Prof Takes ‘Selfie’ Discourse to Mainstream Media

Montclair State School of Communication and Media associate professor Hugh Curnutt brought his thoughts on the ‘selfie’ to the wider world with the publication of an editorial in The Record.

“The Oxford English Dictionary recent named selfie, the practice of taking and distributing a self-authored photograph of oneself using a smartphone, its word of the year for 2013,” wrote Curnutt.

Curnutt goes on to defend the practice that he says some decry as a signifier of a “narcissistic culture … obsessed with celebrity and self-promotion.” Yes, haters gonna hate, but Curnutt argues for a more thoughtful consideration of the phenomenon — “thinking about how something like selfies actually functions to reinforce as well as disrupt the norms associated with self-authored media content.”