Gaby David, Uruguayan, living in Paris, is a PhD Candidate in Visual Cultural Studies, at the “Centre of history and theory of arts” in the EHESS École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She holds a Masters in Fine Arts and is a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language. Her thesis project focuses on “Mobile images as a story of an intimate and vernacular appropriation”.

All What We Send is Selfie.  Images in the Age of Private, Immediate Reproduction

Concentrating on two focus groups of French teenagers and their use of Snapchat, an app conceived for ephemeral mobile image exchange logic, this article reflects on private possession and immediacy. Do teenage Snapchatters feel they might be circumventing a consumerist ecosystem predicated on image mediatization and self-image edition? In an age of hurried attention, this paper focuses on the more fleeting and private vernacular sharing of mobile images and seeks to offer a critical appreciation and insight to the will to save, possess, and archive everyday simple snapshots as we used to. In what ways does this short-lived image viewing dynamic make the process of mobile amateur image creation reply more to private impulsiveness rather than to long termed public deliberation and negotiation?