Semiotics of the Selfie: The Glorification of the Present

After anecdotic evidence providing biographic background for the author’s interest in selfies, the semiotic question of their meaning is tackled, distinguishing between the signification of taking selfies and the meaning of selfies thus taken. Both entail authorial, reception, and structural meaning, to be studied in the long period of the cultural history of self-representation and in the context of a specific semiosphere. Selfies can, hence, be interpreted as symptoms of an emerging and increasingly hegemonic temporal ideology in which escape from both traumatic past and anguishing future gives rise to a valorization of the present expressing itself also in the new visual format of the selfies: they attempt at bestowing an ontological aura to the insignificance of the postmodern present.