Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls Practices of Digital Inscription!

Self Inscription!
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I want to start off by thanking the American Studies Association for this opportunity to present
my work, my co-presenters, and Sarah, our respondent. Its great to be amongst all of these
brilliant minds in LA, and to get Tyrones invitation to join this panel on The Pain and Pleasure
of Autobiographical Expression. It couldnt have come at a better time:!
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Ive been teaching a class at William and Mary about Digital Undergrounds, New media and
emerging subcultures. My undergraduates, incoming freshman, are millennials whove grown up
online. Whats been fascinating to me is finding that, when it comes to the dimensions and
limitations of digital media, its we veteran cultural critics who need to challenge our own
naivet. Our students, who have experienced firsthand the mechanics of digital pleasure and
pain throughout their lives, tend to be much more cautious with social media. Theyve all
witnessed the unfolding of the trends Im speaking about today, and Ive learned a lot from them
about how media work upon their social world.!
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I think my generation is still under the spell of the benign, liberal possibilities we imagined when
digital media became part of our teen and adult lives. The hope of the 90s was steeped in the
rhetoric of the New Left, and that stays with me, so in order to teach my students how to locate
practices of digital power-from-below, Ive had to learn a lot about its infrastructures, the
mechanics of some of its chutes and ladders. !
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This is one of the things Ive learned: Stuart Brand, the founding figure of the WWW, was a
friend of Ken Keseys whose objective was to design a technology that could catalog the Whole
Earth for the sake of human evolution, claiming, in the print forerunner of the germinal web: We
are as gods and might as well get good at it. He believes that this network offers the resources
by which a few enlightened individuals can bring humanity to the next level.!
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SLIDE (Brand)!
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As a teenager in 1958, long before he dreamed of digital technologies, or of Woodstock or the
Merry Pranksters, Brand wrote in his diary: !
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the responsibility of evolution is on each individual man, as for no other species.
Since the business of evolution for man has gone over to the mental and
psychological phase, each person may contribute and influence the heritage of
the species. For this reason, he wrote a month later, The matter of freedom
social, psychological, and potentialis of the highest importance. The liberation
of the individual, [says his biographer, Fred Turner] was simultaneously an
American ideal, an evolutionary imperative, and, for Brand and millions of other
adolescents, a pressing personal goal.!
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Its no coincidence we gain this kind of insight into the core values of one of the internets
founders one based on a teleological model of individual selfhood reaching toward a wireless
utopia, of a technology-dependent evolution through his personal journals. The things hes
talking about here: his hope for self-articulation, integration, and liberationare the kinds of
promise that young people seek universally, and they are the stuff of diary writing. !
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Today, Ill explore the intersection of the personal diary and the worldwide media infrastructure,
but not through the lens of Brands biography. Instead, I want to examine the sharply rising
practice of online diarizing by teenage girls. It is here, I will argue, that the politics of online
pleasure and pain come into high relief. Im hoping to unpack the ideology that led to a digital
landscape in which the principles of self-articulation, integration, and liberation Brand prized are
quite difficult for young peopleand particularly girls and womento access.!
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For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self-
inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany
girls autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that
discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital
register.!
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SLIDE (Photo of a diary)!
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-!
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So: We think of the diary as a mode of self-empowerment, of self-making, of working out
ideasof integrating a broken or breached self through therapeutic modes, or of inscribing
oneself into the adult world on ones own terms. I dont know about you, but my diary was as
much as anything a space where I practiced the loops and whorls of my handwriting, the sound
of my writerly voice, and the ethics I used to negotiate the world around me. !
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SLIDE (Anne Frank)!
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Throughout her diary, Anne Frank tells us of her process of writing, script on page, to elide the
breach between childhood and independence during the liminal time of adolescence:!
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Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is
right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles,
and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a
person than a child, I feel quite independent of anyone.!
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I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things
that lie buried deep in my heart.!
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Her notion of self-makingone based in the present and in presence, begins to explain the
immense power she cultivated from her deeply personal practice of self-inscription. She wrote
herself, privately, in the context of not only the liminality of adolescence, but the breach in
modernitythe breach in humanitythat was Nazi Germany.!
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When we consider the ways in which Franks diary worked upon the worldas a medium
between the very private life of an adolescent girl, hidden in an attic, and a global audience for
whom her work is a primary mode of encountering the legacy of hatewe imagine what an
especially useful medium the diary can be, for the least powerful among us. Through the diary,
we imagine and make the self on our own terms, free from the disciplining force of conversation
with another person, out of surveillance in the public square. We craft a lexicon of our own, an
emergent communicative system: we experiment rather than simply take on one already fraught
with structures of dominance. !

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!
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So how is it that writing in a diary can cultivate this power-from-belowto stake a claim to
discourses and resources in public space? Turning to McLuhan, we realize that its not only the
contentthe chronicle of ones lifethat matters for diarists, its the shape of the medium itself
that works for people with less resources.!
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First; diarizing is a medium that has no gatekeeperone does not need any training to write in a
diary, and very few materials. Even the kinds of literacy required to diarize have become more
diverse as recording technologies become more accessible. !
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Secondly; the diary allows one to integrate overlapping, conflicting, and experimental versions
of the self in an integrated whole, a process that allows people are most often essentialized into
narrow subjectivitiesminorities, young people, womento a cultivate complex and emergent
selves, according their own rules. !
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And thirdly; there is a materiality to the act of instantiationto recording the imagination, and
making an archive, giving it weight, whether in the form of a physical book or a catalog of
recordings or videos. So not only does a diarist have the opportunity to imagine and re-imagine
herself, she also puts a physical reality to that, that affects the world around it. This usually
works in little affects: a space to hide a little book under a bed, extra weight in the satchel. But
sometimes those affects are great, like the power Anne Frank was able to cultivate, and diarists
are aware of this potential. And the power of that materiality remains under the control of and
becomes part of the author !
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Largely, the very real resources associated with the diary as a medium of the self are ignored by
systems structured in dominance, they seem meaningless or playful, and this gives diarists lots
of unsurveilled space in which to perform their work.!
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SLIDE: Mbembe!
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Achille Mbembe writes about the importance of modes of self-writing for the subaltern,
particularly Africans in the postcolony, and his theory here has been very useful for my students
as we work together to imagine interventions we might make in the digital status quo:!
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I propose ways out of the dead end into which [Western intellectuals] have led
reflection on the African experience of self and the world. Against the
arguments of critics who have equated identity with race and geography, I
show how current African imaginations of the self are born out of disparate but
often intersecting practices, the goal of which is not only to settle factual and
moral disputes about the world but also to open the way for self-styling. !
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Mbembe tells us that the resources associated with self-writing are very real for those whose
subjectivities are under processes of constant essentialization and interpellation, which gives us
a sense of what an important resource private inscription can be for under resources people. !
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SLIDE: inscription!
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!
Where the tradition of diary writing and the web meet, new media practices are emerging, and
theyre fraught with micropolitics that demand close attention. In this case, the practice of
inscriptionwriting or carving something as part of a permanent recordchanges drastically
when diaries are put online, through social media dependent on advertising, shares, likes and
hits.!
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Young people are online all of the time, and because their social worlds unfold by the light of the
screen, so do their modes of writing themselves into it. 83% of teenage girls in the US now keep
either written or recorded dairiesand the numbers are rising steadilyand we imagine that the
omnipresence of digital media has made journaling practices even morse available.!
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But the web is not only a technology of articulation, it is also a technology of publicity. In fact,
were coming to understand that the tricky relationship between digital media and more organic
processes of privacy and publicity is its most dangerous element. If the privacy that has for so
long been central to adolescents development becomes in the same instance, the materials of
a media infrastructure built for publicity, what special dangers does that medium hold for the
young people who engage with it? The issue at hand is the third property of the diary medium
that I named abovethe material and political possibilities of diarizingthat digital future has
been able to dig into, monetize, and control.!
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SLIDE (Amada Todd Video)!
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Amanda Todd was another adolescent whose pain went viral: her initial online encounters with
fun and flirtationattention-getting through video chat rooms were exploited by an adult male
stalker who lured her into exposing herself. He then, after blackmailing her into further exposure
with the photos, distributed them to her junior high peers through facebook. Distraught, Todd
created a nine-minute film about her struggle, cast in a series of handwritten notes held to the
camera by Todd herself, with details of her subsequent disordered eating and self-harm. !
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(PLAY FILM)!
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This has been watched more than 30 million times Even with the outpouring of support her
online confession brought, Todd fell into deep depression and committed suicide in 2012, at the
age of 15.!
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At the time of her daughters suicide, Amanda Todds mother echoed the rhetoric of Stuart
Brands project: !
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Amanda put the message out there to help people. You cant help people if you
dont use [social media], she said of the video, frustrated that schools wouldnt be
showing the video for the sake of suicide prevention: They are focusing on maybe
it might encourage somebody to be a copycat, but at no point do they address how
many people it could help. Schools now have a window to do something to help and
theyre not going to do it. Its the same old thing.!
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In fact, Todds video has been an incredibly powerful template for young girls engagements with
social media, and we see thousands of videos using the format of the diary-writ-large on
youtube today. Most of these wrestle with issues of abuse, trauma, and self-harm, are set to the

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soundtrack of an emotional pop ballad, and suggest that these issues are ongoing for video
makers, who rarely indicate that they are getting support or therapy elsewhere.!
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What the cumulative story here tells us is one of unbearable distress for adolescent girls today,
one that increasingly lacks confluent social practices that effectively mediate, sooth, and relieve
this distress. Further, it tells us of a very real violence toward teen girls that is not relieved, but
sharpened by their engagement with digital media.!
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In the realm of digital autobiography, the freedom of self-writing is confluent with the cutting of
self- harm; the utopian fun promised by the online self-portrait is, in reality, an intensification of
teenage pain. How has it come to be that girls engagement with digital technology works to re-
inscribe and intensify their pain, through the sensational modes of confession, intrusion and
incision viral social media encourage.!
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SLIDE (photos of diary locks)!
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So what happens when the diary is unlocked, its secrets spilled beyond private pages?!
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Sigmund Freud turns voyeur when handed such an inscription. In his preface to the book, A
Young Girls Diary, an actual diary written by an anonymous member of the German middle
class and published in 1921, he writes of the secrets within: !
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Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself
vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing
intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge but
gradually becomes enabled to shoulder the burden. Of all these things we have a
description at once so charming, so serious, and so artless, that it cannot fail to be
of supreme interest to educationists and psychologists.!
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Freud tells us that the pleasure principal comes from the process of acting out, of releasing the
tension that builds when needs are unmetpleasure is in release, in confessing or acting upon
bottled-up desires. But in the case of the surveilled diarist, we have to wonder if the pleasure is
hers, or if it belongs to the voyeur.those who have a supreme interest in the work, or even the
interests of supremacy. The resources associated with wiring in a diary are co-opted and even
turned against her.!
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SLIDE: Demi Lovato!
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Social media is dependent on advertising dollars, and voyeurism is one of the most, of not THE
most, currency in which it trades. Any youtube rabbit hole is paved with snippets of reality TV,
webcam confessional, digital documentary, and paparazzi sites like TMZ, all of which tend
toward transgressing the boundaries of young women and teen girls. The thrill of exposure, of
the secret id on display is a special trade for digital technologies, and a lure by which the
broader web-using public can project the broad surveillance conducted into the OWN lives onto
the social lives of a few, misbehaving girls.!
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In any case, we understand that the seam between the privacy and publicity, self-making and
self-undoing is under erasure in a contemporary media ecology based in the principle that
publicity equals empowerment. Not only is this not so, according to the leaks of Edward
Snowden and new information about the relationship between google and the NSA, the
consequences of these processes of self-making-writ-large negatively affect some populations
differentially, particularly those in the most need of alternative outlets for self-writing.!
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SLIDE; Danah Boyd!
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Danah Boyd, whose excellent work on her website, apophenia, and in her new book, It's
Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, examines the nuances of young
peoples engagement with digital technologies. She says:!
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Not only do other people know who you are online; increasingly, software
engineers are designing and building algorithms to observe peoples practices and
interests in order to model who they are within a broader system. Programmers
implement systems that reveal similarity or difference, common practices or
esoteric ones, What becomes visibleeither through people or through
algorithmscan affect how people understand social media and the world around
them. How people respond to that information varies. !
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Gamergate has shown us that there is something potentially very threatening about girls and
young womens digital empowermentthe question is what is at stake!
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SLIDE (screenshot of Amanda Todd trolls)!
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So if 83% of teenage girls now keep diaries, how many of these are online, how many of these
are accessible by the general public, and how many could be easily made accessible by an
internet full of trolls and hackers?!
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SLIDE (Alis stalker)!
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In writing this piece, I posted my abstract online, at academia.edu.I started getting storage
page views from all over the world, and then correspondence.!
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My argument is that the liberatory possibilities opened up by digital media are not only
foreclosed upon in the context of capitalist surveillance, of capture, but they are actually turned
into quite the oppositetechnologies not of integration, but of incision.!
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Hi Ren writes of the ruptures in technologies of self-making that have emerged in the age of
neoliberalism: !
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Foucaults technologies of the self are based on both the productive operation of
power and on expert know-how. Technologies of the self may be developed and
used for self-formation: knowing ones self and making ones self knowablethey
are necessarily reflexive practicesthey enable neo-liberal subject formation when
privatization of public security and personalization of collective goods become
widely implemented. In such a situation, the construction of neo-liberal subjects
may take place through various means such as uses of multimedia and digital

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 technologies, lifetime education, active participation in consumption, and
engagement in entrepreneurial capitalism.!
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So the resources associated with diary are actually flipped in the context of digital publicity and
turned against the self, multiplying the constraints of a social world structured in dominance,
rather than loosening them.!
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SLIDE: Incision/inscription!
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Im concerned here with the difference between inscription, and incision, of long-established
modes of pleasure and pain-making that have become garbled. What feels like the pleasure of
self-makinga positive affect drawn from the life-affirming activity of inscriptionwriting, or
cutting, the gestures are so similar.!
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At heart, the problem here lies with the shape of the medium itself, a medium based on the
neoliberal ontology Brand posited at a very different historical conjuncture. It is a concept based
on an individualized subject that will be realized in a future utopia. Said Brand in the preface of
the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, these new technologies were to be tools that aid this
process:!
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In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal
power is developingpower of the individual to conduct his own education,
find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his
adventure with whoever is interested.!
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But this sense of intimacy, as we see here, is one-directional, parasitic. So what happens when
we invite teenage girls to help us reeimagine digital media according to a different kind of
ontology, a different concept of how the self is constituted on the tricky landscape of conflicting
realities. Adrian Piper, the feminist philosopher and performance artist, arrives at a self
constituted on the tricky landscape of conflicting realities through Kantian philosophy. She
celebrates the power-from below generated in the space of!
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...interiority; of a vivid and extended life of the mind that includes imagination,
intellection, and reflection; these are the foundations of transpersonal rationality.1
Piper tells us that the seam between the contained moral world of interiority and
the shared realm of social reality is marked by a process of explosiveness and
control by which an individual empowers herself in resonance with others.2 !
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!1 Piper, Adrian. 2008. Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume 2: A Kantian Conception. Berlin:
Research Archive Foundation Berlin, 200.

!2 An agent who embodies this ideal suppresses immediate and untrammeled expression of thought or
desire; withholds them from external view, drives them inward, transforms them into enduring mental and
emotional presences, and forces an inward expansion in the purview of the minds eye in order to
accommodate them. The more fully such an agent internalizes thought and desire, the more intensely and
vividly she experiences them and the greater her capacity for interiority becomes. Scope and depth of
interiority is thus directly proportional to suppression and control of the impulse to immediately vent
thoughts and desires in action. Piper, ibid,, 200.

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The question of how modernitys otherspeople of the global south, women, young people,
silenced majoritiesgain access to the deep structures of the digital media ecosystem, and
begin to build spaces of refusalan ontologies of presence.!
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Black Girls Codewomen in coding!
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SLIDE: Final!
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Back to the question of please and pain at the heart of this conference and this panel: Denis
Leri tells us of an alternative psychodynamic understanding of the pleasure principle stemming
from the work of Fichner, who predated Freud and was influential on the work of William James.!
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The origin of the notion that its healthy to release bottled up feelings started with
Freud. For Fechner pleasure was the concomitant result of the re-establishment of
equilibrium (the more so if it can be established on a higher order).Fechner would
assent to the pleasure found in becoming harmoniously balanced.!
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So I want to leave this presentation with a hope that we can begin to develop a critical language
by which we can dig into the power relations at the belly of the digital beast, and relocate the
possibilities of harmony and balance that Brand and the new left championed under very
different circumstances in a very different era. Only when we cultivate new discourses that
critique the mechanics that undergird social media can we begin to restore the full power of
self-writing offline, and to recover the practices of media making that have helped to sustain
teenage girls in the pre-digital eras.!
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I know what I want, Said Anne Frank.!
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I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am
satisfied. I know that Im a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage. !
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And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good
is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be,
and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world. !
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