London – The online satirists at The Daily Currant earned lots of laughs in September when they claimed that Boston’s Emerson College was to launch a course on “The Art of the Self-Portrait”.
But four months later, a London college, City Lit, is offering that very same class.
“The course is a theory and practical introduction to photographic self-portraiture,” intones a syllabus. “It is conceived for students to improve their critical understanding of the photographic self-portrait, as well as a platform to develop ideas towards the creation of a coherent body of work.”
City Lit, admittedly, isn’t a conventional college. It has more in common with a continuing education programme than a degree-conferring university.
That said, it is daring to tread where only satirists and the occasional community college have trodden before. And it’s doing so in accordance with a pretty significant trend: it appears that academics see the lowly self-portrait – and other maligned trends in internet culture – as a subject for serious academic inquiry.
Just think of the other buzzy college classes to have made news.
You can study YouTube and online porn and “wasting time on the internet” – so it’s about time the selfie saw some of that love.
Academics are, after all, enamoured of the form: more than 2 000 are members of an informal group called The Selfies Research Network, a hub for people studying “the artistic, economic and sociological impact of ‘selfies’.”
If you doubted, for a moment, that the lowly selfie had such wide-ranging impacts, you need only scroll through the network’s Facebook page – where, at any moment, high-falutin’ academics are discussing everything from “Marxist feminism photo-boasting” to Lady Gaga.
Conferences on everything from art to anthropology have hosted panels on the selfie. An upcoming issue of the International Journal of Communication will study its sociology and ethics, considering the selfie as as an “act of production” and a “cultural signifier”.
When you sum it all up, it’s less amazing that this lone college is teaching a class on the selfie and more amazing that more colleges haven’t followed suit.
Sure, there are arthritic grumps out there harrumphing about the habits of the “kids these days”. But increasingly, mainstream academia seems to understand the selfie as a cultural artefact – and perhaps the mainstream public does, too. That would at least explain why so many people fell so easily for The Daily Currant’s “selfie class” story.
“Sometimes I read satire and wonder how long until it becomes reality,” one woman tweeted.
Apparently, no time at all.
Daily Mail