7 Things James Franco May Have Missed In His Theorization Of Selfies

In the New York Times, Franco argues that "selfies are tools of communication more than marks of vanity"

1.

"Selfies are something new to me, but as I have become increasingly addicted to Instagram, I have been accused of posting too many of them." What Franco overlooks is that everything posted in Instagram is a selfie, whether it includes an image of oneself or not. As long as it is attached to your profile name, it's a selfie!

2.

"I’ve learned that the selfie is one of the most popular ways to post — and garner the most likes from followers. The likes spin out of control for selfies of me and my two handsome brothers..." What Franco overlooks here is that posting pictures of oneself is popular because it is uncontroversial. It is the content that makes no objective claims about the world and blankets everything in a comfortable subjective sheen for the consumer of the image. Selfies are popular on social networks because they invite uninformed judgment.

3.

"I can see which posts don’t get attention or make me lose followers: those with photos of art projects; videos telling the haters to go away (in not so many words); and photos with poems." What Franco seems to be missing here is that all serial selfies are also an art project. Also, image macros will be less popular than plain images because they require more time to consume, and this added demand on the rapid consumer of Instagram images will filter out a certain proportion of its potential audience. When dealing with a network of Franco's size, this proportion is a substantial figure.

4.

"a well-stocked collection of selfies seems to get attention. And attention seems to be the name of the game when it comes to social networking." What Franco seems to overlook here is the way "attention economy" as a metaphor tends to create the conditions it is intended to describe, assigning a fungible, convertible, circulatable economic value to attention, which is otherwise anchored to measures of time. Of course, social media themselves are premised on the promises of an attention economy: that users will accept attention as payment for their data and their vulnerability to advertising.

5.

"We speak of the celebrity selfie, which is its own special thing. It has value regardless of the photo’s quality." What Franco overlooks here is that the value in a celebrity's image is frail as long as it is secured by its supposed authenticity. Celebrities are valuable to media companies because of their malleability within consumers' vicarious fantasies. Images of them need to be authentic only insofar as they support the realism of popular fantasies involving them. No consumer of celebrity ultimately cares about the mundane genuineness of the people who populate their inner life of aspiration. For celebrities, the "truth" or "reality" of their lives is essentially inseparable from the use to which they are put by their admirers.

6.

"Now, while the celebrity selfie is most powerful as a pseudo-personal moment, the noncelebrity selfie is a chance for subjects to glam it up, to show off a special side of themselves." What Franco seems to imply here is that noncelebrities view selfies as a way to pretend they are famous. This overlooks the way social media invalidate "celebrity" as a motivating aspiration. Being watched by unknown audiences is now understood as a condition of social participation, not something to daydream about. The urgency behind selfie posting is to maintain typical social presence, not secure some excessive fame-like form of it.

7.

"I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, 'Hello, this is me.' " What Franco is really saying here is that selfies are the new frontier of compulsory reputation management. We will require performative selfies from one another as a way to liberate ourselves from more complicated heuristics of social judgment. Just as sumptuary laws once made social class easily apprehensible at a glance, mandatory selfies will make it immediately clear to others whether we are "worth dealing with."