The qualified self : social media and the accounting of everyday life / Lee Humphreys.
Humphreys, Lee, author.
2018
HM851 .H856 2018eb
Available Online

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Title The qualified self : social media and the accounting of everyday life / Lee Humphreys.
Author Humphreys, Lee, author.
ISBN 9780262346252 (electronic book)
0262346257 (electronic book)
9780262037853
0262037858
Published Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2018]
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xvi, 179 pages) : illustrations
Call Number HM851 .H856 2018eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 302.23/1
Summary Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In The Qualified Self, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives-what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit-didn't begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today's digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it's part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life. Humphreys refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn't agree with her. Diaries, Humphreys explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven "quantified self," but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Qualified self.
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Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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Introduction
Sharing the everyday
Performing identity work
Remembrancing
Reckoning
Conclusion.

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