The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life
by Lee Humphreys
- Used
- as new
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- As New/As New
- ISBN 10
- 0262037858
- ISBN 13
- 9780262037853
- Seller
-
Brooktondale, New York, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
First printing. Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in gray paper spine and boards, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are like new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover. xvi/179 pages.
"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."
"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."
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Details
- Bookseller
- Palimpsest Scholarly Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 1002
- Title
- The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life
- Author
- Lee Humphreys
- Book Condition
- New As New
- Jacket Condition
- As New
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10
- 0262037858
- ISBN 13
- 9780262037853
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Date Published
- 2018
- Keywords
- Sociology
Terms of Sale
Palimpsest Scholarly Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged. Packages are shipped USPS. New York state purchases will also be charged state tax.
About the Seller
Palimpsest Scholarly Books
Biblio member since 2017
Brooktondale, New York
About Palimpsest Scholarly Books
Palimpsest Scholarly Books & Services is a new online bookstore founded and managed by Dr. Raul Delgado-Rodriguez, a Harvard-trained comparatist. It specializes in the buying and selling of scholarly and rare books, as well as providing services for collectors of such books, including the appraisal of private collections. We have titles across a broad range of fields and cultures. We specialize in providing uncommon foreign-language works.
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