Space selfie

Space selfies are not a new phenomenon. No doubt the first selfie ever taken in space by the astronaut Buzz Aldrin in 1966 would have made waves back then, but with the confluence of social media networks and improved camera technology the selfie ‘game’ has changed. This particular space selfie was taken by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide during a spacewalk in September 2012 using a digital still camera, and went viral when posted on Commander Chris Hadfield’s Twitter account.

This selfie clearly illustrates one feature of the phenomenon of selfie taking: that selfies may not always be about narcissism and superficiality. Since Hoshide’s face is completely obscured by the helmet, the selfie becomes an image of the surroundings - a vast blackness - and the reflection of the digital still camera he uses, and beyond that, a space station and the Earth. What is pictured therefore, is a reflection of what Hoshide is seeing at the moment; it locates him in time and quite literally in space, capturing the performance of taking an extreme selfie that very few of this age in humanity will get a chance to do.

The extreme selfie is a phenomenon where people take selfies from unusual and often dangerous places, sometimes resulting in injury or death. It tells us several things about the culture of today: firstly, that people sometimes participate in a sort of online one-upmanship, and that secondly, this online performance is so important to some that they go to lengths that will threaten the safety of their real selves. Lastly, it suggests that people feel a need to display a participation in their environment, a need to picture themselves in the extreme/unusual landscape or activity as a sort of proof that it has been a real part of their existence - and who can blame them, when photos can easily be stolen off others, the ways in which a person can prove the authenticity of an image has become greatly limited. We suspect that one of these ways is to involve themselves in it, by taking a selfie.

The selfie therefore may not be about the self per se, but instead function as an artefact and evidence of experience. Hoshide’s space selfie therefore, taken far above the heads of its viewers in a position few can dream of being in, gives us a chance to reflect on the more pensive side of selfie culture. In a world that is increasingly un-real and fabricated, taking a selfie may be a grasp at proving one’s existence to themselves and others, and a reminder, when it shows up on the feeds of social media platforms, that people continue to have exist outside the platforms even as we feel necessitated to construct this image of existence on them.