Lee Humphreys, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life

Abstract

In The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life, Lee Humphreys introduces and centers her work around a concept she introduces as “media accounting” (p. 9), understood as the reflexive documenting of quotidian details of our everyday lives. She identifies four main levels that comprise media accounting: sharing the everyday, performing identity, remembrancing, and reckoning (the chapters that make up the book). It is through her exploration of these four branches that she brings our attention to what she calls the qualified self: “the understanding of ourselves that emerges from creating and reengaging with media traces” (p. 18). Ultimately, by employing a mixed methods approach that includes interviews, archival analysis, and content analysis, among others, Humphreys examines the uses and affordances of contemporary social media platforms as well as older analog media like diaries and photo albums to position social media as a contemporary extension of a centuries-long practice of everyday meaning making.