The erect ego: self-portraits in the Internet era

Abstract

Until quite recently, the public reflection on our own personality or body using artistic means such as writing, photography or cinema, was reserved to artists (or wealthy people who could sign them up). However, the appearance and diffusion of Internet during the 90s, the apparition of the first digital camera in 1994, and the proliferation of camcorders and different electronic devices inserted in computers, has hugely popularized the self-portrait and has come to transform our bedrooms, not into artists’ studios, but into proper cinema sets. At the same time, our bedrooms walls, previously papered with handsome actors and exuberant singers, have been substituted by the walls of our social networks where we are the star. Just like the appearance of photographs allowed the construction of the bourgeois ego, of his/her privacy, home, holidays, family, and concept of gender, their dissolution through digital photography is probably going to entail the dissolution of these very same concepts: privacy as a public space, gender as a masquerade, and family as a global group as well as a group of interests.