Technological Gaze In Filtered Selfies

As digital media penetrate people’s daily lives,we are entering an era of anomalous logic characterized by synthetic vision.The filtered selfie has become the most representative visual body image in the digital space.The selfie brings not only an upgrade and popularization of self-image technology,but also a change in people’s lifestyles and aesthetic perceptions.As we use increasingly intelligent beauty filters for the digital construction of ideal images,what are we chasing for? As a medium,beauty filter is not simply a photo processing tool,but a force involved in the negotiation of aesthetic standards.This research takes Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology as theoretical framework,and focuses on the relationship between technology and people,and explores the hidden technological gaze in the practice of filtered selfies.Taking the filter application Meitu as an example,the research uses in-depth interviews,artifact analysis and online ethnography to deeply observe the process of technological embodiment in the practice of filtered selfies,and discusses the three dimensions of technology,body and technological gaze to explore how technology shapes human action and experience in the engagement between technology and body,and how it participates in the reconfiguration of aesthetic standards through the digital production of beauty.The study reveals that self-image technology has undergone a transformation.The change in mobile media and algorithms have lowered the threshold and expanded the capabilities of beautifying self-image,forming a social carnival of filtered selfies.In the ritual chain of selfie production,the beauty application,as a multi-stable media technology,realizes the subject’s self-imagination by providing multiple dynamic technological experiences such as mirror,camera,digital brush and waiting room.Throughout the selfie practice on and off the screen,there are three interweaving dimensions of the body,the motile body,the cultural body and the technological body,which dynamically influence each other.The technological gaze shapes the subject’s current perceptions and actions through the sedimentation of past experience of beauty technology and the potential revealed by its existence.Technology,consumption,culture and individual desire converge to form a homogenous and collective beauty landscape-a community of facial masks-which becomes a web of desire and aesthetics that shrouds the digital network.