Lee Humphreys - The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life

The Qualified Self

Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life

Lee Humphreys

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Serif by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Humphreys, Lee, author.

Title: The qualified self : social media and the accounting of everyday life / Lee Humphreys.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038167 | ISBN 9780262037853 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Information technology--Social aspects. | Social media. | Diaries--Social aspects. | Self--Social aspects. | Identity (Psychology) and mass media.

Classification: LCC HM851 .H856 2018 | DDC 302.23/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038167

This book is dedicated to my parents, with love, always.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Photo of authors son and husband

Photo of travel journal from 1952

Facebook memory prompt

My School Years multipicture frame

Map of Dodgeball check-ins

Preface

Ive been studying mobile phone use since 2001. And there have been concerns about rude behavior and mobile phones ever since they came on the market. Early on people were concerned about the seemingly oblivious nature of people often ignoring others and speaking loudly on cell phones in public spaces, due to poor receptionsomething they used to call cell-yell. It seemed that the less people could hear the person on the other end of their phone, the louder they spoke. I cant hear you. Can you hear me? How about now? I think I lost you. Can you hear me now? was a common refrain heard across the streets of America as people tried to make cell phone calls despite shoddy service. In fact, throughout much of the early 2000s, Verizon used Can you hear me now? Good, as the tagline in their TV ads, suggesting that their cell phone coverage was much better than AT&Ts. As mobile service overall improved, concerns about cell-yell have gone away, but concerns about inappropriate behavior remain.

Today, when we think about obnoxious mobile phone behavior, an image of a person taking a selfie is likely to pop up. Yes, the selfie has become the poster child for what it means to own a mobile phone. It has become a societal concern. The selfie represents our fear that mobile phones and social media to which selfies are often shared, are encouraging a kind of narcissism. Indeed, there are lots of jokes made about how social media platforms are fundamentally forms of me-promotion. People on Facebook say like me, people on Twitter say listen to me, people on LinkedIn say hire me, people on YouTube say watch me, people on Pinterest say show me, people on Instagram say look at me, people on blogger say agree with me, and people on Tumblr say accept me.

We are concerned that as a society we are becoming more narcissistic. And mobile and social media are contributing to this. We no longer fall in love with our reflection in the pool of water like Narcissus did. We have fallen in love with our image reflected back to us in our filtered mobile devices. Or, if we arent concerned about our own narcissistic tendencies, then we are concerned that others are becoming more narcissistic, especially the younger Me generation Mobile and social media devices and platforms are seen as encouraging a kind of self-obsession.

But I want to suggest that mobile media are not the root evil contributing to a self-obsessed society. Instead, I want to convince you that mobile and social media are part of a much longer story of the ways people use media to catalog their lives and share it with others. I argue that this is a long-standing human practice and there isnt necessarily anything pathological about writing about or taking pictures of yourself and sharing them with others. In fact, its how people have accounted for everyday life for centuries.