How Selfies Think: The Cognitive Dimensions of Digital Photography

In thinking through the rise of selfies, it is tempting to try to say something essential and enduring. Life surely forces them to act on that capacity. And that capacity surely acts on them. Thinking pursues people as much as people pursue thinking. And manifestly thoughtless acts remain open to later reflection. With regard to establishing what selfies basically are, for instance, it might have once been the case that selfies were mainly about public self-presentation. Selfies are, in other words, far less individual, far less public, and far more varied than we might think. Part of the significance of this cognitive dimension of selfies is evident when we invoke something Morrison herself invokes in 2015. The question is how one responds to all this when committed to a direct engagement with the cognitive dimensions of digital photography. Selfies are traces of the thought to take a selfie.