Political Selfies: Image Events in the New Media Field

What is it about?

With the advent of Internet and the Web 2.0 operations along with the social media tools, we have witnessed a fundamental shift in political communication standards. Locating selfie within a broader trend of postmodern political campaigning, this chapter asserts that this new form of communication –partly unmediated- presents opportunities for new forms of interaction between citizens and politicians, new forms of political image making and new ways to attract media attention. More specifically, we suggest that political selfie reconfigures and shifts traditional ways of political communication through four distinct but interrelated uses: (a) self-generated material, disengaged by traditional media, (b) sense of intimacy, (c) political branding tool and, (d) media attention device. Within this context, this research reconsiders media events in the digital media field and suggests that political selfies can be regarded as a new type of image events, which challenge the obsolete representations of the traditional political figure with an aura of proximity and intimacy. Based on a number of well-known and striking political selfies and drawing on theories on media events and celebrity politics, we argue that, compared to the past, this new activity can contribute to attract public attention and build renewed personal brands of the political actors.

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