Digital Narcissism: Social Networking, Blogging and the Tethered Self

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, we have explored the relationship between new opportunities to improve the self and contemporary conceptions of vanity. We have traced the role of fashion and the body beautiful in the rise of the consumer and the pursuit of full citizenship for women at the turn of the twentieth century. We have examined contemporary imperatives to produce fit, desirable bodies and to avert ageing. We have analysed reality television programmes in general, and The Biggest Loser in particular, as an expression of the ‘makeover culture […] where becoming is more desirable than being’ (Jones, 2008). We found in these programmes a point of intersection between corporeal transformation and the transformative possibilities offered by new forms of media and entertainment where vain self-regard was reframed as appropriate attentiveness to the potential for self-improvement. As Braidotti (2002) reminds us, contemporary enactments of subjectivity focus on processes of transformation, on knowing what it is we seek to become rather than ever definitively achieving the perfect state of being.