Mirror selfies fake spontaneity but are highly engineered, revealing why selfies do not exist

Evidence

The no-mirror mirror selfie demonstrates how this is a partial account of our transparency. The image is supposed to appear as if transparent; its intent is, in Han’s terms, pornographic. But its transparency must itself rely on a set of mechanisms that are concealed. We only begin to approach these mechanisms, acknowledging the lack of transparency of the selfie, once we acknowledge that selfies do not exist. As one journalistic account of the no-mirror mirror selfie remarked, “Celebs and influencers go to a lot of trouble to make their instagrams personal, like an inside peek into their lives. The mirror selfie has a certain, je ne sais quoi, because it’s supposed to be taken on a whim, in the moment, a spontaneous second where you look H-O-T,” but the realization that there is no mirror would seem to undermine this disposability, this ephemerality, this vernacularity. “That’s why it’s so interesting that these images aren’t being taken in mirrors. They aren’t fleeting moments of fab-ness, but actually highly engineered and structured photos with a lot of thought and primping behind them.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the claim that ‘selfies do not exist’ as a conceptual move — the selfie purports transparency of an authentic self that is itself fabricated.
• CANDY: The no-mirror mirror selfie — an image engineered to look like a spontaneous mirror shot without any mirror — is a fun, concrete cultural artifact.