Two: Self and the society
Hi Ana. I feel this is me because it represents my first day at secondary school which had a huge influence on who I am today. It’s dated, largely because it was taken in 1985. still dont understand why my mother insisted on the plastic briefcase.. with my name in gold letters on the inside! (it was smashed to pieces on day 1) I was the smallest kid in the first year of school (boys school of 1500) and the smallest when I left! Since then I have always felt that I’m invisible and have to prove my worth to be noticed. Hope this helps with your research.. good luck and see you soon. Jeff
In 1969, George Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), the image sensor that was to become fundamental part of any digital camera. This revolution in photographic technology was reaching much further than to make 35 millimetres film unnecessary for photographic practice and thus life of any photographer easier. Introduction of CCD was another milestone on the way to making photography a popular cultural activity. The way it was going to become an everyday life practice was to be brought about almost 40 years later with the spread of the Internet. Now not only could anybody be an artist but also any one could have access to an audience broader than the visitors of their living room. The moment any one could publish a photograph without any body’s permission or approval the hegemony of established artist-photographer was broken. As I argued before the evolution of services such as Flickr – dedicated to delivering one’s personal photos to large scale audiences – signify the need of individuals to share forms of photographic representation. And in this chapter I would like to examine whether the new need in individual need can be an expression of new social situation.
Lets get back to the subject of the self. In the words of George Mead “The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from objects and from the body” (Mead G, 1992: 136). How contemporary is Mead’s writing, having been committed over 70 years ago, can be a subject to discussion. But what I find remarkable about “Mind, Self and Society” is that in many of its fundamental assumptions it still holds true. It is one of the first books to acknowledge how critical to social thought is the concept of the self and significance of this acknowledgment can bee still observed throughout social theory.
Let us have a look into what this self really is according to Mead. “Reason cannot become impersonal unless it takes and objective, impersonal attitude toward itself; otherwise we have just consciousness, not self-consciousness“ (Mead G, 1992: 138). To make this self-consciousness possible one must be provided with the means of behaving in a way that would allow us to, for the lack of better terms, stand outside of ourselves and look at ourselves the way we presume we are being seen by the outside word. Here, according to Mead, lies the importance of communication, especially symbolic communication, to the human beings. To become an object is to realise oneself through behaviour that has symbolic meaning and this meaning is directed not only at other individuals but at one’s self too. “A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he is saying to others; otherwise he doesn’t know what he’s talking about“ (Mead G, 1992: 147). Awareness of symbolic gesture must be in all participants of communication – we presume our response to the action will arouse the same response in others as it does or did in us. This is an art in itself, and as Mead writes an artist must: “find the kind of expression that will arouse in others what is going on in himself“ (Mead G, 1992: 147). Realisation of this sort might seem disappointingly basic but if we put it in the context of photography’s move from an art form to popular culture practice we must realise that there are two implications of it: first we all become artists and we all embark on the mission of finding appropriate expressions for our emotional or mental states. Secondly the art form descends into popular culture, becomes it and therefore the process of looking for artistic expressions becomes a common experience. If creativity is an expression of what is going on in oneself, I argue that in the sort of pop culture that these photos represent they are realisation of the task to communicate (arouse in others) more so than of the search to express what is aroused in one self.
(…) The photo that represents a person is telling in a lot of aspects: what is on it pictures not only who the person want to be perceived as but also how they want to perceive themselves, how they want to manifest what they are or could be. “We get a great deal of our enjoyment”, writes Mead, “of romance, of moving pictures, of art, in setting free, at least in imagination, capacities which belong to ourselves, or which we want to belong to ourselves” (Mead G, 1992: 201).
Quite along the lines of what was stated by Michael Foucault several decades later Mead observes that the influences between individual and group are never a one-way street. Mead believed that temporarily and logically social process exists before the individual that “arises in it”. However “every adjustment involves some sort of change in the community to which the individual adjusts himself” (Mead G, 1992: 202) The significance of this statement lays in the fact that we can detect origins of social trends and fashions if we methodologically apply it to group behaviour. There is no change of the self without change in society and vice versus. There also isn’t a start to this cycle – both cause one another and even great minds that change the course of history are an effect of changing social landscape. Similarly Anthony Giddens agrees that “the self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences; in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their specific contexts of actions, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications” (Giddens A, 2007: 2).
One important problem that both Mead and Bauman – respectively in their areas of interest – seem to omit is that if it is critical for communication that the meanings people attribute to symbolic actions are similar any differences in this process of decoding can cause serious distortion to the self. Isn’t difference in perceiving the gestures more of a problem to contemporary self than uncertainty? This is why we show so much determination in trying to manifest our personal meaning – to make sure others understand us the way we intend to be understood. It is symbols “that do in a certain sense constitute our mind, provided that not only the symbol but also the responses are in our own nature” (Mead G, 1992: 190).
(…) The key issue here is that our creativity always embodies the social process, however we embody it from our unique perspective (in this sense every self is indeed unique) thus communally creating a full picture.
[part one of "This photo is me" can be found here This Photo is me #1]