Nancy Thumim

Self-representation and digital culture

Introduction: Self-Representation and Digital Culture Histories of Self-Representation Mediation Broadcasters Museums and Art Worlds Self-Representation Online Self-Representation, Digital Culture and Genre Bibliography Endnotes Index

'Everyone has a story to tell : Mediation and self-representation in two UK institutions

This article addresses a global phenomenon: mediated selfrepresentations by ‘ordinary people’, and focuses on public cultural institutions. In order to address how processes of mediation shape institutionally mediated self-representations, the article explores two UK projects, the Museum of London’s London’s Voices and BBC Wales’ Capture Wales. It is suggested that processes of institutional mediation are constituted through tensions in four key areas: the purposes of the projects; the construct of the ‘ordinary person’; the construct of ‘community’; and defining and achieving quality. I argue that critical analysis of the production processes shaping self-representations is crucial to examining the challenge to the power of media institutions implied by their inviting ‘ordinary people’ to represent themselves. The article concludes that, while institutional power is not fundamentally altered in the projects discussed, nevertheless empowerment of participants does have the potential to effect shifts in the role of public cultural institutions; and this is important at a time when that role is questioned, worldwide, as a result of technological, social and political developments. Finally, I suggest that the notion of mediation processes as constituted through tensions, provides analytic tools with which to critically examine the self-representation landscape.

MEDIATED SELF-REPRESENTATIONS: “ORDINARY PEOPLE” IN “COMMUNITIES”

In Britain at the start of the twenty-first century, public service institutions in the cultural domain are inviting members of the public to tell (and exhibit) personal stories, that is, to represent themselves across a range of media platforms and through the use of a variety of audio and visual technologies. I suggest that two notions, “ordinary people” and “community,” are key constructs in the processes of mediation that shape the invitation to members of the public, the public’s take up of the invitation, and the resultant selfrepresentations. Drawing on Rose, Couldry, Williams, Mayo and others the key question explored in this paper is how far the notions of “ordinary people” and “community” operate to control and order people’s representations of themselves, and how far these terms are positive and empowering for those so ascribed. This question is explored with reference to early findings from two case studies, BBC Wales’ Capture Wales and the Museum of London’s London’s Voices.

Self-representation in museums: therapy or democracy?

This article explores the discourses of citizenship through which the museum institution is currently framing its public: museum-goers as participants. Drawing on qualitative research on the Londons Voices project at the Museum of London, and 1934: A New Deal For Artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, this paper examines the ways in which the contemporary museum, and cultural policy internationally, has converged around the activity of inviting members of the public to ‘speak for themselves’ through a variety of media technologies. Discursive analysis of such mediated activities as activities of self-representation suggests that this strategy of participation is simultaneously both productive and uneasy, as questions of institutional legitimacy and citizen empowerment co-exist within the broader social context of the self-speaking or auto/biographical society.

(Extra)ordinary portraits: Self-representation, public culture and the contemporary British soldier

This article explores the contemporary image of the British soldier, especially where the opportunity for soldiers to tell their own stories is highlighted as the core justification in the presentation of co-produced materials. The authors consider the particular generic affordances, constraints and aesthetics of two recent projects, Our War (BBC 3) and War Story (Imperial War Museum), both of which hope to offer a ‘direct’ insight into soldiers’ experiences in Afghanistan, albeit through the lenses of public institutions which inevitably come with their own interpretive frameworks. At the heart of the study are the concept of self-representation and the idea of the portrait. The article examines recurrent themes, styles of portrayal and notable absences, asking, for example: how do the different dimensions of mediation constitute the soldiers as ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’? The authors argue that it is theoretically and empirically productive to analyse the two projects together as interconnected forms of a ‘genre of self-representation’.

BBC and New Media: Legitimization Strategies of a Public Service Broadcaster in a Corporate Market Environment

This chapter explores the use of new media by the BBC as a strategy for the institution to sustain its legitimacy under a new regulative regime that favours open market competition. Even though the BBC, one of the major Public Service Broadcasting institutions worldwide, is not privatized, it is, nonetheless, now obliged both to adopt practices that originate in the private sector in order to remain competitive in the changing media environment, and, at the same time, continually to secure and consolidate its justification for public funding. We argue that one of the practices strategically employed by the BBC in this process is the use of new media for purposes of public participation and self-representation by ordinary people, and we focus on a particular case study of this practice: Capture Wales, a BBC Wales Internet-based project that pictures Wales from the citizens’ autobiographical perspectives.1

Self-(re)presentation now

A special issue called “Self-(Re)presentation Now” cannot ignore the political and social events that have overtaken us since the original call for papers in July 2015. The battles we are seeing in physical and digital spaces and in their intermingling make plain that questions of presentation and representation of individuals, groups, and communities are key sites of struggle in the contemporary moment; relatedly, the roles of digital affordances, systems, industries, snd structures are also thrown into relief. The scholars writing in this special issue touch in more or less direct ways on how critical scholarship on questions of the representation, re-presentation, and presentation of self are enmeshed in wider struggles. That is, issues of representation, re-presentation, and presentation of self should now be understood as more than a niche part of the fields of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the articles collected here suggest that questions about the self in digital culture are now a key part of the field of media and communications engagement with the political. The selected articles—and the enthusiastic response to the original open call for papers—demonstrate the wide range of scholarship focusing on presentation and representation of the self in this moment. This special issue shows that questions of self-presentation and representation in digital culture are the focus of lively debate, critique, and investigation and that this is taking place from a number of theoretical perspectives and indeed in a number of fields and locations across the globe. This special issues features scholars speaking from Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The time for a critique of the concepts at hand and their relations is quite clearly upon us, as the recent explosion of publications engaging these concepts already attests (e.g., Dayter & Muhleisen, 2016; Dobson, 2015; Kennedy, 2016; Senft & Baym, 2015). The authors in this issue join the debate, subjecting the concepts of representation, presentation, and the self (taken together and taken apart) to thoughtful critique. The articles explore a range of objects and processes, namely, gender-diverse and gender-fluid selfies, “migrant-related selfies,” parent bloggers, “nonselfie selfies,” Chatroulette, and Twitter, and in so doing they insist that the field of selfrepresentation and self presentation and performance online be opened up beyond the selfie to include the selfie in a rather larger set of practices and processes. The authors here employ a range of perspectives and methodological approaches. Despite their diversity, we can read the articles presented here as prioritizing a couple of key foci that set the debate for research in this area from now on, namely, the self itself and power relations. In the following sections, I discuss each of these themes and their location in the articles, concluding with some thoughts about where the original research presented here takes theories of the self in digital culture.

'When he's in Afghanistan it's like our world/his world': mediating military experience

This article reports on a qualitative research project which invited those with direct experience – as serving personnel involved in media operations, military veterans and forces family members – to respond to a variety of media genres and discuss how such portrayals of military experience correspond with their own perceptions and their own representational practices. It is our contention that such mediations offer significant and interconnected spaces through which to explore negotiations of the meanings of military experience in contemporary public culture. Drawing on thematic analysis from our focus groups, we address a number of research questions: In what ways do the participants identify and engage with the various media portrayals, and how do they think this relates to the perceived public profile of the armed forces? How do they assess the capability of media texts to provide insights into the ‘realities’ of military experience (including emotionally charged moments of camaraderie and trauma)? In the multiple challenges and ambiguities heard within our groups, we find complex and troubled senses of ‘militariness’, bound up with sometimes intense affectivities.

Legitimising the BBC in the Digital Cultural Sphere: The Case of Capture Wales

Abstract This paper explores the use of new media by the BBC as a strategy for sustaining institutional legitimacy under a new regulative regime favouring open market competition. Focusing on the case of Capture Wales, a BBC Wales internet-based project that describes Wales from the citizens’ autobiographical perspectives, and using a discourse analysis approach, we examine how the BBC re-positions itself in the emerging digital cultural sphere by using technology in the service of public participation. We observe a sense of empowerment in the opportunity participants were given arguing that such empowerment is no small thing, insofar as it clearly demonstrates that the public value produced through technological innovation lies in re-negotiating the power relations between institutional authority and ordinary people – in allowing the latter to appropriate the “means of media production” and to tell their own stories in public. Ultimately the article suggests that competing interests give rise to crucial tensions between ethico-political (serving society) and instrumental (justifying the licence fee) conceptions of benefit within Capture Wales, which in turn produce constant struggles over the visibility as well as the vision of/for this digital storytelling project by the stakeholders involved in its execution.

Therapy, Democracy and the Creative Practice of Digital Storytelling

Thumim returns to the assumption prevalent in much theoretical scholarship in which the practice of Digital Storytelling (DS) is understood as most valuable if it can be understood as functioning to democratise media spaces. Therapeutic outcomes are sometimes seen as at best better than nothing and at worst reactionary - often understood as serving individual self-improvement in opposition to a more widely conceived social good. Thumim analyses practices featured in Dunford/Jenkins (2017), Digital Storytelling Form and Content through this lens and concludes that contemporary DS practices are much more than either democratic or therapeutic. She adds the concept of creativity to the mix and argues the essays in this collection demonstrate how the three combine in a unique productive tension within Digital Storytelling.