The Selfie Machine: Selfies, Platforms, and Digital Image Culture in India

The Selfie Machine offers novel insight into personalized communication practices in the digital age through the medium of the selfie. While the selfie has achieved notoriety due to pop-psychology accounts of Narcissism-related selfie "disorders," this book examines the selfie as a mode of meaning making and self-presentation that includes not just still images, but also short videos, hashtag practices and economies of liking and following. In taking India as the starting point of its investigation, The Selfie Machine inverts the "West-then-the-rest" model of understanding global digital media practices. The book considers selfie culture’s impact on personal and public digital practices and trends—ranging from cellphone markets, to influencer entrepreneurship and microcelebrity, to the conduct of politics and protest. In doing so, it not only offers an expanded definition of selfies in digital media culture, but also demonstrates how “global” digital media (including selfies) cannot be understood as a monolith.