TOW #5: "can your selfie really change the world?"

can your selfie really change the world? is an article that was published in i-D magazine, a British magazine dedicated to fashion, music, art, and youth culture, which holds a major presence both online and offline. The article serves as a kind of counterargument to the modern feminist notion that selfies can be used as radical acts of self-love on social media, displaying body positivity and encouraging women to uplift others online. Bertie Brandes plays devil's advocate as she takes a very different stance on the issue - one that is not necessarily negative, but shows the flaws in this way of thinking.

Brandes begins her piece by describing a common struggle faced by any social-media addict: a "Storage Almost Full" message that occurs at the most inopportune times. By describing her own obsession with social media, Brandes appeals to ethos in an attempt to show audiences her familiarity with the subject. She is a millennial, just like her audience, and is not immune to the addictions of the internet. Her experiences with social media are important to helping her achieve her purpose. She takes quite an antagonistic view of selfie culture, but her credibility and established reputation aid her article, preventing it from becoming a competition of pointing fingers and blaming others.

Brandes cites Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" to help her define the male gaze, a topic which she goes into a lot of detail about in her exploration of selfies. Citing such a cornerstone of second-wave feminism helps Brandes appeal to ethos. The reference gives her argument more weight as she turns the male gaze around, creating the "female gaze", one of self-reflection and admiration rather than dominance.

Brandes achieves her purpose effectively through her appeals to ethos and logos and through personal experience, which helps tremendously when you are taking a stance that may be unpopular or ill-received. Her point is clear and unchanging: as important as it is to normalize self-love, the movement started on social media may be as exclusive and damaging as the stereotypes it sets out to defeat.