The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life

The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life, by Lee Humphreys

Synopsis: How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books.

Social critiques argue that social media have made us narcissistic, that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are all vehicles for me-promotion. In The Qualified Self, Lee Humphreys offers a different view. She shows that sharing the mundane details of our lives—what we ate for lunch, where we went on vacation, who dropped in for a visit—didn’t begin with mobile devices and social media. People have used media to catalog and share their lives for several centuries. Pocket diaries, photo albums, and baby books are the predigital precursors of today’s digital and mobile platforms for posting text and images. The ability to take selfies has not turned us into needy narcissists; it’s part of a longer story about how people account for everyday life.

Humphreys refers to diaries in which eighteenth-century daily life is documented with the brevity and precision of a tweet, and cites a nineteenth-century travel diary in which a young woman complains that her breakfast didn’t agree with her. Diaries, Humphreys explains, were often written to be shared with family and friends. Pocket diaries were as mobile as smartphones, allowing the diarist to record life in real time. Humphreys calls this chronicling, in both digital and nondigital forms, media accounting. The sense of self that emerges from media accounting is not the purely statistics-driven “quantified self,” but the more well-rounded qualified self. We come to understand ourselves in a new way through the representations of ourselves that we create to be consumed.

Published: Apri 2018 | ISBN: 9780262037853

Mini-bio: Lee Humphreys studies the social uses and perceived effects of communication technology. Her research has explored mobile phone use in public spaces, emerging norms on mobile social networks, and the privacy and surveillance implications of location-based services. – Adapted from Cornell University bio

Author’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/leehumphreys

I highly recommend Humphreys’ book to whomever wants to deepen their understanding of how and why people document, share, and re-engage with their own media traces. – Information, Communication and Society

The Qualified Self offers a new perspective on how social media users construct and distribute ‘self-portraits’ through media technologies. Lee Humphreys has delivered a truly original revision of ‘mediated memories’ and a much-needed update to the age of connectivity. – José van Dijck, Distinguished University Professor, Utrecht University; author of Mediated Memories in the Digital Age and The Culture of Connectivity

New Books Network Interviews Author

European Journal of Communication Book Review