances with at least two Government schemes—“Make in India” and “Digital India,” both
floated by the BJP, the party to which Gadkari belongs.
16
Given the affinities between the Make
for India initiative and the BJP-led government's schemes, Gadkari's appearance in the advisory
above reflects a confluence of corporate and government interests. At the same time, these

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features are clearly a product of the specificities of urban mobility in India, and reports of
cellphone and selfie-related injuries do play a role in R&D (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14: (Top Left) Screenshot from the Samsung advertisement featuring the motorcyclist's cracked phone beside
his hand and a pool of blood on the street. (Bottom Left) From the same advertisement, some of Samsung's safety
features developed specifically for India. (Right) A demo-image showing Samsung walk-mode’s alert functions.

The almost universal traffic advisory, “don’t use your mobile phone while driving,” is
perhaps the most easily seen form of regulation that arises out of augmented spaces. Although
not strictly related to internet-based communication the possibility of having a conversation as a
mobile body, is an early manifestation of what we understand as cellspace. Conversation, in turn,
is the source as well as the target of risk management. Studies focusing on road safety and
cellphones such as those by Dragutinovic and Twisk (2005) and Shabeer and Banu (2012) have
identified cognitive and physical distraction resulting from cellphone usage as central to road

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accidents.
17
Dragutinovic and Twisk collectively club these two kinds of distraction as the
“‘impairment potential’ of mobile phone use” (Dragutinovic and Twisk 3). The idea that the
cellphone affords conversation and invites the user’s touch—which are central to the cellphone’s
appeal as communication technology, are also simultaneously its risks. Although these studies
are from a slightly earlier moment than the selfie’s emergence, the idea of the “impairment
potential” of mobile phone usage can be extended to the selfie as well.
18
In fact, one can the
language of impairment potential manifested in the Twitter messages and advisories issued by
Mumbai Police. Phone conversations and texting on the road are frequent subjects of Mumbai
Police’s visual material and Tweets in their road safety campaign (Fig. 15).

Fig. 15: The cellphone’s impairment potential highlighted as a source of road fatality in a Mumbai police road safety flyer.

But it’s not just talking and texting that present a risk in the new-media urban space;
given the increasing popularity and capacity of mobile phone Internet in India, regulatory
attempts have also had to consider Internet related trends and risks. The growing ubiquity of

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mobile Internet in urban centers such as Mumbai has begun to map cellspace on to urban space
on an unprecedented scale. The use of GPS enabled travel and navigation services in the conduct
of everyday life is one such example. Glimpses of this can be seen in the Google Map
advertisement hoardings that pepper the city of Mumbai, with references to specific localities
along with the advertising slogan “Look Before You Leave” and the hashtag
“#LookBeforeYouLeave” (Fig. 16).
19

But such technological augmentation of space and the interweaving of internet
technology with practices of everyday mobility has created new risks. In 2016 for instance,
Mumbai Police, released Tweets and messages about road safety seeing the rise of the global
Pokémon Go craze. Released in 2016 by the San Francisco-based software development
company, Niantic, Pokémon Go uses the same potential for augmentation and tracking as other
GPS-enabled services but demands that players travel across urban spaces to play the game. In
Fig. 16: A “localized” Google
Map advertisement hoarding
in Mumbai, offering a
solution to the city’s infamous
traffic congestions.
Fig. 16: A “localized” Google Map advertisement hoarding in Mumbai,
offering a solution to the city’ s infamous traffic congestions.
Fig. 16: A “localized” Google Map advertisement hoarding in Mumbai,
offering a solution to the city’ s infamous traffic congestions.

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other words, the physical act of walking becomes a means of engaging with the game world,
which takes us back to the notion of “impairment potential.” Mumbai Police’s Twitter response
to the game included an animated GIF that represents a uniform clad policeman walking on a
green map-space (Fig. 17). He spots a squirtle that is then captured with a red Pokéball. We then
see the text “Pokémon Can’t Go Out on Streets Causing Distraction” (Shaikh). The message uses
the visual coding and tropes of Pokémon Go to speak to the larger issue of cognitive and physical
distraction. But at the same time, the grammar of the image points to a subtle marking out of the
mobile-carrying human user in physical space as a potential data point in cellspace.

Fig. 17: Mumbai Police’s animated GIF advisory on Twitter that maps Mumbai’s urban space on to Pokémon Go’s
virtual space. This is an inversion of the game’s AR aesthetic that maps cellspace on urban space. The figure of the
khaki clad policeman literally transposes the force’s “policing function” to the game-world.

While selfies don’t necessarily use the same augmentation potentials of cellspace
(geotagging and geolocation notwithstanding), there is something to be learnt from these
examples about the perception of the cellphone as hazard. While not all selfies are shot on
cellphones, there is little doubt that the emergence of the selfie is related to the cellphone boom,
the increasing ubiquity of wireless Internet and the development of better cellphone cameras.
The selfie then, is not only a visual form; it is also a data form and therefore presents the same

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“impairment potential” that the cellphone, or the mobile Internet device in general does. Another
way of postulating the idea would be to say that while selfies do not represent augmented
mapping like Pokémon Go, the selfie in general imagines a mobile data subject—one who
simultaneously inhabits both physical space and cellspace.
In fact, the images and rhetoric that formed part of Mumbai Police’s selfie-safety
awareness messages share the language of distraction and impairment potential. One image for
instance, features an illustration of a man and a woman with a cellphone mounted on a selfie
stick, while a Hokusai-style wave begins to form behind them (Fig. 18). The text of the Tweet
reads: “There may be danger posing around you. Be cautious and #StayRainSafe.” Another
image also featuring the seaside, focuses on the screen of a cellphone held in the typical selfie
posture with an outstretched hand seen in an over the shoulder shot. The image on the screen
however, is not that of a face, but a coffin. The text of the Tweet featuring this image reads:
“Selfies Prohibited As No One Wants You Dead #Safety Before Selfie” (Fig. 19). Like
injunctions about talking and texting while driving, messages such as these Twitter advisories
advance the popular understanding of the selfie as the product of a distracted sensibility. The
interface of the mobile phone in this understanding is also seen as an interference in the conduct
of everyday life in physical space; the selfie is perceived as a form that invites immersion into
the interface, rather than a seamless integration of the interface and the physical world.
Therefore, while cellspace is understood as pervasive and natural (i.e. part of the everyday
environment) there is also a simultaneously contradictory understanding of technology as
something imposed from outside and hence constituting a risk.

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Fig. 18: A Mumbai Police graphic highlighting selfie-related distraction as a source of hazard.

Fig. 19: This Mumbai police tweet makes a direct connection between the practice of selfie-taking and the incidence
of deaths in the city.

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Risk Management in Practice: The contradictions of selfie-regulation
Three core concepts are central to the regulation of selfie-taking bodies. First, the selfie is
seen as a pathological form—the selfie by nature is understood to expose the human subject to
psychological and physical harm. Second, due to its inversion of the photographic apparatus the
selfie is popularly understood as a “useless” form that defies the social purpose of professional
photography. Third, the selfie-taking body in cellspace becomes a vulnerable body in physical
space, i.e. the selfie promotes a distracted sensibility. Together, these factors force us to
conceptualize the selfie as something more than a pictorial form. As mentioned earlier, when one
speaks of selfie-related deaths, one seldom speaks of the selfie as a pictorial record of the exact
moment of death.
If the selfie is a form in which the body of the image-maker is fused with the filming
apparatus, then the idea of a “fatal selfie” is in an impossible one. Death, as the termination of
biological life, disables the body completely; if selfie-taking is an embodied, performative
process, death negates its production. In other words, the selfie is a form that is embedded in
“life,” understood in its most basic, corporeal sense—as a living, breathing body. Often selfies
that circulate as examples of “fatal selfies” are images that, at best, capture the moment before
death. Death remains inscribed in the image as the photograph’s indelible “eidos” (Barthes 15),
but the performative act of posing and clicking the selfie, remains firmly embedded in life.
Regulations against selfie-taking that pathologize or criminalize the selfie then, can be read as an
enforcement of life itself through the law. Death produces nothing other than death; or, as
Margaret Schwartz writes, death produces a material body that “is uniquely positioned in mass
society as both “deceased subject” and commodity (object)” (Schwartz 8). A living body is
capable of labor and laws and regulations exist to protect this potential for producing something

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that is worthy of exchange. The law or the regulation aims to preserve and lengthen biological
life.
Reactions to selfie-related deaths in the Indian case are expressions of this conflicted
relationship between technology, regulation and life. Regulation assumes a relationship between
living bodies and their conduct in physical spaces such as roads, historical monuments and
railways tracks. The Indian Railways’ response to selfie-deaths for instance squarely places the
body of the selfie-taker within the ambit of preservation of life. In the wake of several selfie-
related deaths reported on or near running trains, the Government Railway Police has recently
announced that selfie-taking will now be deemed a punishable offence under the provisions of
the Indian Railways Act of 1989 (Kumar). The sections of the Act that have been cited are 145,
147 and 153. Section 145 deals with drunkenness and nuisance while Section 147 is an
injunction against trespassing. Section 153 is titled “Endangering safety of persons traveling by
railway by willful act or omission” and states: “If any person by any unlawful act or by any
willful omission or neglect, endangers or causes to be endangered the safety of any person
traveling on or being upon any railway, or obstructs or causes to be obstructed or attempts to
obstruct any rolling stock upon any railway, he shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term
which may extend to five years” (“The Railways Act” 53). All three sections seek to regulate
selfie-taking under existing legal provisions, and Section 153 specifically places it within legal
understandings of life and death, hazard and safety. Injunctions against photography in general
also exist in several public places where the recording of images is understood as a risk, as for
example in “defense airports” (i.e. airports that are managed by the Indian Air Force), where
photography is perceived to be a direct threat to national security. Similarly, provisions for safety

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aboard trains also exist and travelling on footboards or roofs of trains are obvious physical
hazards and are punishable under law (“The Railways Act” 53).
Unlike these provisions where the link between the prohibited act and the legal
injunction are easily discernible, the provisions of the Indian Railway Act are not specific to the
form of the selfie. Thus, while state regulations and injunctions perceive the selfie as a risk, the
specificity of the selfie eludes legal frameworks. Instead the preservation of life and the
prevention of physical hazard combines a fear of unruly bodies with the hazards arising out of
technologies of speed. If the Indian Railways’ regulation represents an inability to combine the
understanding of the selfie’s form with approaches towards safety, the case of Mumbai’s “no-
selfie zones” expresses an even greater contradiction.
News of the no-selfie zones has been circulating widely but the implementation of such
zones is quite a different story. One of the places that have been in the news is Bandra, a coastal
suburb in West Mumbai that houses the Portugese-built Bandra Fort (Castellea de Aguada,
completed in 1640) and the adjoining Bandstand Promenade, a walkway that skirts the seaside.
Given its vicinity to the sea, both the Fort and Bandstand are popular locations that attract
throngs of people. It is precisely this location that also imbues the space with a propensity for
danger. In fact, the hue and cry for “no-selfie zones” followed the drowning of a young girl and
another person who tried to save her on January 9
th
, 2016 (“Mumbai police to identify” 2016).
Since then the idea of no-selfie zones has been circulating in the news widely. However, the
practicalities of policing and regulation in the city tell a different story. One article in Times of
India for instance, points out that the Chhatrapati Shivaji Station in Mumbai would see the
construction of a “safe-selfie zone” opposite to the station in March 2017 (Tahseeni). Something
diametrically opposite to banning selfies has been happening in parts of Mumbai, where areas

158
are being sequestered and marked off as “selfie-spots” with large “I©Mumbai” signs marking off
these spaces (Marpakwar; Fig. 20). Thus, the oft-cited “no-selfie zones” have an ambiguous
character and contrary to most news reports, till date no part of the Bandra Fort and Bandstand
Promenade has been visibly sequestered as “no-selfie zones.”

Fig. 20: A “selfie-point” in Mumbai’s Juhu area.

The responsibility of maintaining the Promenade and Fort gardens is shared by the BMC
(Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, aka the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) and
the Bandra Bandstand Residents Trust.
20
While the BMC is a Government body, BBRT is a
citizen’s group that works closely with the municipal authorities and the police to protect,
preserve and maintain the areas under its authority. However, according to BBRT, adequate
safety measures have not been taken to ensure safety arising out of selfie-related deaths. While a
board had been put up at the Bandra Fort after the incident in January 2016, it has now been
removed.
21
In fact, there is absolutely no signage that is specific to selfie-taking in the area. The
signs that do exist near the fort and the edge of the sea have more to do with the hazards of the
tide and the rocky terrain than anything else, and the ones along the promenade have more to do
( )

159
with regulations for cleanliness and civic order (Fig. 21). The only injunction against
photography of any kind that exists in the entire area is on the “Promenade Rules” boards that
stipulate that no-objection certificates are required for film and video recording in the BBRT
administered areas. On the other hand, people can still be seen taking selfies both in the fort and
at the edge of the sea, despite the existing safety regulations regarding proximity to the sea (Fig.
22, left). Similar contradictions can also be seen in other areas that have been reportedly
designated as no-selfie zones, as for instance the Juhu-Chowpatty Beach, another seaside
location that also attracts throngs of people all throughout the year (Fig.22, right). In another
location, Marine Drive, BMC officials on the spot emphasize that their primary work is related to
making the public aware of the hazards of slipping down from the pier, especially during the
rainy season rather than enforcing any regulations against the selfie.

Fig. 21: Warning signs in Bandra promenade that relate to the risks of high tide and calls for basic civic sense.

160

Fig. 22: Selfie takers can be seen in large numbers in Mumbai despite news-reports of about “no selfie zones.” On
the left are two scenes from Bandra Fort and Promenade, and on the right Juhu-Chowpatty beach. Both locations
had been reported to be no-selfie zones.

The contradiction between news-reports about no-selfie zones and the lived reality in
sites such as Bandra, Juhu-Chowpatty and Marine Drive, expose a gap between the idea of the
regulation of selfie-taking and the actual implementation of such regulations. Selfie-taking in
public places is hazardous—but perhaps no more (or less) dangerous than driving a car or
climbing a hill. The anxiety about the selfie as a death-inducing form is virally produced by both
news-media discourses and state responses to these discourses.
The “selfie-death” is therefore always a pre-mediated experience, or a second-hand
experience that is mediated via traditional news sources such as television and newspapers, or
online sources virally circulating on the Internet. As Folker Hanusch claims, mass media brings

161
us “into contact with experiences that we are generally not personally confronted with on a daily
basis [and] much of what we know about death comes through the media” (Hanusch 3).
Hanusch’s statement counters what the historian Phillipe Aries calls the era of “invisible death,”
i.e. the privatization of death through the medical sphere in the modern period (Hanusch 15-16).
For Hanusch, mass media processes and practices ensure that death maintains a strong public
presence, even though the experience of death in this case is usually a second-hand, mediated
experience. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik call such media experiences
mediated by radio, television and newspapers, “media of the second degree” (14). For them, such
second degree experiences of “death and suffering” are “circulated in the public sphere on a
local, national or global level for people to engage in” (Christensen and Sandvik 14).
In relation to the selfie then, we are presented with two slightly different understandings
of death—first we have the biological death of the subject that results from accidental
happenings while taking selfies, and second, the mediated experience of death that other
members of the public engage in through processes of reportage, debate and discussion. State-
level responses such as creating “no-selfie zones” or banning selfies are responses to the latter
experience of death expressed or produced by popular journalism rather than the biological death
of the selfie-taker. A 2016 advisory issued by India’s Department of Tourism explicates this
point. The advisory seeks to regulate selfie taking in tourist sites, since accidents while taking
selfies in tourist locations “have been widely reported in the media” (Fig. 23). Technological and
spatial anxiety become conjoined to these discourses as they are the arenas on to which the
anxiety of death is often displaced. To postulate it in the language of Beck’s notion of risk
societies then, the fatality of the selfie is a “simultaneously scientific and social construction”
(Beck 155).

162

“Selfie to Die For,” an online initiative started by Mumbai based entrepreneur Deepak
Gandhi in 2015, seems to offer a way out of the approach of blanket banning. “Selfie to Die For”
describes itself as an “educative movement aimed to create awareness on the life hazards of
taking selfies at risky & life-threatening locations. The campaign is conceptualized with an
objective to drive a mass movement and appeal the youth to click selfies responsibly.”
22
Selfie to
Fig. 23: An advisory issued by the Department of Tourism that seeks to regulate selfie taking in tourist sites.
The reason for the issuance of the advisory is that accidents while taking selfies in tourist locations “have
been widely reported in the media” (See detail at the bottom). The governmental advisory then, is a by-
product of media discourses, rather than first-hand experiences of death and dying.

163
Die For still displays some of the same contradictions in the conceptualization of the selfie-death
as popular journalistic accounts do. For instance, there is still a reliance on statistical figures as
evidence of the selfie’s danger, including the comparison to “death by sharks”

(“About Us”,
SelfietoDieFor). It also assumes that the selfie is potentially dangerous because of a “carpe
diem” approach to life in a consumerist world and that “millenials” are more susceptible to
taking selfies and therefore the burden of death and the responsibility of avoiding it must fall on
them (“About Us”, SelfietoDieFor).
However, Gandhi’s initiative is more acutely aware of the language of social media than
attempts at banning and zoning are. The logo of the website is in the form of a hashtag symbol
with the right vertical line in the form of a selfie-stick with a cellphone mounted on top (Fig. 24,
left). Although the logo itself does not encapsulate the themes of safety and hazard, it shows an
understanding of the imbrication of the selfie in multiple communicative forms—as image, as an
element of social media and as a fusion of technology and human bodies. In fact, the hashtag is
central to functioning of Selfie to Die For and “#Selfietodiefor” is one of the ways in which the
website aims to propagate its awareness campaign. The site operates in the form of social media
hashtags (#Selfietodiefor) and a page that allows users to perform “online pledges” through its
website. The webpage allows visitors to enter their names and email addresses on blank squares,
along with uploading a “safe selfie”. The visitor is then presented with a pop-up
message that reads: “Awesome! You are now a Proud Responsible Selfie Citizen. Help spread
the word. Happy Selfie’ing” (Fig. 24, right).

164

Fig. 24: (Left) The Selfie to Die For logo featuring the selfie-stick as an element of the hashtag. (Right) “Online pledges” as
promises of responsible selfie-taking in the Selfie to Die For website.

This idea of the “responsible selfie citizen” reflects a different idea of citizenship than
governmental attempts at banning and zoning and emphasizes the self-discipline of individual
participatory agents rather than the government of bodies through legally enforced rules. Further,
Selfie to Die For’s conceptualization of the selfie is not a blanket pathologization of the selfie. In
one interview, Gandhi says that the traffic police are yet to catch up with selfie-taking as a
hazard. According to Gandhi, while policemen levy fines for simultaneous talking and driving,
“they need to look out for drivers who take pictures while manoeuvring the car as well” (sic;
Jaisinganil). Read together, Gandhi’s statement and the website’s invitation to the user to upload
a “safe selfie” points towards one other thing: the fact that the selfie can be fatal under certain
conditions but is not necessarily a guarantee of death.

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“But What About the Dead?”: Selfie-Death as Moral Panic
How then, are we to make sense of the phenomenon of the selfie-death? On one hand, we
have the reality of biological death and on the other, a mise-en-abyme of perceptions produced
through medical, journalistic and state discourses. If the selfie is only fatal under certain
conditions, calls for blanket banning as in Mumbai, or in the advisory issued by the Department
of Tourism, it can only be explained as a form of moral panic. Stanley Cohen’s now-classic
definition describes the moral panic as “A condition, episode, person or group of persons [that]
emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a
stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media” (Cohen 1). Cohen further states that during
moral panics “socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions” (1) much the
same way that medical discourses and news reportage has done in case of the selfie-death
“epidemic” and that “ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to” (1) as seen in the
Department of Tourism advisory or the Mumbai Police regulations.
The selfie, and by corollary, the selfie-death, seems to fit perfectly into this definition of
the moral panic. Cohen also provides a crucial disclaimer—that to call something a moral panic
“does not imply that this something does not exist or happened at all and that reaction is based on
fantasy, hysteria, delusion and illusion or being duped by the powerful” (vii). Declarations of
“killer selfies” and “selfie epidemics” then are not essentially false, but expose an escalation of
the friction between bodies, technological devices and physical space at this historical juncture.
To borrow a term from Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, the selfie-death is a “hypermediated”
phenomenon. Bolter and Grusin state that hypermediacy “acknowledges multiple acts of
representation and makes them visible. [It] offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation
is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as "windowed" itself-with windows

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that open on to other representations or other media” (Bolter and Grusin 33-34). If the traditional
photograph hides an undertone of death, the phenomenon of selfie-deaths is produced through
multiple replications of the photograph’s deathly eidos. Between the cellphone of the
photographer-subject, televised news shows and virally circulating news on the Internet, the
selfie-death phenomenon is simultaneously “real” and constructed.
But there is something more at stake in the pinning down of the selfie as a denigrated
form, and the simultaneous construction of its deathly potentials. Popular criticisms of the selfie
often characterize selfie-takers as bedazzled masses that are enthralled by the gaze of the
interface (Billias). This approach to the selfie imagines an inventory of ills beginning with, but
not limited to what Jesse Fox and Margaret Rooney have identified as the “dark triad” of
personality disorders—narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy (Fox and Rooney 161).
Here, scientific analysis produces the crisis that it then tries to manage. As Theresa Senft and
Nancy Baym point out, such descriptors of personality traits and “diagnoses of individual cases
turn into indictments of culture at large” (Senft and Baym 1590). Similar to what Cohen
identifies as a disaster situation response to moral panics, the “epidemical” or pathological
discourse of selfie-deaths follows a response chain in which warnings are issued, threats are
identified, impacts are assessed, inventories are wrought and remedies are sought (Cohen 16-17).
The selfie’s psychological “threat” then snowballs into perceptions of physical threat. The idea
that selfie takers are everywhere and that they threaten the safety of both themselves and others
(Weigold) is undercut by an idea of a “zombified” collective—one that is rendered mindless by
technology and whose bodily functions are in thrall to the media…often, infectiously so.
But is there a different way to conceptualize this form of collectivity? Can the selfie point
to the notion of a public that is rooted in “life” instead of death? This does not mean that

167
discussions of and measures for public safety don’t need to take place—they do. But perhaps one
can begin to separate it from the general ontology of the selfie that is often conflated with the
selfie’s inventory of ills—death included. As I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, reading
the selfie-death across the fields of technology, everyday life, space and mediation allows us to
tease out some of the complexities that go into the construction of the category called the “selfie-
death.”

Conclusion
The moral panic around the selfie-death assumes a mass of individuals, encapsulated in
their own digital bubbles, distracted and oblivious to the realities of the physical world. In “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin writes about a similar
rejection of the cinema by the French author Georges Duhamel. In response to Duhamel’s
vitriolic critique of cinema,
23
Benjamin states that this rejection is undergirded by an opposition
between the distracted subject of mass culture and the attentive subject of the artwork (Benjamin
239). Benjamin opposes this view by citing the example of architecture as a form of art that
achieves a collectivity through distraction. Architecture and cellspace are both “atmospheric” in
the sense that they don’t necessarily separate the human subject from the technological object. In
other words, speaking of “media-environment” in terms of augmented spaces doesn’t necessarily
separate “media” and “environment” as disparate elements that have been brought together by
human artifice. Rather, media is the environment and distraction is a mode of inhabiting this
environment; as Benjamin states, the “distracted person, too, can form habits […] the ability to
master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of
habit” (240).

168
In a more recent “new media” context, Heidi Cooley echoes this perspective when she
writes about everyday use of technology in terms of habit. In Cooley’s formulation distraction
and habit are expressions of a non-conscious conduct of life. For Cooley, while network
technology habituates us into regulatory practices of sharing and tracking, it simultaneously
allows for social habit (and social networking habit) to form what Howard Rheingold has called
“smart mobs.” While Cooley is less optimistic about the “mobile many’s” potential for
revolution (Cooley 24), her approach to networked media technology acknowledges the complex
interplay of tracking and sharing, of acquiescence and resistance within the new media ecology.
Using metaphors such as “swarm” and “hive mind,” Cooley points towards a collective
propensity for distraction and media use.
Media theorist Jussi Parikka offers another possible reading of this potential for
collectivity through and in the environment. Drawing from critical work in entomologically
oriented theory, Parikka identifies swarming as a form of social organization that was “integrated
into the body politic of emerging media culture” of the twentieth century (Parikka 49). Swarming
then, is a mode of coming together—the signification of a multitude (Parikka 48). Such ideas of
swarming and collectivity have become central to the ways in which social media operates; in
other words, swarm behavior is central to the conduct of politics in an age of digital networks. If
politics, broadly understood, is about the organization of the means of life and the power to
distribute life’s resources, then the idea of a swarm collectivity allows us to move beyond the
“isolated-bubble” critique of social media. If selfie takers are “everywhere,” then selfie-taking
itself can be read as a collective habit. Selfies then, are interestingly poised in this network
ecology as possible manifestations of swarm behavior. Selfies are not just an imprint of “being”
in the world; they can also be expressions of “being with.” Starting with this idea of “being

169
with,” the next chapter explores how the selfie’s potential of expressing a collectivity has
impacted the conduct of politics and electoral behavior in contemporary India.

NOTES

1. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault defines governmentality as “the ensemble formed by
institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this
very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its
major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (Security
108).
2. For example, see “15 Selfies Taken Right Before Death” on Viralated (16 March 2015).
3. However, this is a commonsensical understanding of the selfie. In fact, one of the arguments I am
trying to make in the dissertation is that the frame of utility might not be the best viewing frame for
something like the selfie. Although the selfie is technically an image of the self-alone, like other forms of
image-making, selfies too have been used for larger social movements.
4. For instance, “Refrain yourself from taking selfies & Groupies”, “Stretch wrist extensor and flexors
Muscles prior to clicking selfies”, “Strengthen the muscles surrounding elbow joint” and “Take oral
Analgesics as prescribed by orthopaedician Eg. Ibuprofen (NSAID)” are some of the stipulated measures.
These are generic measures that are applicable in case of several musculoskeletal conditions.
5. In relation to the issue, Pankaj B. Shah writes: “First and foremost question is “does it fit in the
criteria of addiction”. The answer is yes as well as no. Yes because it leads to chain of reactions as
described above which classically fits in the criteria of addiction. The answer is no as there is no proper
definition/ diagnostic criteria of this addiction. Also we do not have any DSM criteria for the same” (Shah
602).

170

6. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault writes about the convergence of the
biological and the political within the realm of disciplinary administration. He writes: “A 'political
anatomy', which was also a 'mechanics of power', was being born; it defined how one may have a hold
over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one
wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines” (Discipline 138).
7. See “Безопасное селфи” (Safe Selfie) at https://mvd.ru/safety_selfie for the announcement. PDF of
the pamphlet can also be accessed on the webpage. Visit https://media.mvd.ru/files/application/652459 to
download. Russian-to-English translation credit: Parijat Bhattacherjee.
8. “Безопасное селфи” (Translation, Parijat Bhattacherjee).
9. According to Schmitt et al. “manner of death (known in Latin countries as “medicolegal etiology,”
where it is considered as another objective of the autopsy) means, in violent deaths, the distinction among
an accident, suicide, homicide, or an undetermined death […] A manner of death can be the result of
multiple causes and mechanisms of death. The classic example is the one of a gunshot injury (cause of
death), which could be classified as the four manners of death: homicide (someone shot the victim),
suicide (the shot was self-inflicted), accident (the shot was self-inflicted unintentionally), and
undetermined (there are no witnesses to the events, and the autopsy failed to clarify the manner of death)”
(Schmitt et al. 19).
10. An interesting take on this question of circumstance is taken by the authors of “Debunking the
Great ‘Selfies Are More Deadly Than Shark Attacks’ Myth” in The Daily Beast, a popular news portal.
The authors cite several instances of selfie-death headlines culled out of various reports and then replace
the word selfie in each one with the word “breathing” (Fung, Gelman). For instance, “Russian fell to
death from a nine-story building while taking a selfie” becomes, “Russian fell to death from a nine-story
building while breathing.” The authors suggest that most news reports about selfie deaths “deleted
references to the other risky behavior, and blamed all [the] deaths on selfies rather than […] on playing at
the edge of a cliff, playing with firearms, etc.” The authors then, make an implicit distinction between
cause and circumstance of death. They also make the salient point that “when it comes to data, a bad

171

analysis is sometimes worse than no analysis.” One could of course, make a counter-claim by asking what
role the selfie played in encouraging risky behavior; but that would be a completely different approach
that examines the selfie as an element of the risk spectrum, rather than starting from the a priori
assumption that selfies lead to death.
11. The full description of the episode is: “On We The People, we discuss the selfie mania, how it has
changed politics and culture, and what does it tell us about ourselves. Is it harmless fun or hazardous fad?
Is the quest for perfect selfie pushing youngsters to go under the knife? And with shockers like Rajasthan
Commission for Women member clicking selfie with a rape survivor, has the selfie craze taken
insensitivity to a new level?” See NDTV’s website for both this text and the video of the full episode
(http://www.ndtv.com/video/news/we-the-people/we-the-people-the-selfie-mania-narcissism-or-self-
expression-423220).
12. Even the title sequence of the episode tapped into the selfie’s visual coding with the word “selfie”
presented in the form of a photomosaic of separate selfies that are animated to form the word.
13. Also see Chieu Luu and Huizhong Wu’s “Indian teen dies after accidentally shooting himself
while taking selfie” (2016) on the CNN website for a detailed account of the incident.
14. This notion of legality is different from laws in the physical sciences. A scientific law like the law
of gravity invokes a guarantee of attraction; in simple layman’s terms, other things remaining same, what
goes up, must necessarily fall downwards. One cannot say the same about a legal injunction against
killing. To say, “thou shalt not kill,” means that killing is possible, but forbidden by a higher sovereign
authority. The legal inscription of the law becomes necessary if the act has to be regulated. In corollary,
one might say that regulation is made possible only because of the possibility that a certain act can be
committed. The boundary is always imposed from the outside.
15. Reliance’s marketing slogans during the early days of the cellphone in India in the mid 1990s was
“roti, kapda, makaan aur mobile”—literally food, clothing, housing and mobile, with mobile telephony
being posited as a basic need. The equation of data to oxygen now is an extension of this earlier
marketing rhetoric in which communication technology is made essential (even natural) to one’s

172

inhabitation of the data society. See Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey’s The Great Indian Phone Book: How
the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics and Daily Life (Doron and Jeffrey 54-55).
16. See http://www.samsung.com/in/makeforindia/.
17. Shabeer and Banu define physical distraction as that which “involves removing of one hand from
the steering wheel to hold and operate the phone and visual distraction which involves taking one’s eyes
off the road to pick and put down the phone as well as dial numbers” (Shabeer and Banu 194). They
define cognitive distraction as the “(mental) distraction occurred when tasks are performed concurrently,
i.e., when a driver is using a hand-held or hands-free mobile phone while driving, she or he must divide
their attention between operating and maintaining the conversation and operating the car while
maneuvering through traffic phone and maintaining the conversation and part to operating the vehicle and
responding to the constantly changing road and traffic conditions” (Shabeer and Banu 194; sic).
18. See the safety notice put up by the European Youth Portal titled “Taking selfies & texting at the
wheel” (November 26, 2015). The notice says: “More and more car accidents—including fatal ones—
involve drivers taking selfies. Driving demands that you maintain full control of your vehicle at all
times. Taking a selfie distracts you for 14 seconds—and checking social networks can distract you for a
full 20 seconds” (http://europa.eu/youth/eu/article/119/32172_en).
19. It is worth noting that this is not unique to Mumbai and can be seen in other urban centers such as
Delhi as well. The advertising campaign, slogan and hashtag were created by the Delhi based advertising
firm Lowe Lintas who claim that the hashtag captures “the nature of our unpredictable and ever-changing
roads in a very interesting way.” See http://www.mullenlowelintas.in/our-work/google-maps-
lookbeforeyouleave/.
20. The maintenance of the fort itself is the purview of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), but
its proximity to the Bandstand and the gardens means that revelers closely associate the fort with the
larger topological imagination of the Bandra area.
21. Conversation with Benedict Soares, BBRT Trustee (18 November 2016).
22. See “About the Movement” in http://www.selfietodiefor.org/.

173

23. Benjamin writes: “Duhamel calls the movie "spectacle which requires no concentration and
presupposes no intelligence…, which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the
ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles"” (“The Work of Art” 239). Duhamel’s
disparaging description of cinema is similar to contemporary rejections of the selfie.

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Tahseeni, Ismat. “Haven't we learnt our selfie lesson yet?”. Times of India. 30 November 2016,
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yet/articleshow/55684953.cms. Accessed 26 December 2016.
“Taking selfies & texting at the wheel”. European Youth Portal. 26 November 2015,
http://europa.eu/youth/eu/article/119/32172_en. Accessed 2 January 2017.
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Vertov, Dziga, dir. Man With a Movie Camera, Perf. Mikhail Kaufman, VUFKU, 1929.
Wagner, Eric T. Selfie Society: Narcissism and the Celebration of Mediocrity. Pressbooks.com.
2015. Kindle Edition.
We the People. “I, Me, My Selfie: The Selfie Mania—Narcissism Or Self-Expression?” Online
Video Clip. NDTV. 10 July 2016, http://www.ndtv.com/video/news/we-the-people/we-
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2016.
Weigold, Michael. “Why do people risk their lives – or the lives of others – for the perfect
selfie?”. The Conversation. 24 March 2016, https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-
risk-their-lives-or-the-lives-of-others-for-the-perfect-selfie-55937. Accessed 4 January
2017.
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Withnall, Adam. “Aylan Kurdi’s story: How a small Syrian child came to be washed up on a
beach in Turkey”. Independent, 3 September 2015,
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/aylan-kurdi-s-story-how-a-small-
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Image Sources
Fig.1: The Quint, composite of screengrabs (https://www.thequint.com/videos/news-
videos/selfie-death-two-school-boys-hit-by-train-delhi-while-taking-pictures-killfie-
oncoming-approaching-tracks-accident).
Fig.2: (Left) Mashable (https://mashable.com/2015/09/21/selfie-deaths/#TZxaVPVibaqJ).
(Right) Pricenomics (https://priceonomics.com/the-tragic-data-behind-selfie-fatalities/).

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Fig.3: India Today screen grab (https://www.indiatoday.in/programme/newsroom/video/young-
india-suffering-from-selfitis-parents-humiliated-after-students-drown-in-murud-more-
439731-2016-02-04).
Fig.4: (Left) Photographer: Eddie Adams, World Press Photo
(https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/1968/world-press-photo-year/eddie-
adams). (Right) Photographer: Nilüfer Demir, Independent
(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/aylan-kurdi-s-story-how-a-small-
syrian-child-came-to-be-washed-up-on-a-beach-in-turkey-10484588.html).
Fig.5: The Indian Express (http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/karnataka-3-
medical-students-drown-while-taking-selfies/).
Fig.6: Free Classic Movies screen grab (https://free-classic-movies.com/movies-02/02-1928-09-
22-The-Cameraman/index.php).
Fig.7: The Photo Society (http://thephotosociety.org/reality-check/).
Fig.8: Author.
Fig.9: American Psychiatric Association search query result
(https://www.psychiatry.org/home/search-results?k=selfitis).
Fig.10: Digital Trends (https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/japan-railways-selfie-stick-ban-
615x870.png?ver=1).
Fig.11: NDTV screen grab (https://www.ndtv.com/video/news/we-the-people/we-the-people-the-
selfie-mania-narcissism-or-self-expression-423220).
Fig.12: NDTV screen grab (https://www.ndtv.com/video/news/we-the-people/we-the-people-the-
selfie-mania-narcissism-or-self-expression-423220).

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Fig.13: NDTV screen grab (https://www.ndtv.com/mumbai-news/no-selfies-by-the-sea-say-
mumbai-police-1264935).
Fig.14: (Left, top and bottom) YouTube screen grab
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU9oHSzrrIk). (Right) 9TO5Google
(https://9to5google.com/2017/06/29/samsung-walk-mode-app/).
Fig.15: Mumbai Police, Twitter
(https://twitter.com/MumbaiPolice/status/955293664326115328).
Fig.16: Author.
Fig. 17: Mumbai Police, Twitter
(https://twitter.com/MumbaiPolice/status/757102357381394432).
Fig.18: Mumbai Police, Twitter
(https://twitter.com/MumbaiPolice/status/747290102460649472).
Fig.19: Mumbai Police, Twitter
(https://twitter.com/MumbaiPolice/status/753090262251999236).
Fig.20: Author.
Fig.21: Author.
Fig.22: Author.
Fig.23: Neelam Pandey, Twitter
(https://twitter.com/NPDay/status/763311144127893504/photo/1).
Fig.24: Selfie To Die For (http://www.selfietodiefor.org/).

•

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Chapter 3
*

“Being With”: The Selfie and Solidarity Politics

Introduction: The self, the social and the selfie
This chapter makes the argument that the selfie can function as a way of solidarity-
building and community formation in the digital environment. In the context of India, the selfie
has been mobilized widely for both political and civic movements. I examine the selfie in the
larger ecology of social media and participatory politics, in order to locate the specific form of
civic and political participation that it affords. The instances analyzed in this chapter do not
follow a chronological path but are presented to illustrate the larger tensions between the private
act of selfie taking, and its impacts on political and social life. I begin with a theoretical
consideration of the communicational as well as communitarian potentials of the selfie and then
move on to examine how different mobilizations of selfie usage energize new modes of social
and political engagement or reiterate older forms in the guise of the new. As specific case
studies, I look at social-media movements such as the “Kiss of Love” campaign and the
“Students Against ABVP” movement that are reactions to certain ideological and cultural
impositions. I compare these to more “managed” selfie campaigns undertaken by NGOs and
civic bodies around civic issues such as bad roads and improvement of utilities. Finally, I
examine how political parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are cashing in on the
selfie as a way of reinstating ideas of citizenship and nationhood, and how they use the selfie as a
front for more ideologically motivated utterances.
1
As argued in the earlier chapters, the selfie is
not just a visual form, and in the sphere of politics, social movements and participatory

*
Some sections of this chapter have been published in the International Journal of Communication, Vol. 9, 2015.

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democracy, the selfie becomes a language that borrows shared codes from the visual, textual and
performative registers. While taking a selfie doesn’t change the status quo by itself, it becomes
expressive of a certain sense of community. In this, the selfie is interestingly poised as a form
that re-negotiates the relationship between the self and the social.
“The self” could mean either a conscious sense of existing in the world (the philosophical
question of “being”), or an identity or persona (in which case it becomes closely linked with the
ideas of personhood or citizenship). In both cases, the language of the self articulates some
version of the proposition, “I am.” The split between Cartesian and non-Cartesian philosophies
of the self, is over what accompanies this proposition. For Descartes, “I am” was preceded by the
logic of “I think” (Cogito Ergo Sum, or “I am thinking, therefore I exist”) (Descartes 28). In the
Cartesian scheme, the self could only be realized as a kind of interior consciousness that exists
prior to the other. Modern theories of the self have radically moved away from this singular
event of the self and stressed that the self is not one unified entity that can be realized through
meditation alone. As Michael Renov writes, “the poststructuralist version of subjectivity is […]
at odds with the Western tradition since Descartes that posits the “I” of the cogito as the anchor
and foundation of being, the locus of a certainty that reflects in miniature the sovereignty of god”
(110). For Michel Foucault for instance, the self is something that arises out of contact with
structures of power and is not pre-given as a constituent of being.
In “Technologies of the Self” Foucault describes four kinds of overlapping technologies
that make up practical reason—technologies of production, technologies of sign systems,
technologies of power and technologies of the self (with his own interest in being in the last
two). Foucault describes technologies of the self as those that allow individuals to “effect by
their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies

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and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 18). For
example, Foucault looks at forms of writing— “letters to friends and disclosure of self;
examination of self and conscience” as technologies of the self (34). While the form of the letter
or the confessional might seem interiorized at first glance, Foucault is interested in the
interaction or communication through which the self emerges.
2
For Foucault, the self is that
which emerges as “self-knowledge” through interaction with others. Contrary to the Cartesian
understanding of a subject that necessarily exists before the other, the Foucauldian subject is a
relational self.
Similarly, Jean-Luc Nancy postulates that being can only be understood as a kind of
singular-plurality, or “being-with.” For Nancy, the self can only be understood as self through its
departure from itself. Even the possibility of being alone, or “on its own” is inaugurated by the
fact that there are other selves, separated from the self, by the body (Being Singular 86).
3

Nancy’s non-Cartesian approach unhinges the self from the interiority assumed in cogito ergo
sum and makes a case for the “I” and the “We” as simultaneous aspects of existence, rather than
assuming the “I” to be the atom from which the “We” is constituted. Nancy critiques Descartes’s
theorem and calls for a radical destabilization of the idea of the final subject; he writes: “In a
certain way, there never has been, and never will be, a philosophy "of the subject" in the sense of
the final [infinie] closure in it-self of a for-itself […] Being singular plural means the essence of
Being is only as co-essence” (Being Singular 29,30).
Although Foucault and Nancy do not share the exact same language to speak about the
self (Foucault is concerned with the hermeneutics of the self, Nancy with its ethics), the idea of
relationality is common to both. The self is that which emerges as a sign of difference from

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others but must be prefaced by recognition of the other as other.
4
The inverse of this relational
idea of the self, is a corollary, relational idea of the social. The social, like the self is not a unified
category. Bruno Latour traces this as a radical split from earlier sociological traditions in which
the social was seen as a well-defined sphere that must “not be ‘purely’ biological, linguistic,
economical, natural” (3). Latour, in what he defines as “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT), treats
the social as a process, rather than a category. For him, the social has an amorphous character
that cannot be predefined and presumed by the analyst but must be defined through the actions of
human and non-human actors. “The social” here, emerges in interactions and associations
between actors and their actions.
5
This idea of the social has also been extended to the study of
social media and network societies. Agreeing with Latour’s analysis, media theorist Geert
Lovink postulates that “the social” is no longer a stable signifier that points us back to a society;
instead, Lovink declares that “the social” is that which is manifested in the network (Lovink 3).
He writes: “The network is the actual shape of the social […] The social is the collective ability
to imagine the connected subjects as a temporary unity” (Lovink 3, 7).
I draw on these relational theories of the self and the social to examine the selfie as a kind
of interactive, dialogic form of writing the self that is often ignored by summary dismissals of
the selfie as a Narcissistic form. One such indictment of the selfie can be found in Eric T.
Wagner’s Selfie Society: Narcissism and the Celebration of Mediocrity where he claims that
selfies are symptoms of “the narcissistic, irresponsible, and impulsive behavior of our teenage
population” (Wagner, Kindle). This tendency to read technological mediation as an obstruction
to social contact is not new. An older variant of this same refrain can be found in Charles
Baudelaire’s 1859 essay, “The Modern Public and Photography,” where he describes early
photography as a social madness and a Narcissistic exercise, and photography itself as a “trivial

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image on the metallic plate” (Baudelaire 86-87). These readings reject the self and the social as
two disparate categories, wherein the self is understood as an isolated entity devoid of
socialbility, while the social is understood as a corrective to this. It is as if mediation reduces the
social to an image, and in this reduction, the essence of social connectivity itself is lost. The
disdain for the photographic image à la Baudelaire, seems to have percolated down to the
dismissals of the selfie by the likes of Wagner and many others.
Contrary to these readings, I define the selfie as a form of “being-with” or a public form.
To call an image “public” means taking cognizance of its emplacement in a world populated by
and shared with others, or in other words, tracing the connections between the image, the
apparatus that produces it, the routes of it circulation and the manner of its reception. The form
of the selfie draws its subject into the surface of the screen. But reading this as a literal
abandonment of the world in favor of the love for the self, assumes that the aesthetic surface is a
visual evidence of solipsistic social reality. A singular body in the image can be more than just a
lone body. Collectivity is defined here in the property of being-with. Nicholas Mirzoeff
recognizes this in his use of the term “planetary majority” (Mirzoeff 61) to denote the selfie-
taking public. Mirzoeff acknowledges the selfie as a performative form that is predicated on
sociality and group communication—a “digital conversation” (66) as he puts it.
This extraction of the selfie from its imposed solipsistic shell is a necessary
epistemological maneuver that allows us to locate the potential of selfies for building solidarities
and mobilizing political action. Unlike a traditional, printed photograph in which the social is
contained within the boundaries of the frame and is activated only if the printed photograph
enters public discourse by means of newsprint, public exhibition or the like, the social in the

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selfie is pre-eminent. Visually, the selfie pushes the world behind its subject, but as an artefact
that is meant to be shared, it is also meant to be pushed into the world.

“Unframing” the selfie: A visual theory of social relations
This framing of the selfie as a potential for “being within” the world (being with someone
in the world and being in some place and time) is specific to its form. One of the core problems I
am interested in exploring in this chapter is the expression of solidarity. How is solidarity
expressed and reconfigured through the selfie? One easy answer of course, would be to talk of
the group-selfie, or the “groufie”—a term that has been trademarked by the Chinese company
Huwawei (Sparkes). In case of a group of people in one place and one time, being together in the
same image and posing for it, is a visual evidence of having made a decision to be together in the
same image. But if solidarity is about building relations around common causes, it assumes
communication among different interlocutors. What I am interested in therefore, is not a single
group-image, but plural images of singular bodies that define group solidarity. This necessitates
an interrogation of the selfie’s formal features, and the kind of social and political affordances
that come with it. If the selfie is a “digital conversation” then it presumes multiple interlocutors
rather than a digital Narcissus staring into an electric pool (See Fig.1).
(Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: A popular meme that comments on Narcissism in Instagram.

I bring up the Narcissus metaphor again for two reasons—first, for its repeated invocation
in popular dismissals of the selfie, and second, because equating the Narcissus myth with the
form of the selfie also presumes a certain idea of the frame that I seek to counter here. Although
there is no physical picture frame in the Greek myth, Narcissus is transfixed by his image in the
pond. Narcissus replaces the world around him with the world of his image, that is meant only
for his own gaze. In its modern resonances, Narcissus is framed (metaphorically) within the
image. This idea of the frame presumes that selfie-takers are transfixed by their own images—
that they have abandoned the world to gaze at themselves for themselves. The charge of
Narcissism signifies the ultimate dissolution of the social, understood as Latour puts it, in its
adjectival sense, as a quality or trait (Latour 1). Describing the adjective “social” Latour writes:
“Parallel words like ‘sociable’ refer to skills enabling individuals to live politely in society” (6).

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Calling selfie-takers Narcissistic implies that they are not sociable and by extension, not social.
On the contrary, I view selfie-takers and their selfies as actors in a network of relations that
produces the social. In this, I am indebted to Geert Lovink’s advice in “What is the Social in
Social Media?” where he writes: “It is not enough to limit social media to uploading and self-
promotion. It is the personal one-to-one feedback and small-scale viral distribution elements that
are essential” (Lovink 10). This “reassemblage” of the social (to take a cue from Latour) in the
selfie requires a visual, epistemological counterpart—the “unframing” of the selfie.
A frame is both a metaphorical practice and a physical object. Paintings and photographs
are “framed” metaphorically when the maker chooses to arrange or capture objects in a certain
way within the image. But the metaphorical frame always has its invisible double, the physical
frame even when this physicality has not been made manifest. The physical frame of a picture
always follows the format of the image and is always present (as possibility) even when not
manifest (as an object). A frame contains the world of the image; in a painting, the
representational world of the image is fixed into and within a finite surface. As Anne Friedberg
notes, the frame “serves as the boundary demarcation between the screen world and the material
world of the spectator” (Friedberg 2). The frame creates fixity, both in the viewer and in the
image. But this fixity falls apart in the selfie.
The selfie (or for that matter the digital image in general) has no frame in the physical
sense—it is an un-framed, portable image (although one can still talk about framing as
photographic technique). Unlike a painting whose frame follows the dimensions and format of
the image, the selfie’s aesthetic framing does not guarantee physical framing; the frame implies
depth, while the selfie is a technology of the surface (see Chapter 1). One could argue that if the
selfie is viewed on the mobile phone or on the computer, it is bounded by the four corners of the

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screen. But the boundaries of the cellphone or computer screen, are not fixed frames. Each
instance of opening a separate window or starting up a separate app, makes the screen a
boundary for that instance alone. Unlike a picture frame, computer and cellphone screens
themselves multitask. They are not meant specifically for the selfie, but one can make do with
them.
The “world” of the selfie is not that which is contained in its image, but always seeks a
viewer located elsewhere and in some other place. It is this orientation to the outside—this
exteriority that forms the basis of selfie solidarity. Of course, one could make the argument that
posting a selfie of oneself is merely an act of token support. After all, the selfie does not go out
into the world and change the political or economic system; neither does it have material value as
an object that can cause such rearrangement. But this is a miscomprehension of the selfie’s value
system. Locating the selfie’s political potential must begin with taking stock of its status as an
immaterial artefact and identifying the relationship between community, communication and
labor. The correlation between communication and community is not merely one of etymology
(both are derived from the Latin root “communis” meaning “common”); they are interlinked in a
much more fundamental way. As Albert Benschop writes: “Communication is the structural
process leading to community formation: without communication there can be no social action
which leads to the organization of our social relations” (Benschop).
Galloway, Thacker and Wark conceptualize the relationship between community and
communication through the notion of excommunication. In theological parlance,
excommunication means that one is removed from the religious community—so it is a “question
of community, belonging and judgment before the law” (Galloway et al. 15). At the same time,
in philosophy, excommunication is a “question of language and mediation”—excommunication

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means that “there will be no more messages” to and from the community (Galloway et al. 15).
The excommunicated individual is denied the right to communicate with the religious
community. By corollary then, “community” is the condition of the world and the self being co-
extensive, and this commonality is expressed through communicational forms such as linguistic
and visual culture.
Michael Hardt asserts that the “constitution of communities and collective subjectivities”
is the direct result of affective labor, which is a form of “immaterial labor” (Hardt 89). Drawing
on Maurizio Lazzarato, Hardt defines immaterial labor as that which does not result in the
production of material goods, but of services and information (Hardt 94). For Hardt, the era of
postmodernization (“informatization” as he calls it), radically alters the nature of human labor,
placing it within two paradoxical, but interconnected poles. First, human labor has to become
more computational in the sense that interactive communicational technologies increasingly
force us to think and act like the machines we work with (Hardt 95). At the same time, they also
require “human contact and interaction” to become part of the labor-process (Hardt 96). In effect,
the production and manipulation of affects is a form of “biopower from below” (Hardt 98) that
creates forms of life. Hardt sees such affective labor as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it
has become intrinsically connected with and necessary for the continuation of capitalist and
patriarchal domination, while at the same time, it also holds forth potentials for liberation and
destabilization of hegemony (Hardt 100).
While Hardt is more concerned with the question of affect’s intertwining within the
capitalist structure, and Galloway et al. are interested in the question of mediation and
communication, a parallel reading of both allows us to rethink the relationship between the
self(ie) and the world. The selfie does not produce communities in the sense of an originary

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force; rather, in a Latourian sense, one can locate the force of the social, the political and the
communitarian in the selfie’s deployment around certain issues or causes. Solidarity is key to the
formation of social and political bonds, and the selfie is a manifestation of such temporally
specific bonds. In relation to the expression of solidarity, the selfie is always a “selfie with”
someone or something—a digital totem for the expression of support and solidarity.

Selfie Solidarity: Image, hashtags and community
Sociologists and political theorists have identified solidarity as one of the building blocks
of community formation. Sally J. Scholz identifies solidarity as a term that can refer to a wide
range of relationalities including group cohesion, civic membership, familial bonds and
expressions of sympathy (Scholz 17). Scholz places high value on solidarity’s affective power,
defining it as “a feeling that moves people to action” (Scholz 17). Material culture has long been
a part of such affective calls to action, or invitations to solidarity. The use of badges and party
insignia for instance, is a common way of expressing political support. For instance, Robert A.
White sees the resurgence of Chairman Mao badges in 1993, as a re-channelizing of the
“ideological motive force” of the Cultural Revolution (White 57), while Roman Laba notes the
use of badges as symbols of “the internal structure and aspirations” (Laba 134) of the
Solidarność (Polish Trade Union) movement in 1980s Poland.
In recent times, digital “badges” have come to the fore as well. Often this means adding a
certain image or a symbol to one’s online profiles. Marco Bani and Stefano De Paoli propose a
model of “digital civics” in which participants in the online ecosystem will share a set of
common badges to publicly display trust and reputation in the “bottom-up democratic process”
(Bani and Paoli 46). Although their proposed system of unified common badges has not yet

197
materialized across digital civics, one can already see the underlying principles of trust,
reputation and the symbolic power of badges at work in the digital sphere. For instance, in 2016,
a three-member team consisting of programmers from Mangalam College of Engineering
(Kerala, India) and Fanshawe University (Canada) developed an app called “MyParty2016.in”
that allowed Facebook users to pin a virtual “badge” of the political party they support onto their
Facebook profiles for the upcoming state assembly elections (Kurian). Facebook now also allows
users to create frames and invite others to use them on their profile pictures to show support.
Users can create frames using Facebook’s Frame Studio service, which is part of its Camera
Effects platform. The Frame Studio webpage states that such frames can “help people celebrate,
show support for their favorite team or cause, or simply enhance their experience in the moment”
(Facebook for developers) (See Fig.2). Such digital maneuvers allow for the expression of
solidarity with a certain party or a certain cause through an additive process.

Fig. 2: (Top Left) Banner on Facebook’s Frame Studio webpage. (Bottom Left) A Facebook frame created by
Facebook user Daniel Langthasa to promote the “Beton Deu” (pay our salaries) movement protesting against non-
payment of wages of government workers in Assam’s Dima Hasao district. (Bottom-right) The Beton-Deu Facebook
frame used by another Facebook user.

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But the expression of “being with” in a selfie is never additive as far as the surface of the
image is concerned. Displaying a digital badge or a frame only adds a layer onto the profile
image of a social network user; there is a separation between the body of the individual and the
body politic. This separation collapses in a solidarity selfie. The image of the lone body of the
user absorbs all the symbolic functions of paraphernalia such as badges and flags. Aspects such
as the selfie taker’s connection to the recording device, barrel-distortions, oblique camera angles,
the frequent pre-dominance of the face in the image and the subject’s direct gaze at the lens
unsettle the properly framed relationship between the photographic image and the world. These
informal or “amateurish” traits hint at the selfie’s status not just as an image, but as a form of
doing—an embodied performative utterance that spills out of the confines of the frame. It
becomes attached to the world of the viewer and the image of the user-citizen becomes the
symbol of the political.
This reframing is in line with what Jenny Edkins describes as “the political,” which she
differentiates from “politics.” While politics has to do with the institutional and governmental,
the political is the “more lively, less dogmatic, less predictable […] arena of innovation and
revolution, a field of sudden, unexpected and abrupt change, a point at which the status quo is
challenged” (Edkins xiii). The political then, includes the uneven terrain of everyday life wherein
performative practices, language and utterances come into play as well. Images of selfie-takers’
bodies do not directly align with “politics” proper, but become part of a less organized, but
dynamic field of action. This reframes the language of solidarity by allowing dispersed selfie
takers to perform the political through multiple avenues of symbolic and linguistic codes. In the
language of solidarity, the selfie’s form has multiple layers. First, the selfie is a form of doing; it
is a performative form in which individual agents choose to place themselves in front of the

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cellphone camera with a specific goal in mind. Second, it is a form of visual language in which
the body’s performativity is fixed into an image and transformed into a political symbol. The
third aspect is linguistic in a more traditional sense; solidarity selfies are often accompanied by
textual captions within the image itself, or by hashtags when they circulate online. In fact, the
hashtag completes the lexical retinue of the solidarity selfie.
The hashtag—graphically represented by the “hash” or “pound” symbol, #, began as a
way of grouping online conversations together. Although the hashtag is not unique to, or
proprietarily owned by Twitter, it evolved in the context of Twitter’s massive conversational
ecology. It was originally used and promoted by Chris Messina in 2007 to solve the problem of
“contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity within the Twittosphere”
(Messina) and in this sense, the hashtag has a meta-data or database function that does the work
of sorting and grouping posts around topics and making them searchable. Recently, media
scholars have begun paying attention to the semiotic and social functions of the hashtag that go
beyond their intended role of supplementing the database functions of the network. Kate Scott
asserts that hashtags perform important interpretative and stylistic functions on Twitter, allowing
users to grasp “additional contextual information” given Twitter’s 140-character constraint (Scott
9). Michele Zappavigna makes a similar point when she says that the contemporary use of
hashtags on social media have established their use as a “social resource for building
relationships and communities” (Zappavigna 274). As “social metadata” (Zappavigna 276)
hashtags make the cataloging function a real-time descriptor of social issues and trends. The use
of a hashtag by a social media user denotes knowledge of or interest in a specific issue or topic.
The social function of the hashtag is to connote: “I am with you in this conversation,” even when

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the digital interlocutors are separated by differences in clock-time and geopolitical boundaries. In
this, the hashtag demonstrates the same tendency for “being-withness” as the selfie.
Negar Mottahedeh demonstrates the affinities between the hashtag and the solidarity
selfie in her analysis of the role of social media after the 2009 Iran elections, when protests broke
out throughout the country against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. She pays special
attention to the 2009 arrest of the political activist Majid Tavakoli who was picked up after
giving a speech condemning dictatorship. Following the arrest, Iranian officials released a
photograph of Tavakoli dressed in a hijab, claiming that he attempted to flee arrest in disguise.
The use of the hijab in the photograph released to the press was meant to elicit a sense of shame,
the underlying allusion being that in trying to escape arrest by disguising himself as a woman,
Tavakoli was demonstrating cowardice (Mottahedeh 75). This patriarchal allusion to the “weaker
sex” was immediately challenged by Iranian men worldwide, who began uploading images of
themselves wearing hijab, with the hashtag,” #IamMajid.” In doing so, they expressed solidarity
with not only Tavakoli, but also with scores of Iranian women, on whom the veil was an
enforced reality (Mottahedeh 76, 77).
Although these were mostly images that were captured on laptops and webcams, and
different in terms of execution from the cellphone-made selfies of today, Mottahedeh calls them
the “forebears of the #selfie” (Mottahedeh 76). The instruments of their construction may have
been different, but these images displayed the poetics of the selfie in that they were images of the
self that were meant to be shared with the digital civic. The digital images, along with the
captions then, were a sort of an organic community formation. The uploaders of the images and
their solidary targets (Iranian women and Tavakoli) were not present together like the protesters
in the street; but despite this spatial and temporal disjuncture, they were together because of the

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same cause, around (but not precisely at) the same time. The images and the hashtag were
concrete manifestations of this social formation. If the solidarity selfie is a way of expressing a
certain kind of being-with within a community or a cause, the hashtag is its linguistically
manifested counterpart. In the register of solidary politics, both the image and the text are
expressions of the same communis. Together, they function as the full repertoire of community
action and solidarity formation. But even when they appear without each other, they are still
expressions of a certain “withness” that is core to the formation of digital collectivity. Such
digital collectivity is not a mere supplementation of a pre-existing public sphere, but part of a
new, global privatization of the public sphere. By “privatization” I am not referring to the
takeover of means of public communication by private corporations; that is of course, already
happening in the sense that what we call “public” means of communication in relation to social
media, are largely run by profit-driven private corporations such as Facebook. But privatization
also means something more—it refers to the fact that public participation in online platforms can
be increasingly customized according to the private user, and that the individual person becomes,
at the core, the origin-point of any larger collectivity.
Manuel Castells points out that the present era of digital communication has moved on
from the concept of “mass communication” to “mass self-communication” (Castells 239). While
private ownership of social media platforms can foreclose the possibility of meaningful public
participation online and can also lead to more monitoring and censorship, the balance is held by
the fact that the engine of profit in these platforms is massive individual participation. Detractors
of social media forms, who claim that participation on online platforms is merely “slacktivism”
overlook the fact that the key terms, and the means of participating in public life have been
altered by the pervasive presence of networked digital media. Castells, in fact, goes on to say that

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social movements on digital platforms are not even virtual—instead local experience and
emotional connection to place are globalized by the network’s vast reach and potential for
speedy communication (Castells 250). For Castells, online social movements are deeply rooted
in a sense of belonging to a community or a place, notwithstanding their reliance on social
media.
I find this notion of the globalization of belongingness useful in Castells’ argument, but I
make two divergences. First, while “globalization” is a useful way of thinking about the vast
reach of the internet, it can sometimes mislead one in thinking that all social movements become
global once they are on the internet. Instead, the key terms in this argument are about speed and
reach, and those work in much the same way even when we talk about a linguistically and
geographically diverse nation-state like India, which is not essentially “the globe.” Second, I
suggest that we reinstate the term “virtual” into the discussion. Online collectivities and
movements are as much virtual as they are “real.” Castell’s argument underlines a
pathologization of the virtual, as if the virtual means “inauthentic.” This demonstrates a slippage
in which formal difference is confused with inauthenticity.
6
Speaking of a “virtual community”
does not relegate the authenticity of the community, but points towards a rearrangement of
relationships between individuals, media-technology and society. Anne Friedberg offers a useful
corrective to this problem, when she stresses on removing the term virtual from its negative
connotations, as well as distancing it from only the digital (Friedberg 10,11). Drawing a long
genealogy of the term “virtual” from other forms of representation such as painting,
photography, cinema and television, Friedberg suggests that the virtual ought to be understood as
a matter of form and function. For her, the virtual is that which “appears "functionally or
effectively but not formally"—of the same materiality as what it represents” (Friedberg 11).

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Friedberg’s definition of the virtual underlines my understanding of online social
engagement, whether collective or personal. The virtuality of such movements is defined by the
fact that the connection between the individual and the collective is not a question of tangible
organization in public places. The collective does not formally appear in the form of a physical
crowd (though it might lead to it)—but as the Iranian example above shows, it can functionally
and effectively appear and work as a collective. Online platforms have also been instrumental in
the formation of public action and opinion on many occasions in India. Social media platforms
such as Twitter and Facebook and online messaging tools such as WhatsApp are widely used in
contemporary India and have become key to the operation of both political and civil action. The
relationship between the selfie and these movements has to be placed within the context of this
propensity of the network to foster collective action.

Selfie-Reaction: Contesting Community as Image
The relationship between individual and community in the social media context in India
can be most directly seen in online campaigns and movements that emerge as reactions to issues.
One instance can be seen during the “Kiss Of Love” movement of 2014, that was a reaction to
instances of moral policing in India. The campaign started when a café in the southern state of
Kerala was vandalized by Hindu right-wing protesters who alleged that youngsters were using the
space of the café to get physically intimate. This, of course, is not a new phenomenon in India and
moral policing of this kind has been seen earlier as well, most notably during Valentine’s Day
when Hindu-right wing groups routinely harass couples in public spaces for what they allege to be
violations of Indian culture. What was new in 2014 however, was the rapid formation of a
resistance against moral policing. Protestors began organizing public meetings against moral

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policing throughout India—while different cities organized these events independently, they were
done under the banner of the “Kiss of Love” movement and each city was called a “chapter” (for
example, Bangalore chapter, Delhi chapter etc.). Public meetings of Kiss of Love chapters were
highly contested events, with numerous counter-protests as well. The main contestation of course,
arose against the movement’s call for unfettering love and intimacy from moral policing, which
often culminated in mass public kissing as a form of protest. Crucially though, while the meetings
happened in physical space, majority of the organizational work took place online on Facebook
groups such as “Kiss Of Love” (@kissoflovekochi), “Kiss of love Delhi” (@kissofluv), “Kiss of
Love Bangalore” (@KissofLoveBangaluru) and “Kiss Against Fascism; Do The Don’t’s of
Fascism” (@kissagainstfascism). One way in which supporters of the movement showed
solidarity with the cause was by uploading images of themselves onto these online communities.
Typically, the subject would look directly into the camera and hold up a placard or a piece of
paper where they wrote why they supported the movement (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Screenshot composite of some of images from the Kiss Against Fascism Facebook page.

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A similar use of images was seen again in early 2017 following an attack on academic
freedom in the University of Delhi, where the Hindu right-wing student’s organization, Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) attacked students and teachers who were attending a
symposium on democracy and the concept of freedom. The focus was on cultures of protest and
state suppression, and some speakers were slotted to speak on contested topics such as the crisis
in Kashmir. ABVP, which is the students’ wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which
currently holds power in the country, was opposed to having speakers from the academic
community who had previously been accused of being unpatriotic and anti-national (Bhanj).
These are contested terms in the current Indian context, wherein the right to dissent or the
expression of an anti-establishment opinion often becomes embroiled in a web of national pride,
honor and patriotism. In this case, ABVP physically assaulted students and teachers who were
attending the symposium, leading to heated, nation-wide discussions about the nature and status
of the democratic arrangement in the country. One response was posted by a student, Gurmehar
Kaur who took a picture of herself holding up a message that read: “I am a student from Delhi
University. I am not afraid of ABVP. I am not alone. Every student of India is with me.
#StudentsAgainstABVP” (Fig. 4). The image was posted on Facebook and was accompanied by
an appeal to the student community to speak up against the culture of intimidation on University
campuses in the country—“If you are a student in any Indian university, in any Indian state and
you wish to protest against ABVP then take a similar selfie and make it your profile picture. Use
the hashtag #StudentsAgainstABVP and copy paste this message along with it” (Advox). Despite
much controversy and calculated aggression
7
the hashtag picked up momentum and students
from across the country started posting similar images (Fig.4).

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Fig. 4: Gurmehar Kaur's Facebook protest (top) and an example of other images shared as a response (bottom).

Both the “Kiss of Love” and “Students Against ABVP” campaigns are at the edges of
selfie culture in the sense that not all the images are made with cellphones, or self-shot. In fact,
Kaur’s own image was shot by a friend and not herself (Doshi). But Kaur’s appeal to the student

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community to take a “selfie” like hers and make it their social media profile picture is not mere
slip of tongue. In both the campaigns the images are not selfies if one considers the typical selfie
look—cellphone hand-held by the subject, angular framing, no hand in the image. This kind of
selfie communication can be placed in the same register as the Iranian images analyzed by
Mottahedeh in her work where she calls them the “forebears of the selfie” (Mottahedeh 76). But
this is also not merely a matter of genealogy, where today’s selfies have evolved from
yesterday’s selfie-like images. Instead, solidarity campaigns such as these point towards a
broader understanding of a “selfie-mode” wherein the selfie becomes a way of showing and
seeing the self. In this understanding, the selfie’s aesthetic features, and tools of production must
be considered alongside its semiotic deployment, its social context and its intentionality; which is
to say that, the instrument of production is only one of the determining features of what the selfie
is. As Karen ann Donnachie notes, it is a fallacy that camera-equipped phones were created for
taking selfies and as I pointed out in the Chapter 1, she locates the selfie as a by-product of
video-telephony and an increasing collective desire for self-photography (Donnachie 57, 59). In
the Indian context, this plays out a little differently since the availability of high-end camera-
equipped smartphones and the rise of selfies has almost been simultaneous (see Chapter 1).
However, we would be served well to heed Donnachie’s separation of the camera-phone and the
selfie in terms of a causal relationship. That is why I suggest that the selfie is a mode of an
image-making, in which what Mottahedeh calls the “forebears of the selfie” can be aptly
classified as selfies.
What is more important then, is what a selfie does. A digital self-image becomes a selfie
proper, only when it is meant to be shared and only when it is oriented towards an outside,
towards an audience or towards an imagined community of lookers—a point also made by

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Donnachie when she states that an image “only becomes a selfie once shared on social-media”
(Donnachie 65). In this, the selfie represents a publicization of the private image. This is not to
say that earlier photographs were not public; as Daniel Rubinstein points out, “photography has
always been a distributive art form” (Rubinstein 173). But the selfie’s embeddedness in the
network transforms the relationship between individual bodies and the public. This is not a
“false” image, but virtual one. The public in the age of social media exists as a virtual public. In
relation to this, Benschop adapts the Thomas Theorem (“If men define situations as real, they are
real in their consequences” [Thomas & Thomas 572]) and writes: “If people define networks as
real, they are real in their consequences […] The new social reality of electronic communication
(of computer-mediated interactions and networks) is virtual, 'just like reality'” (Benschop).
In both Indian campaigns mentioned above, social media became the site for contesting
this public image. This was a semiotic battle over what the community ought to be, or to borrow
from Benedict Anderson, what imagination of the community is to be invested in. I invoke
Anderson’s Imagined Communities not for its focus on the nation-state, but for a latent theory of
the image that undergirds the work. In the introduction to his book, Anderson writes that the
nation as a community is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never
know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each
lives the image of the communion” (Anderson 6). The reverse of this theory of nationalism is a
theory of the image—for Anderson, the image-function is what brings a community into being.
Of course, Anderson makes his argument in relation to the impact of print capitalism on the
emergence of nationalism, but a larger connection can be made between the material conditions
of technology and community formation. Anderson implicitly places his understanding of
community and communication as being functionally related. The nation-state as an imagined

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community survives, first and foremost as an internalized image. As Ernesto Laclau puts it, “if
there is an image of the communion it must also be an image of the communion” (Laclau 24).
8

Laclau points out one crucial aspect that we can bring into the discussion of selfie solidarity and
community action—the gap between the image and the picture. Even as nationalism thrived on
print capitalism, the function of print was to create an image of the nation-state.
In corollary, one can say that an image need not always be pictorial (although in common
parlance it often means visual image). For instance, the term “self-image” refers to an
individual’s abstract idea of himself or herself, which includes but is not limited to the visual
image, impressions and attitudes as well as persona. But a picture is an image made flesh.
9
Like
the members of the imagined national community, participants in the “Kiss of Love” and
“Students Against ABVP” campaigns need not necessarily have met or known each other,
although in these cases, the issues themselves meant that there was a likelihood that they did. But
reactions to these issues are based on a spontaneously shared image of what India ought to be
like, and the selfies were a physical manifestation of that image. It follows then, that the public is
also an image of the public. Any account of the selfie that admonishes it as narcissism, tout
court, fails to recognize the selfie’s affective potentialities, its ability to accumulate value
through viral circulation and what Jakob Svensson calls the “expressive turn” in practices of
citizenship in the digital era. Following the work of Ulrich Beck, Svensson theorizes that the
contemporary era is the era of reflexive modernity, where the “making of oneself” (Svensson 45)
becomes an end in itself. For Svensson, contemporary theories of political participation need to
take this shift into account, to be able to locate the “political” at all. Supporters of the “Kiss of
Love” and “Students Against ABVP” movements who stood in front of the camera with text in
hand were also in some senses, “motivated by a will to express, perform, maintain, create and

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recreate identities” (Svensson 50). This is one image of the ideal imagined community, filtered
through the prism of the self. The selfie becomes a way of expressing this image, in opposition to
other imaginations that are perched on ideas of tradition, patriotism and exclusivity.

The “Civil Contract” of the Selfie: Social Media and Civilian Action
The use of the selfie to express community formation and individual participation in
such formation can also be seen in more instrumental settings such as “civilian” acts that employ
social media. I use the term “civilian” in to denote those actions, movements and reactions that
emerge out of non-governmental initiatives and are oriented towards civilian spaces and
concerns. I call this kind of public engagement instrumental, to distinguish them from more
spontaneous, organic reaction formations such as those seen in “Kiss of Love” and “Students
Against ABVP.” Such participation is called for as part of a rhetorical strategy to meet certain
pre-determined goals. In the light of increasing individualization of politics, these kinds of
moves recognize that civic participation can only be guaranteed if placed within the framework
of individual interest. This is a little different from spontaneous formations around issues in
which the call to action is decentralized and develops organically in a chain of reactions. Instead,
organized drives for civic engagement call the individual to action as a calculated move in which
the purported good of the community is perched on the completion of a goal, and filters
individual self-interest through the rhetoric of the common good.
In India, some of this civic engagement can be seen in case of issues around the
prevalence of potholes and quality of roads in urban spaces. In Mumbai for instance, a Non-
Governmental Organization called the Sahas Foundation started a “Selfie with Pothole” drive in
2016, as part of its larger road safety awareness campaign. Sahas Foundation was formed in

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2013 with a focus on issues such as social justice and education, welfare of senior citizens and
the disabled, improving urban infrastructure (road, water electricity) and to function as a pressure
group for ensuring good governance (“Vision and Mission”). Given Mumbai’s perennial
problems of road safety, especially during the rainy season, the pothole issue fell squarely within
the ambit of the Foundation’s operations. For Sahas Foundation, social media provided a new
and innovative way of engaging the public in social and civic issues (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: A web-banner advertising Sahas Foundation’s social media strategy.

In relation to Mumbai’s roads, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (aka the
Municipial Corporation of Greater Mumbai, and abbreviated either as MCGM or BMC) has
consistently come under fire for the lack of maintenance and repair. Sahas Foundation came up
with a three-pronged strategy to create awareness about the issue—a selfie contest titled “Selfie
with Khadda” (pothole), a public participation drive called “Khadda Rangoli” (rangoli referring
to colored decorative patterns made with powdered colors) and a “Pothole Utsav” (festival) that

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was held in collaboration with the radio station, 93.5 FM. The “Pothole Utsav” was a public
performance event in which people were invited to dance and perform prayers near potholes. The
“Pothole Utsav” incidentally, has existed as an independent radio program hosted by 93.5 FM
since 2013, in which listeners are invited to interact with the RJ on their show, and by
participating online on Facebook. In this, Sahas Foundation collaborated with the radio station to
ensure that BMC corporators themselves would witness public participation that was perched on
satire and ridicule. Likewise, the “Khadda Rangoli” was also meant to take the protest to the
streets, and although it was initiated by Sahas Foundation, it was woven into the Pothole Utsav.
In this Sahas Foundation was joined by 93.5 FM’s RJ (Radio Jockey) Malishka, who covered the
event.
10
Here, Mumbai residents were invited to create colored patterns around potholes to
highlight them and saw significant public participation. In many places, the patterns were
accompanied by the slogan for the drive: “MCGM SharamKaro, kaamkarom” meaning “Shame
on MCGM, do your job” (“Khadda Rangoli”). In effect, the “Pothole Utsav” and “Khadda
Rangoli” were a kind of performative citizenship that relied on interactivity and public display
(Fig. 6). At the same time, as Catherine Bouko points out, such selfie campaigns favor the
“autonomy and creativity” of citizens by forging connections between their personal engagement
with causes, and their lifestyle concerns (Bouko 54).

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Fig. 6: Web-banner advertisement for Sahas Foundation’s “Selfie With Khadda” contest (left) and a scene from the “Khadda
Rangoli” (right).

The “Selfie with Khadda” contest, in that sense, was a calculated extension of that
performativity in a social media context. The contest was initiated with the idea that selfies can
raise awareness about unique issues when the individual places their body in front of a
background. The contest gave out three cash prizes of Rs. 10,000, Rs. 5000 and Rs. 3000, as well
as gift hampers. The very idea of a “contest” around the issue is interesting because it brings to
light a certain contractual lure to the idea of civic engagement. At the same time, the use of the
selfie in such civic drives is less spontaneous and affective, than a deliberate us of what W.L
Bennett identifies as the ethos of “crowd-sourced inclusive personal action frames” (Bennett 22).
For Bennett, such personal action frames allow more easy identification with a cause than more
collectively-oriented action. Bennett writes this in relation to the Occupy Movement, and his
ideas are very much applicable to the “Kiss of Love” and “Students Against ABVP” movements
as well. But it also applies to more instrumental action-drives such as Sahas Foundation’s civic
activities. However, we begin to see here, a divide between the spontaneous and the managed.

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The contest-based idea of civic engagement filters collective action through individuated
frameworks, but also recognizes that the success of civic drives must take place through
managed crowdsourcing. In Sahas Foundation’s selfie contests for example, prizes were given
out on the basis of a selection process that involved panels of judges who selected images for
their originality in foregrounding the issue. The foregrounding of the issue, was very much
dependent on the literal background of the image that would fit the narrative of shaming
governmental bodies.
Mumbai is not alone in its employment of the selfie for highlighting pothole problems.
The same trend has emerged in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru and has caught on in other
cities such as Hyderabad as well. In Bengaluru, a similar campaign also titled
“#SelfieWithPothole” was started in 2015, to highlight the tech-hub’s massive road safety
problem. The online campaign was started by a business professional, Rajdeep Ghosh who says
he conceived of the campaign as a way of both involving citizens and alerting municipal
authorities (D’Souza). The campaign received active coverage on television channels, especially
NewsX, which collated Tweets as well as images sent to the channel via WhatsApp, to alert
Bengaluru’s municipal authorities about the problem (NewsX, Youtube) (Fig.7). The campaign
also spread to the neighboring city of Hyderabad, where residents started using the hashtag to
highlight their own pothole problems. Hyderabad’s selfie contest inviting images of pothole
ridden streets was cheekily titled, “POTography Contest” (Fig.7).

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Fig. 6: Screen grab from News X's coverage of the Bangalore pothole selfie campaign (left), and a satirical image
posted on Twitter as part of Hyderabad's "potography" contest (right).

In all three cities—Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, there was a vivid sense of civic
intervention made possible by social media platforms. At the same time, individual bodies taking
selfies in public spaces were seen not as a threat, but as potential for positive change. This is a
striking paradox when compared to reactions around Mumbai’s selfie deaths described in the
earlier chapter, where selfie takers were immediately seen as narcissistic and skirting the borders
between life and death. Clearly, when the bodies of selfie takers are framed within the rhetoric of
common good, they begin to be seen in a different light. This highlights the instrumental nature
of the relationship between individual and the public, wherein one is legitimized when filtered
through the other. But at the same time, this kind of relationship also exists as a kind of “civil
contract.”
Fig. 7: Screen grab from News X's coverage of the Bangalore pothole selfie campaign (left), and a satirical image posted on
Twitter as part of Hyderabad's "potography" contest (right).

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The term civil contract is used by Ariella Azoulay to explain the relationship between
photography and citizenship. For Azoulay, photography creates a civil contract among
“photographers, photographed persons, and spectators” with each party knowing exactly “what is
expected of them and what to expect from the others” (Azoulay 24). According to Azoulay, this
is an assemblage of civic skills that goes beyond the sovereign power of the state and creates a
deterritorialized “citizenry of photography” (Azoulay 99). Azoulay of course, writes in relation
to photographs of human pain and suffering and the ways in which the circulation of these
images imagines an audience of a citizen-ethos, rather than legal citizen status. But her idea of
“civil contract” can also shed light on how self-shot images of individual bodies become
legitimized within the sphere of civil action once framed within a certain rhetoric of the common
good. If the “civil contract of photography” imagined the spectator, the subject and the
photographer, as largely three distinguishable categories, in the “civil contract” of the selfie, or
what Adi Kuntsman calls “selfie citizenship” (Kunstsman 14) the three are enmeshed together. In
its attachment to collectivized individual concerns, the selfie attains a social value that
legitimizes the public act of selfie-taking.
Such individualized action exists within a larger digital ecology of non-governmental and
governmental bodies that want to emphasize increasing individual participation. For instance, the
online platform “ichangemycity” that focuses on four cities—Bengaluru, Mumbai,
Bhubaneshwar and Delhi, has launched a web-platform and a mobile phone app to facilitate such
participation. The website describes itself as “a locational online social networking platform for
civic action [that] uses the power of the internet to connect people locally and helps them discuss
and act on their civic issues” (“About: IChangeMyCity”). The website contains a complaints
section where users can choose the category of their complaint (for e.g. garbage, potholes,

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electricity etc.) and the location of their complaint and forward it to the concerned government
body. The app too, follows the same plan integrating geolocation, cellphone imaging and civic
action (Janaagraha, Google Play). The model has been adopted by the Greater Hyderabad
Municipal Corporation (GHMC) that has released an app for its various functions including,
among other things, a grievance reporting function for “manholes, potholes, open dumping
points, streetlights, etc.” While such apps are not specifically selfie-based, they preface
Kuntsman’s definition of selfie citizenship—“claims made by ordinary citizens via their
networked self-portraits, created, distributed and consumed at the times of algorithmic visibility,
large-scale dataisation, globalised participatory politics and biometric governance” (Kuntsman
13). The “civil contract” of the selfie then, exists within a larger digital domain—one that
recognizes the individual citizen first and foremost, as a user and a consumer of media forms;
and in asking them to produce their own images for the instrumental realization of goals, non-
government and government bodies also allow them to produce a language of citizenship itself.
The instrumental production of such selfies then, is also the production of an image of
citizenship.
But even while it appears “deterritorialized” the civil contract of the selfie can often be
co-opted and re-territorialized by institutional and state powers. There are instances where the
selfie has been literally used in policing and surveillance. In the state of Assam for instance the
police force arrested two rhino poachers tracking down their location based on selfies they had
taken and shared (Parashar). Similarly, in the state of Andhra Pradesh a Maoist rebel leader was
arrested on the basis of evidence drawn from a selfie found on a confiscated laptop; the police
had no recent picture of the person, and the selfie was used to both identify him and track down
his location (G Siva). Such instances are a literal manifestation of warnings issued by scholars

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such as Heidi Cooley and Henry Giroux. For Giroux, selfie-culture is a kind of self-surveillance
that feeds into the logic of the surveillance state that now encourages people to self-monitor and
track themselves (Giroux 162). Similarly, Cooley points out how our everyday technological
habits such as talking, texting, posting and sharing have made us “locatable—and measurable—
in real time” (Cooley 22).
But such state power can also work in more subtle ways when incorporated into the
benevolent façade of the paternalist state. This is most notably seen in government sponsored
schemes that invite citizen selfies. Unlike civilian initiatives that mobilize selfies and social
media as means of pressurizing government bodies, government-initiated schemes re-insert the
language of civilian affectivity into the framework of legal citizenship and duties. This
rearranges the terms of democratic engagement that becomes more and more managed by the
state. Even as it appears to evoke the citizen’s choice, engagement itself takes place through the
state’s pedagogic voice that interpellates the individual citizen. Here, the goal is to create
collective consent through the language of public opinion and participatory democracy, and
though it does target the same individualized, expressive politics, it is at best, a state-managed
relationship.

The Consensus Machine: “Swachh Bharat”, “Selfie with Daughter” and Election Selfies
In India, this management is an offshoot of recent efforts at boosting e-governance and
citizen participation. In 2015, the BJP-led government announced its “Digital India Initiative”
that aimed to “transform” India through the power of IT. The government describes Digital India
as an “Umbrella Programme” that would cover many departments and bring many pre-existing
schemes under its ambit (“Digital India”). However, as scholars like Biswarup Sen have argued,

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such an initiative is not merely aimed at increasing bureaucratic efficiency and the day-to-day
functioning of the government, and instead “rethinks the nation through one central notion:
information” (Sen 2). Participatory, e-governance modes can be said to “reterritorialize” the civil
contract of digital action, by rephrasing it in the language of information. Every individual who
participates in such initiatives does so with the tacit acceptance of becoming trackable pieces of
national data. This logic applies most clearly to the introduction of “Aadhar” or Unique Identity
(UID) cards that fuses biometric and demographic information of individual citizens. But the
logic can also be extended to less obvious forms such as digital images. The slogan of the
Digitize India Platform is, quite crucially, “transforming pixels into data” (“About DIP”). The
platform imagines a mass of Indian citizens who will feed constant data over a crowd-sourcing
platform—or as the homepage of the website puts it, “a Digital Contributor [who] will help the
country to transform into a knowledge driven economy” (“Digitize India”). The focus here of
course, is on documents that will be uploaded by citizens, validated and tagged by government
agents, with the meta-data then making the scanned documents searchable for purposes of
governance. However, the slogan of the platform itself points us to a very important fact. Once
documents are available as digital images, they become available as packets of information and
insofar as digital images are also made up of pixels, the logic extends to them as well. As Heidi
Cooley points out, “a picture appended with metadata becomes less about what it represents than
the information it carries” (Cooley 62). While not all digital images are neat little surveillance
machines, the point is that digitization opens them up to the possibility of sovereign
manipulation. Or as Adi Kuntsman warns us, notwithstanding the political potential of citizen
selfies, we would be well-served to keep in mind that this is a “new techno-social practice that is
embedded not only in new forms of agency, but also in new forms of governance and violence”

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(Kuntsman 15). When co-opted by the state machinery, “selfie citizenship” no longer coheres
within the idea of a civil contract. Rather, the civil contract is dissolved by the re-emergence of
sovereign power disguised as vox populi.
The state-machinery uses the language of digital media participation to rearticulate older
“utterances” of the citizenship imagination. One such state-sponsored scheme in India is the
“Swachh Bharat Abhiyan” (literally “Clean India Mission”) scheme that is aimed at improving
the state of sanitation nationwide. Although the scheme itself is not part of the Digital India
mission, nor has it been conceived of as a selfie-centered scheme, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
also falls back on the selfie as a way of eliciting participation. The scheme was launched in 2014,
shortly after the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) coalition came to power and was
part of BJP’s election manifesto which stated that the scheme would yield results by 2019, by
“taking it up in mission mode” (BJP Election Manifesto). As of 2016, the government had
outsourced the Swachh Bharat publicity campaign to Ogilvy Delhi, a branch of the New York-
based advertising and PR firm Ogilvy and Mather (ETBrandEquity) to boost the project with
“everyday stimulation to bring about a behavioural change” (Venugopal and Anand).
Beyond such advertising initiatives, the Swachh Bharat scheme has seen the introduction
of selfie schemes and contests at the local-levels. For instance, in the state of Punjab, the
Ludhiana District Administration started a selfie contest titled “Selfie With My Sauchalya”
(toilet) in 2016. The contest invited beneficiaries of the Swachh Bharat scheme to click selfies
with their government-built toilets and send them to the district administration via WhatsApp or
over email (“Now a Selfie Campaign”) and the winners of the contest were awarded at a special
function to encourage people to take advantage of the scheme (“'Selfie with my Shauchalya'
winners”). Similarly, in the state of Jharkhand, the Mango Notified Area Committee (MNAC),

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an urban administration body that administers the suburb of Manga, has held a “Selfie with
Dustbin” contest in 2017, to spread awareness about cleanliness in the city. The contest is slated
to give away three smartphones as prizes as well as certificates to the first fifty entrants
(Choudhary).
Such schemes feel similar in structure and intent to the Sahas Foundation’s contest, and
their technological motivations do, in fact overlap. But it is equally important to recognize where
the schemes originate. The fact that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is a government sponsored
scheme, and more specifically, the fact that it is part of a party’s political agenda, cannot be
divorced from the question of motivation. Critics of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan have raised
concerns about its blindness to caste and its multiple erasures of systemic problems in the state of
public cleanliness in the country. For instance, Anand Teltumbde points out that “uncleanliness
is uncritically attributed to poverty” (Teltumbde 11) in Modi’s vision of a clean India. Teltumbde
is especially critical of Modi’s decision to launch the program from the Valmiki Colony in Delhi,
that is inhabited by members of an oppressed Dalit community who have historically been forced
to work as manual scavengers, and states that this decision “reinforced the association between
Valmikis and scavenging” (Teltumbde 11). For Teltumbde, the main motivation behind the
Swachh Bharat Abiyan, is “the supremacist obsession of the Bharatiya Janata Party” (Teltumbde
11). Other critics have echoed similar opinions. For instance, Subhash Gatade points out how the
campaign is completely blind to the presence and the role of ragpickers in Delhi, “who are
largely invisible but play a major role in the garbage management of the city” (Gatade 29).
Gatade points out how manual scavenging is still attached to the Dalit communities; given the
high-risk, often fatal nature of the work, and the government’s indifference to the death of
sanitation workers who work with little or no protective gear (Gatade 30). Given this deliberate

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erasure of caste from the narrative, calls for “Swachh Bharat” ignore “larger complex reality and
perpetuate historical asymmetries, injustices and varied forms of casteism” (Gatade 29). Seen in
this light, selfie contests promoting the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan align with a selective
understanding of democracy and participatory government. Or, as Robin Jeffrey writes, the
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan “responded to the yearning of mobile, caste-Hindu, middle-class
Indians to be free of the slur, often expressed by others, that 'India is a dirty place'” (Jeffrey 816).
Such contests and schemes are not only pedagogical in tone and purpose, but also promote a
particular kind of pedagogy and participation that remains blind to inequalities of caste, class and
religion. These selfie contests, while appearing to be elective, work by delivering the state’s
message through various kinds of peer pressure. Further, the images for such contests themselves
are almost always not freely available over social media networks, such as the ones for the Kiss
of Love movement and the Students Against ABVP movements. Instead, they circulate in news
sources (websites as well as newspapers) as samples of participation and thereby behave more
like press photographs and PR material. In this managerial logic, the “civil contract” of the selfie
is usurped by the political fetishes of sovereign.
A similar use of the language of the selfie is also seen in the BJP-led NDA government’s
“Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana (BBBP)” (“Save the girl child, Educate the girl child
Mission”) mission. The scheme was part of the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto that claimed that
the party was committed to “Women’s Empowerment and welfare” (BJP Election Manifesto
2014) and is aimed at addressing the skewed child sex ratio in the country, that had declined
from 976 in 1961 to 918 IN 2011 (“About Scheme”). As part of the scheme, the BJP adopted a
selfie campaign that was started by Sunil Jaglan, a village headman based in the northern Indian
state of Haryana. The campaign was started by Jaglan in June 2015 as a contest in his own

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village, Bibipur, giving out cash rewards and trophies to winners.
11
The campaign soon caught
the eye of the BJP and Narendra Modi promoted it on the June 28
th
, 2015 edition of his monthly
radio address “Mann ki Baat” (“My Thoughts”). In his address, Modi stated:
A few days back a Sarpanch in a small remote village of Haryana,
Sri Sunil Jaglan ji launched ‘Selfie with Daughter’ campaign. Such
an environment was created that every father wished to click a
selfie of himself with his daughter and post it on the social media
[…] I request you all to take a selfie with your daughter and post it
on #selfie with daughter. And do not forget to post a tagline around
the theme of “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” with it, whatever be the
language it can be in Hindi, English, your mother tongue or your
native language. And I promise to re-tweet the most inspirational
tagline with you and your daughter’s selfie. We can turn “Beti
Bachao Beti Padhao” into a mass movement. I urge you all to take
forward the programme launched by Sri Sunil in Bibipur village of
Haryana. I request you all to post on #selfie with daughter. (“Mann
ki Baat”)

The Prime Minister’s address effectively tied the local contest to the larger rhetoric of the party’s
scheme. Crucially his exhortation to the listeners, specifically asked them to post pictures with
captions and hashtags, leading to a flurry of photographs being posted on Twitter and Facebook.
In effect, the Selfie With Daughter campaign was now merged with the BBBP Scheme, although
it originated outside of the party’s ambit. “Selfie With Daughter” is now an official part of BJP’s
social media campaign, even while the trademark remains with Sunil Jaglan, who has also
registered it as a foundation in 2017. The campaign also maintains a website where photographs
submitted with the hashtag are added to a gallery that is being touted as an “online museum” for
selfies (Fig. 8).

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Fig. 7: The website banner declaring it to be an “online museum” (top). (Middle) An example of a selfie from the
website in the homepage, and (bottom) in downloaded form in a "frame."

The website’s counter claims a total of 17005 selfies in store (Selfie With Daughter:
n.pag.). However, only the latest ones—35 or so are available for public viewing. Contributors
do have the option of finding their own selfie by providing their name and phone number, which
Fig. 8: The website banner declaring it to be an “online museum” (top). (Middle) An example of a selfie from the website
in the homepage, and (bottom) in downloaded form in a "frame."

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they also have to provide when submitting the image. Visitors have the option of viewing the
available selfies or downloading them in a frame (Fig.8). This effectively shifts the register of
the selfie’s ephemerality, by bestowing the fleeting, everyday nature of selfie imagery with a
greater significance. Of course, this is by no means a physical frame, but it simulates the “fixed”
function of the frame. If selfies are about the fleeting and the ephemeral, the idea of a frame or
even that of a museum, embeds the digital artefact in a mnemonic framework that is as much
political as it is formal. It is worth recognizing that both the “frame” and the “museum”, are
ways of fixing objects and memories, and by simulating the memorial function, the Selfie With
Daughter website inserts its digital images into the service of BJP’s ideology.
The website invites the user to crystallize their own memories, but within the framework
of the party’s rhetoric. In being asked to contribute to the party’s agenda, users/senders are asked
to work for the party, even as they seem to be with the cause. This is a form of “immaterial
labor,” which Maurizio Lazzarato defines as “a series of activities that are not normally
recognized as "work” […] defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes,
consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato 132). Aligning more with
Hardt’s conceptualization of the manipulation of affects, the brightly colored frame with
inspirational words in cursive font (prefixing the daughter’s name with “My Angel” and the
phrase “A daughter is one of the most beautiful gift by God”) endow the image with a
sentimental value that masks its status as affective, immaterial labor.
While women’s empowerment is an issue that needs to be an addressed in the Indian
context, it has to take place at deeper grass-root levels rather than as part of political and PR
strategy. Women’s empowerment schemes must exude a sense of “being with” women’s issues
in a larger communitarian sense that must be reflected in policies, agenda and ideology. Sharing

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an image against an act of outrage, for example in case of the “Kiss of Love” campaign, is vastly
different from the mechanics of the Selfie With Daughter campaign, which is a calculated
political strategy that does not align with the larger realities of the BJP’s stand on women, or
with the more deeply embedded structural problems surrounding gender and technological
access. For instance, in their study of the cell-phone boon in India, Robin Jeffrey and Assa
Doron point out how, despite bringing communication access to underprivileged classes and
castes, cell-phone access in India still hasn’t penetrated the male-dominated domestic sphere. In
the rural and small-town communities that they study, “The mobile phone was viewed as an
object of distrust, unless it was monitored by the husband and family” (Jeffrey and Doron 175).
The gap does not stop at just cellphone access but also internet access, broadly conceived. Three
years after the publication of Doron and Jeffry’s book, the IAMAI report of 2016 reveals a
persistent gap between the number of women internet users in India, 40% (as opposed to 60% of
male users) in urban India and a dismal 25% (as opposed to 75% male users) in rural India
(“Internet in India” 6). As the India Exclusion Report 2016 points out, “The most vulnerable
group in terms of complete digital exclusion is women and the condition becomes worse when
they belong to the lower rungs of the economic ladder and reside in rural areas” (Manzar et al.
76).
This gendered access to technology can also be seen in reports of de facto “bans” on
women’s cellphone use in states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat for reasons varying
from sexual promiscuity to distraction from studies and household chores, to preventing
elopement and inter-caste marriage (Reuters 2012, 2017; Al Jazeera 2016; The Hindu 2017). In
2013, Raghunandan Sharma a BJP MLA in the state of Madhya Pradesh raked up controversy
when he went on record saying that women should be barred from wearing jeans and using

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cellphones (“No cellphones for unmarried girls”). While Sharma later declared that these views
did not reflect the views of the party, such denials do little to bridge the gap between the wide
gaps between the BBBP’s official stand on women’s empowerment and the realities of gender
disparities in India. In fact, the BJP has a distinct notoriety when it comes to online harassment
of women (Arya; Roy; Mohan; Prabhu). Ironically, this was evident even when critics of Modi
and the BJP expressed their mistrust of the BBBP scheme and the Selfie With Daughter
campaign. For instance, actress Shruti Seth outright called the scheme a product of Modi’s
“selfie obsession” and in another tweet, wrote, “A selfie is not a device to bring about social
change” with the hashtag “#selfieobsessedPM” (Bajwa) (Fig. 9).

Fig. 8: Shruti Seth's critical Twitter post.

Social activist and women’s right advocate Kavita Krishnan also tweeted critically about
the scheme, with a snide reference to a case of illegal surveillance of a woman that Narendra
Modi and current BJP President Amit Shah were alleged to have ordered in 2009 (“Top
Fig. 9: Shruti Seth's critical Twitter post.

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Narendra Modi aide”). Both Seth and Krishnan were subjected to a volley of online abuse by
Modi and BJP supporters. In her response to such abuse, Seth wrote:
Men who were busy hash-tagging their selfies with their daughters
one minute called me slanderous names the next. Asked me if I
knew who my real father was. Questioned if I had been sexually
abused as a child and hence was opposed to the idea of a selfie
with my father. (Seth)

In 2015, Krishnan, alluding to one particularly vitriolic comment that called her “a retard” who
should have been killed before birth,” wrote that such tweets attached conditions of acceptable
femininity to the girl-child, before she can be saved. Krishnan calls the BBBP Scheme and the
Selfie With Daughter campaigns a symptom of BJP’s paternalism, that although benevolent on
the surface, “does not question the idea that parents have a right to decide, based on their
assessment of a daughter’s moral worth, whether or not she has a right to exist” (Krishnan). For
Krishnan, social media campaigns such these are content in addressing women’s issues at a
surface level, while deeper issues of systemic violence, opposition to inter-caste marriage,
imposition of dress codes and other restrictions on women’s freedoms remain unchallenged.
A more recent example of such systemic violence can be seen in the 2017 case in
Chandigarh when a young DJ, Varnika Kundu was stalked by two men. In her police report
Kundu stated that she was almost abducted by the men, one of who happened to be the son of
BJP’s Haryana chief, Subhash Barala. In response to the incident, Kundu was subjected to online
victim shaming on Facebook and Twitter, and the Vice-President of Haryana BJP, Ramveer
Bhatti even went on record to say that it was Kundu’s fault that she was out at midnight
(Sunderraman). In response to this, women started posting selfies on Twitter with the hashtag
“#AintNoCinderella” (“#AintNoCinderella: Women fight”) (Fig. 10). This spontaneous
emergence of a hashtag and a string of selfies around the issue of women’s safety—especially

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one sparked off by the paternalistic remarks of a BJP official, reveals the contradictions between
BJP’s social media campaigns around women’s empowerment, and the attitudes of its own
leaders and party workers. This spontaneous response to outrage stands in stark contrast to the
carefully managed optimism of the Selfie With Daughter Campaign.

Fig. 9: Selfies uploaded in response to the victim shaming against Varnika Kundu.

But perhaps nothing encapsulates the critique of the Selfie With Daughter campaign than
a Facebook post by Nishrin Jafri Husain, daughter of Congress Party member Ehsan Jafri who
was killed in the Gujarat riots of 2002 (Fig. 11). Narendra Modi was initially implicated in the
brutal death of Ehsan Jafri, with allegations being raised that Jafri had called Modi many times
asking to be saved from the rampaging mob of rioters. However, Modi’s name was cleared in a
Fig. 10: Selfies uploaded in response to the victim shaming against Varnika Kundu.

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2016 ruling that placed the blame on Jafri himself, saying that he had instigated the mob by
pointing a gun (Mukhopadhyay).

Fig. 10: Nishrin Jafri Hussain's Facebook post featuring a photograph of her and her father.

On June 28, 2015, the day when Modi announced the official adoption of the Selfie With
Daughter Campaign, Nishrin Jafri Husain shared an old photograph of herself with her father on
Facebook with the caption: “#SelfieWithDaughter: This one will haunt him for ever.” This was a
stark reminder of the incommensurable gap between BJP’s managerial approach to social media
affectivity and the violence of its partisan politics, that is anything but a commitment to being
with. The impact of such managerial tactics however, can be seen even earlier during the 2014
General Elections that brought Narendra Modi to power. The 2014 elections were the first
Fig. 11: Nishrin Jafri Hussain's Facebook post featuring a photograph of her and her father.

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instance of the selfie’s visible impact on public life in India and it also points towards the merger
of the political sphere with the digital ecology. Digital participation and digital invitations to
physical participation in political activity have become part of the electoral landscape in India.
If the electoral process is the ultimate expression of democratic opinion, then voter
participation is an indicator of the state of democratic institutions. In India, the use of selfies has
been advocated as a way of drawing voters into polling booths by the Election Commission of
India (ECI), the highest, autonomous body in the country for all matters related to elections,
ranging from the conduct of polls, maintaining ethical electoral conduct and allocation and re-
allocation of party symbols. In 2009, the ECI started a program called SVEEP (Systematic Voter
Education and Electoral Participation) to increase voter awareness among Indian citizen, and
boost polling rates. The ECI has planned to implement the program in three phases—SVEEP-I
(2009-2013), SVEEP-II (2013-current) and SVEEP-III (being planned), with each phase
including new strategies developed from the experiences of the previous ones (“History”). The
program itself is structured at the national, state and district levels, with each SVEEP body
working towards SVEEP’s larger goals within its allocated areas. The SVEEP-II phase has seen
an increased awareness of the impact of social media, and this has partly been because of its
focus on a younger, more technologically savvy demographic. The 6
th
National Voter’s Day Fest
(“Matdata Mahotsav”) held by the EIC, featured “selfie walls and photo booths” (Aggarwal) to
promote voter education. This also remains a prime focus in the SVEEP-III plan outline that
aims to use “social media and other new media for outreach” (SVEEP III 20) with a specific
focus on connecting with youth over platforms such as “whatsapp, other mobile apps, facebook,
instagram, twitter, sms, email etc.” (SVEEP III 23).

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Crucially, the Project Plan for SVEEP-III, 2016-2020 sees engagement and interventions
over social media as a way of overcoming urban apathy (SVEEP III 31) and includes capturing
“voter registration experiences through social media” (SVEEP III 51) as part of its operational
plans. The SVEEP plan for the Assembly General Elections 2016 in West Bengal, also included
plans for a voter selfie-contest. The plan mentions: “We will ask voters/ public through social
media to upload their selfies showing inked index finger (indicating that they have voted). We
will mention their names on EC’s Facebook page to draw engagement” (SVEEP in West Bengal
22). In the state of Tamil Nadu, the EC had planned an election selfie contest in the Sivaganga
district to promote the 2016 state assembly elections; to circumvent government regulations that
prohibit selfie taking inside polling booths, voters were encouraged to take selfies with the booth
in the background and post in on the social media page of the district administration (“Tamil
Nadu polls”). In the Karaikal district of Tamil Nadu, the district administration set up a selfie-
corner at a college to spread awareness about voting, demonstrating some of the outreach ideas
put forward by SVEEP (“SVEEP” Government of Puducherry). Similarly, the “Comprehensive
SVEEP Plan” for the 2016 Assembly elections in the state of Assam also planned to implement a
selfie scheme for “first time voters” (“Comprehensive SVEEP Plan For Enhanced” 32). In fact,
in Assam’s Dima Hasao district, a selfie contest was held by the Assam Rifles Regiment of the
Army to draw voters into booths (Bhattacharjee) While this was not directly under the aegis of
the EIC alone, it reflects the same approach to selfie-taking as the SVEEP plans, with a
connection being made between young voter populations, smartphones and the allure of the
contest (Bhattacharjee). For the ECI and its subsidiary branches then, the selfie presents itself as
a unique opportunity to draw seemingly disenchanted and apathetic voters back into polling
booths. In the ECI’s version of digital participatory democracy, social media and the selfie take

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work more as a lure that aligns with the ECI’s pedagogic voice (Fig.12). Such measures are
seemingly designed to magnetically drive the electoral public back to public participation
conceived in a more traditional sense.

Fig. 11: The EC's pedagogic voice, expressed through this web comic on its Facebook page.

Some of the planned actions in SVEEP-II and SVEEP-III are reflective of the
individualization of politics mentioned earlier. Election selfie contests have been held even
outside the ambit of the EIC, by non-state bodies. For instance, news agencies such as the news
channel ABP News, and the online portal of India Today held election selfie contests in 2014,
during the time of the General Elections. The ABP contest described itself as the channel’s way
of asking citizen’s to “exercise the ballot & vote for the right candidate” (“#ABPSelfie: Cast
your vote”). The India Today contest was advertised as a “dance of democracy” and a
contribution towards making “a formidable India” and offered gift hampers and a chance to be
featured on the website as prizes (“Selfie contest: Go, vote”). The trend has continued with ABP
Fig. 12: The EC's pedagogic voice, expressed through this web comic on its Facebook page.

234
News holding an election selfie contest for the 2017 state elections for Uttar Pradesh as well
(“UP Polls: Send,” Youtube). In images seen in these online pages, the one striking common
feature is the ink-striped forefinger that is a mark of having voted (Fig. 13). This is a somewhat
global phenomenon seen in Twitter’s introduction of an inked-finger emoji to promote the 2016
elections in Philippines (Villa) (Fig. 13).

Fig. 12: An image from India Today's Election Selfie Contest (left) and a Phillipines Election banner featuring the
inked-finger Twitter emoji (right).

While the individual’s face still remains part of the image (although in some cases only
the finger is present), the face as the “most subjective manifestation of man” (Balazs 25) is
displaced as the true focus of the photograph. The iconicity afforded by the image of the face
becomes less relevant than the countability afforded by the ink-striped finger. While the election
Fig. 13: An image from India Today's Election Selfie Contest (left) and a Phillipines Election banner featuring the inked-finger
Twitter emoji (right).

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selfie asks voters to represent themselves as individual citizens who have voted, in the larger
pedagogic discourse of selfie-citizenship, they become countable, findable and trackable as
population. Managed political campaigns use this aspect of the election selfie while maintaining
a kind of personalized veneer. The goal in such campaigns is to gain popularity by numbers,
while individual citizens are invited to participate with the promise of being part of some greater
national narrative. This same tendency was seen in the BJP’s campaign during the 2014 General
Elections.

Selfies and the Electoral Subject: Narendra Modi and the address of the selfie
A May 2014 issue of Open magazine, an Indian weekly news digest, celebrated the
victory of Narendra Modi, the new Indian prime minister, with an iconic portrait with the caption
“Triumph of the Will” (Fig. 14). Given the pronounced right-wing leanings of BJP the reference
to Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 film might have been more than just a mere play on words. Added to
the oft-iterated implication of the BJP in the Gujarat riots of 2002 during Narendra Modi’s chief
ministership, Open magazine’s low-angle portrait of the incumbent prime minister, together with
the caption, seemed to convey a deliberate construction of Modi as a man of iron will.

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Fig. 13: Open Magazine’s celebratory cover image of Narendra Modi.

However, it is not oversized, spectacular images such as these that won Modi the
elections. Rather, Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign was marked by a strong digital presence,
with regular updates being posted through a Twitter account. Selfies played an important part in
this campaign, with the politician posting pictures of himself with his party’s electoral symbol,
with celebrities, and with family members. Contrary to Open Magazine’s Bonapartean portrait of
Narendra Modi, his own uploads seemed to exude a very different aura. The more amateur look
Fig. 14: Open Magazine’ s celebratory cover image of Narendra Modi.

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of Narendra Modi’s selfies conveyed the sense of a more believable person rather than an
inaccessible icon. This lent the electoral campaign a viral, affective charge that, if it did not win
the election, at least proved to be integral to the construction of a public imaginary around the
personality of Narendra Modi. Like the Battle of Waterloo that the Duke of Wellington
purportedly claimed to have been won in the everyday spaces of the playing fields of Eton, the
2014 general elections in India might well have been claimed in the viral playing field of the
Internet.
Although photographs and images of political leaders have always played an important
role in Indian political campaigns, Modi’s use of selfies to connect with his support base was
unprecedented. However, this was not the first instance in which Modi effectively used
technological means of dissemination for political leverage. In 2012, for instance, Modi’s
campaign mobilized three-dimensional holography to project a 10-foot-tall image of him
delivering a speech across several BJP rallies and public meetings in the country.
12
The use of 3-
D holographic technology revealed a keen understanding of the impact of techno-spectacular
media
13
and the benefits of the ostensible “omnipresence” that they accorded.
14
However, unlike
the capital- intensive holographic projections that were reported to have cost Rs. 5 crore per
projection (“Narendra Modi's 3D campaign”).
The selfies, on the other hand, were much less cost-and labor-intensive. Affordable and
easy to produce, selfies accorded Modi’s public self with something that the spectacular
hologram could never achieve—viral circulation. The holographic projection required people to
actually attend a rally to see it, whereas Modi’s viral-self proved to be a much more effective
delivery system that could reach his audience in more convenient and intimate interfaces—
desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The holographic projections demanded a singular presence,

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but the selfies compressed time and space and allowed the recipients to simultaneously inhabit
two places. In corollary, Narendra Modi, the man in the selfies, could now infiltrate the spaces of
the everyday.
The “Narendra Modi” produced by the campaign was technologically enabled, but it
externalized the iconicity associated with the cult of the personality that BJP’s electoral
campaign banked upon so heavily. In fact, a section in Narendra Modi’s official website is
dedicated to explaining the technology behind 3-D holography. There is an almost didactic
function attached to this inclusion, because it helped project Modi’s image as a man who is in
sync with the technological developments that can lead to progress and development. Selfies
offered a unique two-way connection between the prime ministerial candidate and his supporters.
Not only was Modi posting his own selfies, he was encouraging his supporters to do the same,
citing the selfies of his supporters shared over social media as proof of a positive political
culture. Although such claims of optimism deserve critical dissection, one thing is certain: social
media and the possibilities of viral circulation had been actively recognized and tapped as potent
political tools. The medium of the selfie allowed a do-it-yourself form of virality, ensuring that
the “NaMo” (short for Narendra Modi) syndrome never went out of circulation.
Whereas images such as the Open magazine cover and the holographic behemoth revel in
the aesthetics of the spectacular, the selfie grounds itself in the familiar, the routinized, and the
everyday. In fact, the ostensible elimination of the spectacular in the selfie lends it a peculiar
sense of authenticity. Shot by the user with a handheld cellphone camera, this first-person point
of view of the self is ostensibly amateur, for the corporeal self is never detached from the
recording medium. The selfie is also amateur in the common-sense meaning of the word
“amateur” that stands in opposition to the word professional. The very idea that digital

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technology—and, in particular, the cell-phone camera—allows for a certain level of
democratization of imaging technology that was previously the domain of professional
photographers points to the kind of access to technology that connects the selfie to the notion of
the everyday. An argument can be made—and has been made—about selfies being as old as self-
portraiture (Eler). The crucial point to note, however, is that the selfie is not a matter of mere
technological advancement over older forms of recording the self through oil paintings or even
celluloid photography—the selfie is not merely modern technology, it is a different technic
altogether.
15
The drive to visually record the self might have similar precedents, but the “self”
produced by a selfie and a traditional self-portrait are not the same. The connection of the hand
to the cell phone at the moment of recording makes the selfie a sort of externalized inward look,
and the point of view of the selfie is not necessarily the external gaze of the painter’s eye as he
steps out of his body to see and render his own form, but that of the hand that has been extended
the power of sight. Thus, the so-called amateur look of the selfie also becomes an index of the
real—the point of view of the selfie seems authentic, because it is as if the human body is
looking at itself. Amateur, therefore, becomes synonymous with the everyday and the
evidentiary in the case of the selfie, and an embedded presence in time and space accompanies
selfie imagery. This, then, is the affective charge of the selfie—a sense of liveness, an ostensible
reality conveyed visually, frozen in bytes and ever ready to be shared.
It is this affective form of the selfie that was mobilized in Narendra Modi’s electoral
campaign. The Modi selfies literally produced another body that was Narendra Modi. Mirroring
Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) exegesis of the inherent duality of the office and the person of the
king in medieval Europe, the Modi selfies seemed to emphasize that the office of the prime
minister was marked by a similar dualism. However, because the selfies operated within the

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realm of the routinized and the everyday, they paradoxically seemed to visually fuse the body
natural and the body politic. Thus, the prime ministerial candidate that was Narendra Modi
seemed inseparable from Narendra Modi, the everyman. The amateur and everyday form of the
selfie, then, complemented the ideology of the BJP and its emphatic projection of Narendra Modi
as a man of austerity, routine, and practice. Consider, for instance, the emphasis on Modi’s
official website on slogans such as “We need action, not acts” (“We Need Action Not Acts”) and
on Modi’s career as a political activist of the street, “immersed in nation building from a very
young age” (“Dedicated Life”), which essentially pits this image against the dynastic operation
seen in political parties such as Congress. This idea of a self-made man has been integral to
Modi’s public persona and has been part of a larger public relations machinery that includes a
comic book titled Bal Narendra: Childhood Stories of Narendra Modi, which narrates episodes
from Modi’s childhood, emphasizing his drive for moral action and extolling notions of self-
dependence, selflessness, and bravery (Basu).
16
The selfies extended and reemphasized this
rhetoric of Narendra Modi as a man of action by taking advantage of the seemingly inherent,
evidentiary, and immediate nature of their form. The idea of the self-made man seems to have
become fused with the idea of the “selfie-made” man; the question of Modi’s own agency as he
clicks his own pictures rather than waiting for a photographer to reach out to the masses becomes
fused with the rationale of “actions, not acts.” This rationale, in fact, has been one of the ways in
which Narendra Modi’s popularity among his support base has been ensured, with the rhetoric of
development being one of the major trump cards that the BJP has played in these elections.
17
In a
sense, the immediate and everyday nature of the selfie was integral to BJP and Narendra Modi’s
ideological advertising—even a sort of viral marketing campaign, with more than 4 million
followers on Twitter and more than 17 million likes on the official Facebook page.

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For all its intended benefits, Narendra Modi’s selfie-snapping landed him in controversy
on April 30, 2014, when he clicked a selfie while holding a cutout of a lotus (his party symbol) at
a polling booth. just minutes after having cast his vote in the city of Ahmedabad, the capital of
the state of Gujarat (Fig. 15). In a highly-televised affair, Modi had also addressed a nearby
gathering of voters while holding the party symbol. A First Information Report (FIR) was filed
against Modi for having flouted the provisions of the 1951 Representation of the People Act,
whereby candidates are not allowed to hold meetings, campaign or address voters in any way
that might influence the suffrage process. The Election Commission, which is the national body
entrusted with ascertaining the smooth and fair conduct of the elections, alleged that Narendra
Modi had “intended and calculated to influence and affect the result of elections in the
constituencies going to polls…not only in Ahmadabad but also in all other constituencies in the
State of Gujarat and elsewhere in the country” (“Read: Election Commission’s notice”).

Fig. 14: Narendra Modi's controversial post-poll selfie tweet.
Fig. 15: Narendra Modi's controversial post-poll selfie tweet.

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Sections 126 (1) (a) and 126 (1) (b) of the law under which Modi was charged, clearly
state that no person can “convene, hold or attend, join or address any public meeting or
procession in connection with an election” or “display to the public any election matter by means
of cinematograph, television or other similar apparatus” for 48 hours after the conclusion of the
polling process to ensure an unbiased and unmanipulated election. Section 3 of the Act defines
“election matter” as “any matter intended or calculated to influence or affect the result of an
election” (Representation of the People Act 109.). Although the law does not mention social
media or selfies, it could be argued that the category— “other similar apparatus” could be
updated to include them, especially since the BJP’s electoral symbol was foregrounded so
strongly in the images. Though the investigation never achieved any closure, it was clear that the
selfie was a force to be reckoned with, and it is easy to understand why it might have irked the
Election Commission and competing political parties such as the Congress and the Aam Admi
Party. The content of the selfie featured Narendra Modi’s face, unusually rounded due to
distortion from the closeness of the cell-phone camera’s wide-angle lens to the subject matter.
This smiling image of the politician, almost homely in his disposition as he holds up the lotus
cut-out, while prominently displaying the black ink stripe on the forefinger as a mark of having
voted, is also an invitation to suffrage, as the tweet was accompanied by the caption “Voted!
Here is my selfie” (@narendramodi). This is particularly significant, because the selfie now
became a call to political action, wherein the invitation was not only to partake in the democratic
process but to make the right choice by voting for Narendra Modi. The persuasive idea of
making the right choice by electing Modi was also evident in another selfie, this time featuring
Modi with the author Chetan Bhagat. Bhagat, a vocal supporter of Modi’s candidature and the

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purported development it would bring, (Srivastava) posted a selfie of the two of them after a
meeting on April 21 (Fig.16).

Fig. 15: Modi's selfies with Bhagat

The selfie carried the caption “Met #namo. You know a leader has the youth pulse when
he can discuss job creation and is still up for a selfie!” (@chetan_bhagat). The image reiterated
the rational values of the man of action that have been projected as Narendra Modi’s unique
selling point. When Modi shared the same photograph on his Twitter account on the occasion of
Bhagat’s birthday, Bhagat tweeted, “When the front-running PM candidate of the world’s
biggest democracy remembers your birthday and posts a selfie, have to say, it feels nice”
(@chetan_bhagat). The tweet reemphasized the aura of the everyman that has been central to
Fig. 16: Modi's selfies with Bhagat.

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Narendra Modi’s candidature. A selfie that became viral after Modi was elected as prime
minister again highlighted the idea of the accessible everyman that Modi was being made out to
be (Fig. 17). This one featured Narendra Modi seeking “blessings from his mother,” Hiraben,
after having won the elections (@narendramodi).

Fig. 16: Modi’s selfie with his mother.

Modi’s selfies with Chetan Bhagat and with his mother painted Modi’s public image as a
man of everyday, rational values for whom the mundane rituals of conversing and greeting and
respect for preordained structures of the normative family were of paramount importance. Along
with the “Chai Pe Charcha” (Conversation Over Tea) campaign in which Narendra Modi met
and interacted with the public in a modified version of the over-coffee talk-show format, selfies
Fig. 17: Modi’ s selfie with his mother.

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such as these repeated the rhetoric of everydayness. The “rational” leader, after all, had to be a
man of the everyday to be able to understand the travails of the common man, or so the rhetoric
implied. The language of the selfie, therefore, was a part of what Theodore Adorno has called
“the jargon of authenticity” (Adorno 3). Adorno refers to the rhetoric of the everyday and the
banal that allows certain ideological constructs to be projected as “authentic” experience that
remains untouched by the seemingly corruptive influences of modernity. Such jargons of
authenticity promise an absolute and pure experience of life and the world, which is as
artificially constructed as that which it promises a refuge from. Narendra Modi’s authenticity has
been repeatedly emphasized by the electoral campaign through various narrative modalities—
that of talk show, the comic book, and the selfie.
18

In effect, what social media and selfies helped Narendra Modi and the BJP attain was a
consolidation of a political vantage point where the public image of the prime ministerial
candidate could circulate virally at an accelerated pace. Tony Sampson argues that the viral
inhabits “a space in which affects are significantly passed on, via suggestions made by others,
more and more through networks” (Sampson 5). Such was the nature of #NaMo, the digital
avatar of BJP’s electoral spearhead; #NaMo was a viral warhead that existed outside the time of
the real world, yet claimed to be from within it. From suggestion to suggestion, image to image,
#NaMo spread virally through an affectively charged electoral field, until #NaMo, the viral
candidate was made flesh as Narendra Modi, the prime minister.
From legal controversy to political advertising, Narendra Modi’s digital presence and
selfie imagery have intensively permeated the Indian mediascape. For instance, Amul, the Indian
dairy cooperative that has conducted an ad campaign commenting on significant happenings
through its mascot, the “Amul Girl” for more than five decades, also came out with a

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promotional image after BJP’s resounding win in the general elections. The Amul image carried
the caption “Ab Ki Baar, Bhajap Sweekar!” (This time, BJP is accepted), a clever play on BJP’s
election slogan, “Ab Ki Baar, Modi Sarkaar” (This time, Modi’s government) (Mishra) (Fig. 18).

Fig. 17: Amul’s Modi ad with the Amul Girl shown clicking a selfie with the prime minister.

The image shows the Amul Girl clicking a selfie with Narendra Modi as he holds bread
and butter. The cartoonish reference to the selfie might be humorous, but given Amul’s tradition
of commenting on significant political and news events, the advertisement testifies to the viral
impact of the Modi selfies. Perhaps Amul’s nod to the selfie syndrome points toward a far more
important issue, for the image might have worked even if the cell phone were to be omitted. If
the selfie was important enough to be referenced in the Amul advertisement, it was probably
proof that taking a selfie could indeed be political work. This seems to complement Modi’s
polling-booth call to action—“Voted! Here is my selfie.” In fact, Modi’s polling-booth selfie was
not an isolated element but rather a node in an intensive network of exchanges. As mentioned
earlier, Modi supporters were encouraged to take selfies and upload them onto social media sites.
Fig. 18: Amul’ s Modi ad with the Amul Girl shown clicking a selfie with the prime minister.

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On April 29, when posting his polling-booth selfie, Modi also tweeted “Selfie is in! Share yours
using #SelfieWithModi & see what happens” (@narendramodi).
On Twitter, images and tweets with the hashtag “#SelfieWithModi” began trending as
Modi supporters started sharing post-poll selfies, often foregrounding, or even solely featuring,
the forefinger striped with black ink as evidence of having voted. This was the other, paradoxical
end of Modi’s selfie experiment, as Modi himself does not appear in them. Rather, it is an
invitation to be a part of a political phenomenon where the nomenclature “SelfieWithModi”
belies the fact that Narendra Modi as a political personality remains largely inaccessible, at least
in the way the word “with” might seem to imply (Fig.19).

Fig. 18: A family selfie uploaded by Modi supporters on Twitter.

Fig. 19: A family selfie uploaded by Modi supporters on Twitter.

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If the black ink stripe was evidence of voting, the selfie became an index of not merely
the vote, but of voting for Narendra Modi. The idea of the secrecy of the ballot is destabilized
here, as the selfie stands in as an evidentiary form whose production is not merely leisure or
casual clicking but a kind of informal political labor. Here, the selfie becomes redolent of what
Steven Shaviro describes as the total subsumption of life by labor in the neoliberal economy. For
Shaviro, “Real subsumption leaves no aspect of life uncolonized. It endeavors to capture, and to
put to work, even those things that are uneconomical” (Shaviro). As per this postulation, one is
constantly laboring in the neoliberal economy, with value being extracted even from “feelings
and moods and subjective states” (Shaviro) in the creation of brands. The ostensibly casual
selfie, then, is also laboriously produced—the “feelings, moods and subjective states” of Modi
supporters in this instance were totally subsumed into the creation of the NaMo brand.
If the political potential of supporters’ selfies was indeed subsumed within the field of
electoral labor, there was another, more literal sense in which the selfie syndrome became
subsumptive in the Narendra Modi case. The selfies uploaded by supporters were compiled into
a photomosaic portrait of Narendra Modi. The statement on Narendra Modi’s website explained:
Selfies have re-defined the way we share our feelings. Make sure
your selfie is a part of this historic victory mosaic, send your
wishes with #congratsnamo. Find your selfie & even locate your
friends who have shared theirs. Together, be a part of this new
beginning & lay the foundations of a strong developed India.
19

The selfie is actively recognized as a form of political labor, but one that the BJP rhetoric
claims to be both “patriotic” and “historical.” Here, the selfie is not only accorded evidentiary
value but is raised to the status of the archival and the narratological. The narrative is that of the
patriarchal nation-state and that of the BJP’s teleological understanding of progress and
development. According to this narrative impulse, it would seem that the true history of the

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Indian state remains unwritten, but can be written, albeit under the censorial gaze of the new
government.
20
The casual form of the selfie is mobilized here as an invitation to participate in a
sort of an instant history that is a token participation at best, and a form of historiographic
surveillance at worst. The form of the selfie is fused with a selective ideal of responsible
citizenship and suffrage in which only that which adheres to the party ideology—whether
knowingly or unknowingly—can be allowed entry into the realm of the historical. The historical
is equated with BJP’s ideological stance in the Modi Mosaic via the medium of the selfie, for the
viewer is urged to find her photo within the portrait of Narendra Modi (Fig. 20).

Fig. 19: The Modi Mosaic at different zoom levels.

Fig. 20: The Modi Mosaic at different zoom levels.

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The Modi Mosaic is the digital manifestation of the absolute fusing of the body natural
and the body politic. As one zooms into the portrait, one begins to see thousands of individual
selfies, similar to the ones on Twitter with the hashtag #SelfieWithModi. In an allegorical way,
the body of the nation is equated with the body of Narendra Modi, the sovereign patriarch. The
selfies, it would seem, form the genetic core of the prime minister’s other body—a virtual body
whose “virtual reality […] supplements and enhances physical, ‘face-to-face’ reality” (Shaviro).
Not without reason did one Twitter user claim, “This is #LEVIATHAN already! We have a
Hobbesian #sovereign” (@skishcampis). The reference to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) on a
Twitter newsfeed might be a stray reference, but the analogy is striking. The Abraham Bosse
etching that forms the frontispiece to Hobbes’ 1651 publication features a rendition of the body
of the sovereign formed by numerous human bodies, as if to visually signify Hobbes’ postulation
that the social contract entered into by the multitude legitimizes the absolute authority of the
sovereign. Like Bosse’s Leviathan, the Modi Mosaic seeks to confer a similar legitimacy onto
Modi’s prime ministership. More strikingly, the Leviathan reference is interesting because it
points toward the idea that the sovereign might be created out of the multitude but is always
above both the subject and the law, as the idea of an absolutist regime cloaked in the grammar of
the popular looms large in Hindu right-wing ideology.
Even as the Selfie With Modi campaign sought to mobilize the electoral public by raking
up populist fantasies of participation, it still remained a highly managed campaign that was
steered by the BJP’s Information Technology (IT) Cell that was formed in 2007. During the 2014
elections, the IT Cell worked closely with volunteers in its digital campaigns. Some of these
volunteers, young professionals working in the IT, PR and Management industries—were
organized under a non-profit organization called Citizens for Accountable Government (CAG).

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Under the leadership of political strategist Prashant Kishor, the CAG became affiliated with
Narendra Modi and the BJP, and was a key strategic partner in Modi’s campaign. As one news
report put it, the BJP’s massive workforce included “about two crore BJP members, 11 lakh RSS
activists and 12.5 lakh volunteers of Modi's 'private army'—the Citizens for Accountable
Governance (CAG)” (Pandit). Alongside this, the Bengaluru-based news organization—Niti
Digital also assisted Modi’s campaign through its (now defunct) website Niti Central. On its
Facebook page, Niti Central defined itself as the “the voice of the Neo-Middle Class in India
[…] unapologetic in [their] advocacy of the Indian National Interest” (“About” Niti Central,
Facebook), while the Niti Digital LinkedIn profile describes the company as a that sought to
offer “"New Ideas to Transform India" through disruptive use of Technology and through out of
the box Innovations” and focused on “creating a Next Generation Technology Platform for how
Digital Media will be consumed and shared in India by the Mobile-First, WhatsApp-crazy
Generation” (Niti Digital Pvt. Ltd., LinkedIn). Clearly, Narendra Modi’s pervasive presence in
the Indian electoral sphere in 2014, was part of a concerted effort to manufacture consent by
manipulating platforms. For instance, as part of the campaign, a special website was set up to
facilitate cellular campaigning. This website, NamoNumber.com (now defunct) addressed Indian
cellphone owners as a potential voter and asked them to garner their friends and relatives’
support for Narendra Modi. The name of the website was itself a clue to a certain “gamification”
of politics, in which the “Namo Number” was described as “the total number of people you have
convinced to pledge their support to NaMo” (Fig.21). The labor of political mobilization was
placed on the voter, while cleverly retaining a sense of play through the notion of the score:
“Your NaMoNumber is the votes for NaMo that you are responsible for. The higher your
NaMoNumber, the greater your impact on NaMo’s success” (Fig. 21).

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Fig. 20: The "gamification" of voting in the NaMo Number website.

The Selfie With Modi campaign was part of this larger wave of mobilization involving
cellphones and the Internet. While such measures inserted a sense of playful engagement and
agential performance into the process of political mobilization, they masked the colonization of
life pointed out by Shaviro. And even while the effect of this was the production of an
everydayness and relatability around Narendra Modi, it was a PR-fueled, political-celebrity
culture that sought to hide its nature as celebrity-culture. Modi’s own selfies were highly curated
public performances that are part of a much larger public relations machinery including the
hologram, the public forum, and the comic book. But what is crucial is the way the campaign
made it appear as if these were regular selfies by fusing the political function with the language
of the everyday.
21

The BJP has been keen on cashing in on selfie culture even after the 2014 elections. In
Delhi for instance, the BJP had continued the Selfie With Modi campaign in the run up to the
2015 State Assembly Elections in Delhi, setting up selfie-booths throughout the city (Dutta 2015:
n.pag.). The campaign also had a website (http://www.selfiewithmodi.com/delhi/) that listed the
Fig. 21: The "gamification" of voting in the NaMo Number website.

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areas where these booths had been erected.
22
The campaign’s Facebook page however, is still
available at https://www.facebook.com/SELFIEwithMODI/ and features images and videos of
from the campaign. The page features a promotional video with an upbeat tune as viewers are
exhorted to vote for BJP. Modi’s smiling face greets the viewers, while the text reads: “Magical
Lotus gets you #SelfiewithMODI” (Fig. 22). Interestingly, the campaign was marked by a double
absence; first, even though BJP’s candidate for the post was the former police official Kiran
Bedi, it was Narendra Modi’s face that was used to advertise the campaign. Second, even as the
campaign advertised itself as the “only opportunity to get clicked with Shri Narendra Modi!”
individuals did not take an actual selfie with Modi in the booths—instead an image of Narendra
Modi was fused with the subject’s image with the aid of “augmented reality” software
(Kaushika) (Fig. 22).

Fig. 21: Screengrab from the promotional video in the Selfie With Modi Delhi Facebook page (left) and example of
a "selfie" taken at a selfie kiosk (right).
Fig. 22: Screengrab from the promotional video in the Selfie With Modi Delhi Facebook page (left) and example of a
"selfie" taken at a selfie kiosk (right).

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The arrangement required the subject to place themselves next to the party symbol (the
lotus) against a screen, whereupon, Modi’s face appeared in place of the lotus allowing the
picture to be taken (Ramaseshan). Although BJP did not win the 2015 Delhi elections (the
elections were won by the Aam Aadmi Party), this set a precedent for similar activities at the
state levels. In the north-eastern state of Assam where the BJP won for instance, a similar selfie
campaign was run for the candidate Sarbananda Sonowal. Titled “Selfie With Sarbananda.” The
Assam campaign was launched by senior BJP official and member of the cabinet, Nitin Gadkari
and allowed users to have photographs with either Sarbananda Sonowal or Narendra Modi
(“Selfie with Sarbananda”; Sarma) (Fig. 23).

Fig. 22: Nitin Gadkari displays the two possible versions of the selfie during inauguration (top). An example of an
image from the Selfie With Sarbananda campaign (bottom).
Fig. 23: Nitin Gadkari displays the two possible versions of the selfie during inauguration (top).
An example of an image from the Selfie With Sarbananda campaign (bottom).

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The images were embedded with Sonowal’s campaign slogan “Xokolu’re Ananda,
Sarbananda” (“Sarbananda, Everyone’s Pleasure”: my translation). In Kerala, in the run up to
the state polls, the BJP ran a door-to-door campaign for its state president, Kummanam
Rajasekharan, with the slogan “Oro veettilum Kummanam, oro vottum Kummanathinu
(Kummanam at every house and every vote for Kummanam)” and kicked off the campaign with
a picture of the candidate with a popular actress; according to news-reports, party workers
accompanying the candidate would keep a selfie-stick ready throughout the campaign
(“Kummanam too joins”) (Fig. 24).

Fig. 23: Screenshot of a newsreport featuring Kummanam Rajashekaran's door-to-door selfie campaign.

Such instances of the selfie’s utilization by the BJP at the regional/local levels with
varying success point towards a conceptualization of the selfie as a tool for political marketing.
For instance, the Selfie With Modi Delhi campaign involved a significant expense; as seen from
the BJP’s expense report to the ECI, the party had a total of Rs. 10604931(Approximately
Fig. 24: Screenshot of a newsreport featuring Kummanam Rajashekaran's door-to-door selfie campaign.

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$165559) spent on the acquisition of cellphones and other various heads (Fig. 25). In contrast to
the spontaneous affective selfie-responses in something like the “Kiss of Love” campaign, the
selfie’s political use shows a demonstrated managerial harnessing of its affective power. This is
also reflected in the BJP-led government’s “social” schemes such as the Swachh Bharat and
Selfie With Daughter Campaigns. In such managed, calculated schemes, the selfie assumes a
transactional value, or a lure for political support. This is not to say that there may not be
spontaneous and affective support for the party itself. Rather, the overarching frame of a political
campaign filters participation through the management of affect.

Fig. 24: Expense report showing the total costs of the Selfie With Modi campaign.

Fig. 25: Expense report showing the total costs of the Selfie With Modi campaign.

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Conclusion
I began this chapter by trying to move away from a priori denunciations of the selfie as a
bad object. However, some of my analysis has been critical of the selfie’s mobilization in
managerial logics. This seeming gap between the two positions I have presented throughout this
chapter is prefaced on the understanding that there is a difference between communication and
its instrumentalization. In this, I once again follow Nancy who posits a difference between a
medium of communication and communication itself. Taking the example of the mouth, Nancy
argues that speech is formed in the “mouth’s articulation,” i.e. in the contact between its various
parts and their movements; speech therefore is “not a means of communication but
communication itself” (The Inoperative 30-31). While my analysis is not one of speech, I am
interested in a similar understanding of communication itself. Selfies, are, in one sense not a
means of communicating the self, but a specific articulation of the self that arises between the
photographing apparatus and the body. This is why I conceptualize the selfie as a mode rather
than sticking to an instrumental definition that is predicated on the presence of a rigid set of
features.
Thinking of the selfie as mode opens us up to the possibility of locating the social in the
zones of contact between body, technology and ideology. To call the selfie a “Narcissitic” object
then, is as much a political position (and by no means a false one), as the use of selfies in activist
politics. But to call the selfie only a Narcissitic object closes off other ways in which the selfie
can operate. The case studies presented above present the full range of this spectrum—from
spontaneous, affective political formations, to civic engagement, to political advertising that
banks on the selfie as a lure. With this, I offer a postulation of the selfie as a media-form that can
be understood only in the specific work it does in each articulation. It is in the gaps between

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these various kinds of adoptions and mobilizations of the selfie that we can arrive at an
understanding of its nature as media-object. In this, I follow Nick Couldry’s advice that media
scholars need to study not merely the “production of media outputs, interfaces and platforms, but
on what people do with them once produced” (Couldry xi). My focus in this chapter has
precisely been this—locating the selfie as a force-field of action around which social activity and
media engagement can be studied. In doing so, I have necessarily taken recourse to multiple
registers of scholarly work, philosophical engagement and more concrete cases of selfie-use. In
many ways the selfie is, then, both the object of study, as well the conduit through which digital
practices is studied. To borrow from Gilles Deleuze’s postulation in “Postscript on the Societies
of Control,” technology does not exist in a vacuum, but instead expresses “those social forms
capable of generating and using them” (Deleuze 6). And it is in this expression of the selfie that
the imprint of our times can be found—the selfie, after all, is what the selfie does.

NOTES

1. I use the term utterance in a Bakhtinian sense. In “The Problem of Speech Genres” Bakhtin
describes the utterance as the basic unit of language. Utterance is different from linguistic grammar
because unlike grammar which is bound by theoretical rules, utterances also account for the everyday
variances in language use. In this, utterances can vary in scale, from the “short (single-word) rejoinder in
everyday dialogue to the large novel or scientific treatise” (Bakhtin 71). For Bakhtin, utterances are inter-
subjective because they exist within a matrix of communication responses. He states that an utterance is
“preceded by the utterances of others, and its end is followed by the responsive utterances of others” (71).
Although digital culture is not exactly the same as spoken language, the call and response structure of
communication through digital artefacts such as selfies, GIFs and emojis can also be read as utterances.

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2. Foucault writes: “I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and
in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself in the
technology of self” (Foucault 19).
3. In relation to separation Nancy writes: “All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of
touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other” (Being Singular
5). Following this logic, to be one-self is to recognize that there is an-other self. Touch becomes possible
only because there is separation.
4. A parallel can be drawn between this socio-philosophical tradition of thinking about the self, and
the mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the “I” is realized only through a radical
understanding of difference (Lacan 75-81). A similar relational idea of the self can also be found within
the symbolic interactionist sociological thought of George Herbert Mead. According to Mead, the self is
that which arises out of a recognition of what he calls, the “generalized other.” In Mind, Self, and Society:
From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (1934) Mead differentiates between two aspects of the
self—the “I” and the “Me.” While the “Me” is the social self as seen by the generalized other, the “I” is a
response to the social “Me.” So while the “Me” can be thought of as public persona that acts within
society, the “I” is its introspective counterpart that is only knowable through reflection and recollection.
Borrowing Foucault’s terminology from “Technologies of the Self” one can draw a parallel between
Mead’s concept of the I and the Me, and the Foucaldian concepts of Meletē (meditatio in Latin) and
Gymnasia. Both Meletē and Gymnasia are forms of realizing the self. Meletē means meditation and
implies philosophical introspection, while Gymnasia (“to train oneself”) implies practice. According to
Foucault, “while meditatio is an imaginary experience that trains thought, gymnasia is training in a real
situation, even if it's been artificially induced” (Foucault 37). The “I” as conceptualized by Mead is
analogous to the process of Meletē, and the “Me,” to Gymnasia.
5. Latour writes: “To clarify, I will call the first approach ‘sociology of the social’ and the second
‘sociology of associations’ (I wish I could use ‘associology’)” (Latour 9).

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6. Even something like “fake news” is “real” in some senses, insofar as it exists in the world as an
object or a process and has impact on political processes. However, when we use the term “fake news” we
talk about inauthentic news; we talk, in other words, about the quality of its information, but not its status
as information. Informational incertitude does not necessarily mean virtuality.
7. Kaur received death and rape threats after posting the image and subsequently left the campaign
(Doshi).
8. Similarly, Marc Redfield posits that “signs of nationhood” such as flags and emblems are above all,
arbitrary signs; and it is their arbitrariness itself that allows the mind to “transform a semiotic function
(linguistic arbitrariness) into an image: an image of the nation as will, or, better, of the nation as imagi-
nation” (Redfield 84).
9. Daniel C. Dennett makes a useful distinction between images and pictures when he says that
imagination works more like words, than like pictures. He writes: “Imagining is depictional or
descriptional, not pictorial, and is bound only by this one rule borrowed from the rules governing sight: it
must be from a point of view” (Dennett 135-136). However, these categories often overlap. A photograph
in a passport for instance, is a pictorial image that is not necessarily the same as the photographed
subject’s self-image; it has the objective, classificatory function of pointing out “this person is.” On the
other hand, a profile picture on a social media account is usually a pictorial image that aligns with some
version of the self-image and can be designed to fit that self-image. It is a more imagined version of a
picture of the self, even when the picture not always point back to the human referent directly.
10. Notably, RJ Manishka also released a song in 2017 criticizing the BMC and highlighting the
pothole problem. The song has gone viral and the BMC has reacted aggressively to this by filing a
defamation case against 93.5 FM (Venkatraman).
11. The official website states: “We start this campaigning June 9, 2015 and got 794 selfies in 10 days
campaigning and distribute cash reward as ` 3100/- with the trophy & appreciation certificate for first best
selfie ` 2100/- for second best, ` 1100/- for third best selfie (sic)” (http://selfiewithdaughter.world/).

261

12. For a more detailed analysis see Govil and Baishya’s “The Bully in the Pulpit” in
Communication, Culture and Critique.
13. I am indebted to Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, where he claims: “The spectacle cannot be
understood as a mere deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually
been materialized” (6). The spectacle of Narendra Modi produced by the campaign was technologically
enabled, but it externalized the iconicity associated with the cult of the personality that BJP’s electoral
campaign banked upon so heavily.
14. In fact, a section in Narendra Modi’s official website is dedicated to explaining the technology
behind 3-D holography. There is an almost didactic function attached to this inclusion, because it helped
project Modi’s image as a man who is in sync with the technological developments that can lead to
progress and development. See http://cdn.narendramodi.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/3D-
Technology.pdf.
15. I use the term technic in the sense that Bernard Steigler uses it in Technics and Time. He describes
technics as the “pursuit of life by other means than life” (Stiegler 17) and points out that technologies are
not merely material forms that shape the world outside us but are affectively ingrained in us as
normalized habits. I borrow Steigler’s definition to point out that selfies and selfie-taking, like many other
forms of digital culture, are not merely outside us but also within us.
16. In his piece, Samit Basu describes the Bal Narendra series as a “deeply dull comic book” that
reads like a “How to be like Young Modi Leaflet,” pointing out its didactic function.
17. Gujarat has been touted as a state with a high level of industrial and commercial development.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has often claimed this to be a sign of the success of Narendra Modi’s chief
ministership, while detractors have often rightly pointed out that the facade of economic success is not an
indicator of social equality that is often overlooked in development indices. For a good critique of this
rhetoric, read Nonica Datta’s “The Language of Narendra Modi.”
18. Adorno’s analysis is pertinent to this case because he warns against the potential for fascist
absolutism in such jargon. Adorno speaks of the “cult of authenticity” in which “the authority of the

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absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority” (3). The potential of fascism is one of the strong
critiques leveled against the Hindu right wing, which has been repeatedly implicated in attempts to
impose an overarching pro-Hindu framework in India. For a more detailed analysis, see Vanaik (1997)
and Natarajan (2009).
19. This text was available on the website (https://mosaic.narendramodi.in/)developed specially for
the mosaic. The website has since been taken down, but an image of the splash page is available on
Narendra Modi’s homepage. (See http://www.narendramodi.in/narendra-modis-call-for-selfie-from-
people-becomes-all-india-rage-minutes-after-launch-6180). The mosaic website still remains linked on
the homepage that now says that Narendra Modi understood the “pulse of the youth and found an
innovative way to use the digital platform to encourage people to come together and vote to be a part of
strong and developed India” and provides a separate link to a compilation of tweets and selfies on Storify
(https://storify.com/narendramodiin/selfiewithmodi-well-wishers-and-supporters-enthus) that has stopped
working since the Storify website was shut down on 16 May 2018.
20. For instance, soon after the BJP government came to power, Megha Kumar’s book Communalism
and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 was withdrawn from sales by the publisher Orient
Blackswan under pressure from a civil lawsuit filed by Dinanath Batra of the Siksha Bachao Aandolan
Samiti, which was also active earlier in the censorship of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative
History.
21. In effect, the selfies along with the other public relations arsenal made Narendra Modi a star
figure in the sense that Guy Debord has described in The Society of the Spectacle, where he writes that
such figures are “specialists of apparent life [and] serve as superficial objects that people can identify with
in order to compensate for the fragmented specializations that they actually live” (Debord 16). Debord
goes on to elaborate an important point about social labor and stardom when he writes that stars “embody
the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically
projected above it as its ultimate goals—power and vacations…a governmental power may personalize

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itself as a pseudostar” (Debord 6). This seems to translate very well in Narendra Modi’s case as the PR
machinery did play with the idea of political labor by making it look more recreational.
22. The website is now defunct, and as of September 2017, the URL leads to a website of an art
student and photography enthusiast named Modi Khan. However, snapshots of the page can be found at
the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The information about the areas of the city where selfie booths
had been erected has been retrieved from there.

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Fig.23: Author’s composite from images in The North East Today
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Fig.24: YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyNptTFIHN0).
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Conclusion

Grounding the Selfie

“One does not simply assume social media is the same everywhere”
The selfie and its immense, worldwide popularity as a 21
st
century communication form
requires us to carefully consider questions of locality. Emerging studies on the selfie have
established crucial groundwork for the examination of its nature as networked photography. But
it is crucial that we also interrogate the selfie in relation to its more “grounded” dimensions.
Viewing the selfie as the communicative form of “the planetary majority” (Mirzoeff 15) must not
blind us from the contextual factors in which selfies emerge. It is tempting to think of the age of
global digital networks as a sign of a world without borders—one where national boundaries and
regulations have given way to a kind of a transnational or global citizenship. However, as events
around the world have proved consistently, older structures of state and nation have not
disappeared. Geert Lovink points out that the internet’s relationships with geo-sensitive tools
such as national IP (internet protocol) address ranges have given increasing power to states to
build walls in online spaces both by blocking users outside the country, and by blocking access
to foreign websites within the country (Lovink 20).
Global digital networks and state structures do not exist in an either/or relationship but
are mutually transformed and shaped by each other. As Radhika Gajjala points out, “social
relations and interpersonal exchanges within virtual communities cannot escape their connection
with real-life political, economic, social, and cultural material practices” (Gajjala 41).
Cyberspaces and virtual communities are neither inherently liberatory, nor are they intrinsically
oppressive. But they do have the power to attach to cultural and legal formulations that are very

288
specific to historical and geopolitical location. This dissertation has attempted to account for the
selfie in the context of India’s complex socio-economic, political and cultural realities. In the
Introduction I mentioned a commitment towards close reading to explore such nuances. Such an
endeavor requires us to consider, in Michel de Certeau’s words, the “mobile and endless
labyrinths far below” (de Certeau 91). Questions of aesthetics and style are no doubt important,
but if we approach the selfie only as a global or planetary language, we risk losing the finer
mutations and adaptations of its form.
The SelfieCity project that was conducted by Lev Manovich and a team of seven other
researchers is one example of a recent project where these granular aspects of the selfie are
totally flattened out. The project collates selfies and selfie metadata from six cities—Bangkok,
São Paolo, New York, Moscow and Berlin and London. London was a later addition to the
project. SelfieCity London was created for the Big Bang Data Exhibition (2016) and the data
collection for that was done from September 21-27, 2015. For the other five cities, the data
collection was done from December 4-12, 2013. For all six cities, the data was collected only
from Instagram and for only a period of one week. In total, the project’s dataset now includes
3840 selfies for the six cities. In his blog, Moritz Stefaner, who was in charge of creative
direction and data visualization for Selfiecity writes about the idea of a “macroscope” that was a
driving idea behind the project’s scale and scope. He writes:
Just like the telescope allows us to see far beyond what our eyes
would allow us, into the depths of space, and the microscope
allows us to look at the infinitely small, a device called
macroscope could allow us to investigate the infinitely complex:
society, and nature. We have this device now on our hands: data
science and data visualization. It provides with new kinds of
“glasses” to look at the world, a body extension that gives us the
superpower to change the realities we are looking at, beyond the
physical world. (Stefaner 2014)

289
Based on this idea, the SelfieCity project collates factors such as geolocation, age, gender along
with variables such as the position of the head and the eyes. The objective of the project, as the
introductory section of the website states, was to investigate the “style of self-portraits (selfies)
in five cities across the world” (Selfiecity). The researchers do this by visualizing data in
multiple ways. For instance, there are video montages for each city in which each of the 640
selfies for the city are played back aligning the eyes in the images to “present an artistic
reflection of the tension between individual shots and high-level patterns [that] characterize the
"aggregate face of a city"” (“selfiecity — new york”, Vimeo).
But what are the exclusions that take place in this statistical idea of aggregation? Through
its “Selfiexploratory” interface, the SelfieCity project allows visitors to the website to access
images based on specific variables such as age, position of head and gender. While some of the
variables are easily discernible, others such as “mood” and “gender” are often anomalous.
Elizabeth Losh writes that one of the project’s major flaws is its assumption that gender can be
defined through the binaries of male and female (Losh 1653). Indeed, one can notice a curious
question mark in the Selfiexploratory’s “gender” filter. The sign of the question mark here (?)
does not denote the fluidity of gender identity and points instead, to a failure of both AI facial
recognition systems and human judgment to account for the ways identities are articulated and
performed (Fig.1). Losh further points out that SelfieCity’s sole focus on Instagram defines the
selfie “far too narrowly to be useful to selfie researchers” (Losh 1649).

290

Fig. 1: (Top) Screenshot from a YouTube demo of Amazon’s Rekognition software that was used for facial analysis
in the SelfieCity project. (Bottom) The Gender filter in the Selfiexploratory with a question mark in between the
symbols for male and female.

The narrowness of such a project is not merely about the choice of platform. In his talk at
the Visualized 2014 conference in New York, Stefaner mentions the process of selecting eligible
images for the project. He says that the decision to use human judgment (employing workers
from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service) was to get a hold of “actual selfies” that might elude
the gaze of machine vision. While he agrees that it is often hard to judge what an actual selfie is,
Stefaner also says: “if you see both hands in the image, you’re pretty sure it’s not a selfie”
(“Moritz Stefaner: Visualized”, Vimeo). This goes counter to the elastic notion of the selfie as a
mode, or the modifications of selfie-usage seen for example, in Mottahedeh’s analysis of the “ur-
form” of the selfie in Iran (see Chapter 3). Strictly speaking, a project like SelfieCity offers us a
way of aggregating and visualizing data about images shared over one week on a single platform.
Yet the findings of the project are presented and reported as objective knowledge that is

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generalizable.
1
Further, while the SelfieCity project collects and aggregates a large number of
images, it completely overlooks the hybrid nature of selfies by considering it as a solely visual
form. We do not get a sense of other factors that go into the selfies’ production and circulation
such as hashtags and captions. The complete elision of textual factors from analysis and the lack
of focus on the background of the images leaves out important aspects of individual utterances of
selfie taking. The creators of SelfieCity claim to balance the individual and the aggregate, which
is why one can click on a single image in the SelfieExploratory and enlarge it for viewing. But
without the cultural and contextual factors in place, the plain images flatten the individual and
are comparable to routinely captured surveillance images (Fig.2). In some sense, Stefaner’s
description of the data visualization process as a new kind of glass to examine the world, or as a
superpower to change our physical realities betrays a notion of data science as a kind of optics
that enables a totalized knowledge of the world. Ultimately, each location in SelfieCity is
differentiated from the others by mere fact of name, but the “city” as a category remains a
homogenous and universal concept.

Fig. 2: Selection of automatically cropped and rotated images from SelfiCity’s collection of selfies from Bangkok.

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Although SelfieCity remains an important work for the subfield of Selfie Studies for its
pioneering nature, its overdependence on “big data” models of knowledge highlights some of the
problems that would inherently arise in undertaking such work in a country like India. As I have
suggested throughout this dissertation, reliance on statistical methods and distant reading
techniques cannot account for the granularity of selfie-taking as a form of lived practice. As the
contemporary Indian experience shows us, we cannot assume selfie-takers and social media
users to be all part of an “Instagram class.” Manovich uses the term Instagram class to refer to
“millions of young people in many countries who use Instagram in systematic ways to create
visually sophisticated feeds” (Manovich 117). He specifically mentions that he does not refer to
economic class and inequalities of access at all, but to a global design aesthetic informed by the
ubiquity and new possibilities afforded by image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop
(Manovich 117, 119). While this formal approach is extremely useful for comprehending
questions of aesthetics and style, it leaves one wondering as to how to think about the category of
the user. Like the city in SelfieCity, the “Instagram class” is also a presented as a homogenous
category wherein the experience of social media is all but universal.
While the expansion of software conglomerates and social-media platforms has indeed
been a global reality, the idea of an “Instagram class” cannot account for the variety of selfie-
taking practices in India, where, for instance platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook remain
much more popular than Instagram itself.
2
Even if one discounts the question of specific
platforms, the idea of a “global” class of social media users completely flattens out the terrain of
social inequalities that affect technological access and usage in a country like India. We would
be well served to heed Radhika Gajjala’s warning that “the lack of boundaries of cyberspace
assumes that cyberspace is a possible utopia for the privileged classes” (Gajjala 41). To return to

293
de Certeau’s metaphor, if we are to account for the “mobile and endless labyrinths” of social
media and selfie practices in India, we must necessarily engage in multiple acts of juxtaposition
and close, engaged reading. Or, to speak in the language of a popular meme modified for the
“Why we Post” project (a site-specific selfie study undertaken by researchers at University
College London): “One does not simply assume social media is the same everywhere” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Screenshot from Why We Post’s introductory video.

Findings of this study
The preceding chapters have been an attempt to drive the study of the selfie in the
direction of a more granular approach. Chapter One balances questions of locality and
technology through the idea of a vernacular interface. As my examination of cellphone
technology and the market reveals, selfie culture in India is shaped at the confluence of “global”
technological cultures and the specificities of India’s social fabric. While selfie beautification
apps and selfie camera phones are popular worldwide, the account of India’s obsession with such

294
applications would be incomplete without a comparison with its fairness-cream obsession. The
vernacular interface here is both the tangible interface between the cellphone and the user, and
the cultural interface where negotiations between larger corporate, globalizing forces and
traditional cultural structures takes place. It would be a mistake however, to assume that India’s
selfie culture denotes a strictly indigenous culture. Any idea of a fixed national selfie culture is
quickly dispelled if one surveys the “selfie expert” cellphone market that is largely populated by
Chinese phone manufacturers. The “selfie beautification” culture is rampant both in India and
China, and the Chinese app manufacturer Meitu has even released an Indian version of its
popular selfie beautification app. Named BeautyPlus Me, the app featured support in more than
twelve Indian languages and was one of the top trending apps for India on Google Play in 2016
(Tandon). Future research in this area will require a focus on the cultural and commercial
connections between India and China, and how their infrastructural relationships and shared
material cultures mold the selfie phenomenon in the shape of their own local specificities.
Questions of scale and texture become crucial in Chapter Two as well, especially in
considering how the global panic around selfie fatalities has adapted itself in the Indian context.
This chapter also accomplishes another important task in bringing questions of governmentality
back into the picture. This is not a mere question of making laws and of policing public spaces;
instead, the governmentality of the selfie is produced at the intersection of multiple discourses
including current psychoanalytic perspectives on social media, medical discourses on self-care
and selfie taking and more strictly state-based institutional reactions such as zoning and law-
making. However, as my chapter demonstrates, such institutional reactions can run counter to
urban “lived” experiences of selfie-taking. Moral panics such as purported selfie-epidemics
reported in the news can influence the mediated experience of selfie-deaths. Often, the selfie is

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easily associated with fatalities that can include a wider array of factors including the clash
between traditional forms of urban regulation and the distracted sensibilities that mark the digital
age. I mapped these contradictions through an examination of reported “no-selfie” zones in the
city of Mumbai, and although it is by no means a “complete” account of urban experiences of the
selfie in India, it attempts to recognize the particularities of that specific urban locale. This goes
counter to the abstract notion of “the city,” seen for example in the SelfieCity project where the
cities are merely separated by nomenclature. To read the selfie culture of a city, we need to move
out of the totalizing abstract category of “the city” and read selfie-culture alongside other signs
and rhythms that mark a specific location at a specific historical moment. Again, the experience
of Mumbai is not an indicator of a generalizable perspective on death and urban selfie cultures
across India. It is a close reading with what Losh calls “small” or “medium data” perspectives
(Losh 1650), but it does reveal that the category of the “fatal selfie” must be rigorously grounded
in its temporal and geographical contexts rather than viewing it through an overarching frame of
a Narcissism epidemic.
In Chapter Three I explored the selfie as a form of expressing solidarity and mobilizing
support. This extends to a range of acts including protests, civic action and elections. It is
especially in these arenas that we can begin to see the limitations of considering the selfie as
strictly visual material as in the SelfieCity project. Since such acts of solidarity and belonging are
inherently polyvocal, focusing only on the image with no consideration of textual captions,
hashtags and performative aspects would result in a narrow understanding of the politics of the
selfie. Locating the “mobile and labyrinthine nature” of selfie solidarity requires us to account
equally for physical spaces and cyberspaces. My analysis of the various spaces of mobilization
and action explored in Chapter 3 reveals that the selfie’s potentials for mass, affective action is

296
also influenced by who uses the selfie. Just as selfies are not necessarily a sign of Narcissism
epidemics and increasing apathy, they are also not always a “communist form of expression”
(Dean). For instance, while protests against the government, civic action and electoral campaigns
may all use selfies, they are distinctly different acts. There are different political ramifications to
“#StudentsAgainstABVP” and “#NaMo.” For every act of counter-politics and articulation of
dissent, there are instances of hegemonic use as well. According to Jodi Dean, “Hashtags,
emojis, memes, and selfies are the people’s version” of communication in an age where social
interaction has been turned to “storable, mineable resource” (Dean). Dean harks back to an idea
of a vernacular use of technology that refuses to be confined by the restrictions of codified usage.
While this may very well be true, we must also be cautious not to read every act of selfie use as a
“communist form of expression.” India’s political scenario today proves that the use of the selfie
can also push us back into older languages of authoritarian cults of the personality, albeit in the
garb of populism. Such overtly political uses of the selfie also invite us to study them alongside
declarative formulations on social media platforms such as Twitter. As Tomás Baviera notes in
his study of Twitter in Spanish politics, the field of social media communications is a “horizontal
communications arena” in which politicians, voters and journalists co-exist (Baviera 3). The
horizontality of such communication practices can easily lend themselves to conceptions of
greater democratization, but they also create new managerial logics that weave themselves into
the cultural logics of social media. In India’s case for instance, the work of the Bharatiya Janata
Party’s IT Cell remains a prime example of how informal networks of volunteers and trolls can
influence the shape of public opinion and electoral results. While the work of the BJP IT-Cell
remains shrouded in secrecy, it hints at the emergence of new techniques for the conduct of
politics that may soon become formalized. Consider for instance, the blending of electoral

297
campaigning and the Public Relations (PR industry), and the incorporation of specialization
modules for political communication and online reputation management (ORM) in management
schools such as SCoRe (Fig.4).

Fig. 4: Portions of ScoRe’s course catalog highlighting their modules on political communication and PR.
(Brochure courtesy of Hemant Gaule)

All of this is happening alongside new revelations about data-manipulation for political
profit. As of March 2018, the effects of Cambridge Analytica were being felt in India as well,
with both the BJP and its rival party, Congress accusing the other of having hired the
controversial data-mining firm (“BJP, Congress trade charges”; Dutt). Around the same time,
Narendra Modi’s official Android App has also been accused of gathering user’s data without
their consent (Kaushik), and the biometric-ID scheme, Aadhar has also faced numerous
accusations of data leakage and breaches (Khaira). In the face of such concerns about privacy
and data manipulation, it might be a little too hasty on our part to celebrate the selfie as a
“communist form of expression.” On the other hand, if the selfie appears to be mere play, we are
forced to asked what is the role of “playful” forms such as the selfie, the meme and the GIF in

298
articulations of contemporary political culture? In part, this dissertation emerged from the need
to look at these seemingly innocuous and playful forms of information culture. If large-scale
political strategies use “big data” logics of data mining and manipulation, our analyses of these
strategies require a strong critique of the “occult logic” of software cultures (Galloway 66). The
consequences of close, attentive reading become all the more important in Chapter 3 to expose
the multifarious implications of the selfie for India’s political culture.

What Else is there?
In ending this dissertation, I want to point to a few other instances of the selfie’s impact
on India’s audiovisual culture. In the Introduction to this dissertation I mentioned the popularity
of the song “Selfie Le Le Re” and in Chapter One, I analyzed the viral popularity of Dhinchak
Pooja’s “Selfie Maine Le Li Aaj.” However, these are not the only examples of the selfie in
Indian popular culture. The 2014 Tamil film Kaththi (Dir. A.R Murugadoss, 2014) featured a
song titled “Selfie Pulla” (Selfie Girl). The lyrics of the song and the representation of the selfie
show a keen awareness of the public, performative nature of love and intimacy on social media.
Lyrics such as “lets live in instagram, lets shoot n snap […] lets share in Facebook to get
unlimited likes n shares […] so lets take a selfie girl gimme a kiss,” are interspersed with posing
and staging visual signs of intimacy for the camera.
3
The cellphone interface becomes a
constitutive part of the song and dance routine. At one point in the video, the cellphone
substitutes the actor in the romantic arrangement, as the actress kisses the screen of the cellphone
(Fig.5). Intimacy is visually defined in this song and dance sequence as something that is to be
literally played out on the theater of social media. Representationally, the selfie is a sign of

299
romance, and acts of sharing and liking become ways of performing publicized rituals of
intimacy.

Fig. 5: YouTube screenshots from the video for “Selfie Pulla.” (Top) The couple poses together for a selfie and
(bottom) the actress about to kiss the cellphone screen.

Video sharing websites such as YouTube are also replete with Indian short films focusing
on the selfie. A detailed analysis of this dispersed body of films is beyond the scope of this
dissertation. However, one can notice a moralistic strain in many of these videos, especially with
regards to the selfie’s impact on intimate relationships. For instance, in at least two of the films
that pop up on a quick YouTube search—“New Selfie” (2018) and “Latest Selfie” (2017), the
selfie presents itself a bad object that is conflated with the anxieties around leaked sex-clips or
MMS (multimedia messaging service) pornography in India (Baishya). In both short films,
intimate selfies are leaked into circulation either accidentally or by intent leading to social
embarrassment and humiliation (Fig.6). This leakage signals, among other things the invasion of
privacy by everyday technology usage. The anxiety around leaked digital intimacy is also played

300
out in a recent advertisement for Manforce condoms in which “safe sex” is equated with not
recording one’s sexual acts (Fig.6). Arguably, while the two short films on YouTube are themed
around the selfie, they extend the cultural logic of leaked MMS-porn to the selfie itself. In this
view, the rituals of digital intimacy performed through the selfie (and more broadly by other
forms of self-recording) are only one step away from the pornographic. Indeed, a quick survey of
popular pornographic sites such as PornHub and Xvideos now reveals a number of videos with
“desi selfie” or some variant of the term in their title or description (Fig.6). In these instances, the
selfie presents the possibility of a pornography of the self that is intricately connected to the
concept of viral and mobile subjects.

Fig. 6: (Top left) Screenshot from the short film “Latest Selfie” (2017) showing the moment of taking the nude
selfie. (Left middle and bottom) Screenshots of the advice for “safe sex” from Manforce condom’s infomercial.
(Right) Selection of video clip titles from Xvideos and Pornhub that show “Indian” or “Desi” selfies.

301
If contemporary perspectives on the selfie in India seem to oscillate between the extreme
poles of techno optimism and techno pessimism, this is because the selfie is only understood
through the effects it has in specific contexts. In popular accounts, the selfie remains a floating
signifier, or at least displays a malleability of signification. At the end of Chapter Three, I
signaled that our understanding of selfies is shaped by what the selfie does in the context of its
circulation. To end, let me point out two contrasting vignettes, that further illustrate this point. In
February 2018, an Adivasi (indigenous tribal) man was beaten to death the southern Indian state
of Kerala after being accused of stealing rice. In a separate incident in March (also in Kerala)
the, the footage of an old woman falling into a well to her death went viral when the moment was
captured on the cellphone of her grandchildren. The selfie was the common factor in both
instances—in the first case, one of the perpetrators took a selfie with the bound man in the
background, while in the latter case, the selfie captured the moment of the woman’s death
(Fig.7). But there was one major difference between the two cases; the second death never
happened. It later turned out that the video which went viral was being shot as a part of a film
shoot, and the viral circulation was in part pre-publicity for the film project, and in part a dig at
the current culture of mistaking fake videos to be factual reportage.

Fig. 7: (Left) Screenshot from the viral video of the simulated death. (Right) The selfie taken during the lynching
that provided evidence in the case.

302
Questions of ethicality were raised in both instances. In the case of the fake accidental
death, initial reactions were seen “lamenting the selfie culture that had apparently overtaken the
country” (Babu), especially given that the poster of the video was allegedly the woman’s own
grandchild. Such reactions hint at the epidemiological notion of the selfie as a viral and
infectious culture and align with the reactions to selfie deaths studies in Chapter Two. In the
lynching case, the selfie was presented as a sign of apathy: “the worst thing that one person can
do to another is to take a selfie in such a situation,” as one news report puts it (“India Kerala
mob”). Here, the selfie ended up being a record of actual evidence against the attackers
(Abraham). In both cases the invocation of the selfie as “evidence” of the incidents
(notwithstanding their factual accuracy) had less to do with any inherent indexical connection to
truth. Rather the perceived truth effects of the selfies were a product of their circulation. While
instances such as these bring questions of ethics and morality into sharp focus, they also attest to
the messiness of the selfie’s terrains of circulation and reception. These images elude the hyper
objective optics of big data visualization techniques and its reliance on data mining. Instead, if
we are to understand the effects of selfies as cultural images, we have to be slow, deliberate and
zoom in close to read them. While my account of selfie culture in India is far from complete, it
points us to future directions of research that can do justice to the complexity of the images and
the work that they do.
NOTES

1. For instance, several news reports linked in the SelfieCity website carry headlines such as “Russians
Are Miserable And Brazilians Love To Smile” (Co.Design) and “Women Tilt Their Heads More, and
Other Findings From a Rigorous Analysis of Selfies” (Slate).
2. See “Penetration of leading social networks in India as of 3rd quarter 2017” in Statista.

303

3. The original lyrics are in Tamil. I have accessed an English translation of the lyrics available on the
Tamil Song Lyrics website (http://www.tsonglyrics.net/2014/10/selfie-pulla-english-meaning-lyrics.html).

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Image Sources
Fig.1: (Top) YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk-TxySUAzw).
(Bottom) SelfieCity (http://selfiecity.net/#selfiexploratory).
Fig.2: SelfieCity (http://selfiecity.net/#).
Fig.3: YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jA5B32MP98).
Fig.4: SCoRe brochure. Courtesy Hemant Gaule.
Fig.5: Author’s composite of YouTube screen grabs
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Fig.6: (Top Left) YouTube screen grab (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R36sb1vi_oA).
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308

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•

309
Dissertation Bibliography
(Note: Social media content such as Facebook and Instagram posts and Tweets have not been
included in this bibliography. Website information documents such as “About Us” pages have
also not been included. Video citations have been retained. In case of collected editions, journals
and anthologies from which two or more sources have been referenced, the entire collection has
been cited here. Social media references and image sources can also be found in the relevant
chapter bibliographies and have not been included here.)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Baishya, Anirban Kapil (author)

Core Title Viral selves: Cellphones, selfies and the self-fashioning subject in contemporary India

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/26/2020

Defense Date 05/03/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cellphone culture,India,mobile imaging,network culture,OAI-PMH Harvest,selfie,virality

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Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Govil, Nitin (committee chair), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email anirban.baishya@gmail.com,baishya@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-34238

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