The vernacular behind selfies is the vernacular of capital, not popular culture

Evidence

Regardless, challenging this view—that the essence of the selfie is its link to the photographer, that it is a “vernacular” form of image making outside the boundaries of institutional visual culture—is more difficult to challenge than the suggestion that selfies are disposable, and it is an argument that characterizes far more commentary on selfies and selfie culture. Do selfies—now self-portraits or, perhaps even better (referring back to the Times article from 2006), digital self-portraits—appear different from the disposable, quickly constructed, ephemeral selfies of the early to mid aughts? Not really, but this belies their labored construction. Let us turn to the example hinted at above: the no-mirror mirror selfie. This case both undermines the ability to claim the selfie as disposable and reframes what we might mean by “vernacular.” If these images come from some form of popular vernacular, then that vernacular is the one spoken by capital. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 83

The image, its inability to fully conceal that which exists beyond its frame, gestures toward the condition of production; this would, we suggest, make these images self-portraits, not selfies. And even if selfies may have seemed to be “disposable,” we can begin to see that they’ve always involved an elaborate, extensive system of production that remains obscured by the image. This is why selfies are not “vernacular” forms of visual culture. We can only say they are vernacular if we ignore the relations inherent in the production of any image, and these relations are surely not “of the people.” They are relations of capital, in which sociality and community have been subsumed into production. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 90

Categorization

• SEED: A strong closing line: ‘that vernacular is the one spoken by capital’ could anchor an essay on influencer ‘authenticity’ as a commodity dialect.
• XREF: Key to the reader’s Corpocene case study: the influencer’s self-image is a commodity, with labor subsumed into production—directly relevant to analyzing a real creator.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 83; Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 90