Please Vote Nicely!À Young People’s Visual Communication Online and Media Imagery

This paper discuss how young women and men communicate themselves through self-portraits on a popular web site in Sweden, both in relation to popular media representations and new technology such as the web camera, as well as the judging system in which the images appear on the site. Using examples of difference and similarity in young women’s and men’s visual self-representation, it will offer an interpretation of these practices pointing towards new visual conventions as well as references to preexisting media representations. The material shows that young people interact symbolically with the viewer/voter in accordance with references to media representations of ones gendered body (where femininity is communicated as body-ism and masculinity with facial prominence), while simultaneously constructing new forms of visual conventions, thus showing a process of hypervisuality. In this transforming process the involvement of new technologies such as web cameras, creates specific visual conventions within the frame of preexisting media imagery, when the self is “put into practice” online.

Publisher: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2007
Year of Publication: 2007