All What We Send Is Selfie: Images in the Age of Immediate Reproduction

Résumé En

Like the use of social network sites, mobile visual apps function as repositories of images. There, conversations are also affectively driven and have been adopted by a mass of users. Focusing on Parisian teenagers' uses of Snapchat, a mobile application conceived for ephemeral image exchanges, this paper aims to offer a qualitative analytical appreciation, an insight on teenagers' selfie 1-taking ephemeral practices, and the mechanisms they have to control the privacy and the sharing of their images. Today, at least among the teenaged population I studied, it seems there is a marked shift in the practices of sharing and saving self produced images. Due to the fact that most of these mobile amateur pictures remain digital, there seems to be a change of attitude where youth see mobile images less as a physical good, a commodity, or an object for personal data archiving, and more as fleeting ephemerality. Is this the end of vernacular everyday life photographs understood as a material jukebox of souvenir? Through these transient private image exchanges, is not a more a visual-storytelling recreational exchange being established?