Selfie Journalism and Politics: An Empirical Approach

Introduction

In 2016, Anil Sabharwal, Vice President of Google Photos, shared a blog post of Google’s statistics on selfies, showing that within a year 24 billion had been uploaded to the application by more than 200 million users (Sabharwal, 2016). Undoubtedly the popularity of selfies has increased rapidly since 2002, when an Australian citizen posted a picture of his face and called it a ‘selfie’, with millions of people now posting and sharing selfies using various applications on a daily basis (Littleton, 2019).

However, the cause of this popularity increase is perceived in different ways by society and academia. While society characterises selfies as narcissist, attention-seeking and self-promoting, academia focuses on more meaningful approaches and detailed analysis (Zook & Poorthuis, 2019). For example, a number of scholars have extensively analysed the phenomenon of selfies through documentation of the various contexts in which selfies are used (Kedzior & Allen, 2016): as tools for self-presentation and communication (Bellinger, 2015; Katz & Crocker, 2015; Frosh, 2015), a form of journalistic evidence (Koliska & Roberts, 2015), political messaging (Baishya, 2015), resistance (Nemer & Freeman, 2015), a visual commodity (Iqani & Schroeder, 2015), conspicuous consumption (Marwick, 2015), and an expression of feminist values and art (Murray, 2015).

Selfies were recently documented in the context of journalism (see Omar, 2015; Maniou & Veglis, 2016). A theoretical idea of convergence between journalism and selfies in a single framework led academic researchers to identify a new tendency in journalism, which they termed selfie journalism. Having studied the phenomenon of selfies, not only in the field of cultural studies but also in that of visual studies and the media, selfie journalism was viewed and introduced as a form of participatory (Bowman & Willis, 2003; Gillmor, 2004) and citizen journalism (Noor, 2017). As such, it constitutes one of the most notable phenomena within the current digital media environment, with its dissemination linked to the advent of the internet and Web 2.0. The digital revolution, including the use of smart, personal digital devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) and the power of social media tools, has converted citizens into potential creators of images of newsworthy events (Maniou & Veglis, 2016), affecting various norms in the news production process.

Although this new technologically-driven phenomenon was incorporated quickly into contemporary journalistic workflows, it raised a number of issues regarding the emergence of elements of infotainment and impartial reporting on crucial and complex matters. More and more public figures such as politicians began to exploit the capabilities of social media platforms for consumption and distribution of personal content (Ellison et al., 2011, p. 19), experimenting with a range of self-presentation tools to empower their political base (Farci & Orefice, 2015) and to widen political participation (Zook & Poorthuis, 2019). Other frequently discussed factors contributing to an increase in political participation are microblogging (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011) and social networking (Amichai-Hamburger & Hayat, 2017), which similarly raise issues of reliability and trustworthiness.

This chapter investigates the relationship between selfie journalism and politics, examining its use during elections, based on quantitative analysis techniques. The wider scope of the research is to investigate the extent to which selfie journalism has penetrated the media, aiming to attract larger audiences in ‘difficult’ sectors of reporting, such as politics. The aim of the study is twofold: first, to examine the extensive use of selfie journalism in political campaigning and, second, to examine the impact of this phenomenon on the media.