Summary: There are three well defined modes of self-representations in digital media: written, visual, and quantitative. Each of these modes have a pre-digital history, and they are briefly explained in the text.

• Blogs and written material that we encounter in our present life all descended from diaries, memoirs and autobiographies
• Selfies are descendants of visual artists’ self-portraits
• And the quantitative modes of lifelogs, personal maps, productivity records and activity trackers are descendants of genres such as accounting, habit tracking and to-do lists.

The ways in which we have represented ourselves with numbers and data have been less studied than the histories of visual self-portraits and written autobiographies, memoirs and diaries, at least from the point of view of self-representation and aesthetics. Recording quantities of grain or other valuables can be a form of self-representation, or at least representation of what belongs to the self.

According to Jill Walker Rettberg there has been some research in the past few years that is presenting the fact that there has been an ever-increasing number of consumer devices that automatically track our activity, posture, health and so on. One in ten adult Americans now owns an activity tracker. Quantitative self-representation is becoming commonplace.

As readers, we encounter other people in social media as texts. From our perspective their self-expression is self-representation. This is particularly true when we are readers more than participants.

Commentary: “Burns sees the hatred, ridicule and pathologizing as mechanisms that society uses to discipline the stereotypical selfie-takers: young women. We saw the same mechanism in the early days of blogging. I began blogging in my late twenties as a PhD student and was often called an exhibitionist or narcissist by non-blogging colleagues”. (Mortensen and Walker 2002; Walker 2006) (Rettberg) 

This statement in the text just absolutely boggles my mind because the fact that these labels are being put onto innocent young women who are just trying to express themselves and  broaden their intelligence is quite atrocious to say the very least. Women have been able to find a platform they are able to use that allows them to speak without censorship to large public audiences but society just wants to intrude and mock these incredibly influential women. This society has begun to be so closed minded that if you aren’t a popular millionaire then you don’t have a voice, but that is far from the truth because from the beginning of time women have used their platforms to create substantial things. As I am a female I relate to this just a little more because the stereotypes and the disgusting stigmas that we are put under degrade and belittle us as a whole. We will use our voice and our platform to consistently endure what makes us the most happy no matter what.

Analysis: Reviewing this text for the last time before submitting these notes I noticed some new and interesting information. There was so much of it that it really took me quite a few times to comprehend it. I liked how the author Jill Walker Rettberg used a lot of evidence and information from decades back to show how the topic we’re discussing in this Chapter unfolded into what we have now.