I’m writing a book this semester about how we see ourselves through technology, and today I presented the project to the Communications Department here at UIC, where I’m a visiting scholar this semester.

Of course I forgot to press the record button on my phone, so don’t have the audio track, but the talk was recorded on video so at some point it will be online, I’m promised. Here are the slides.

Slideshare apparently no longer displays speaker notes, which makes the slideshow rather useless unless you already know what I intended to say about each image. Here’s the same slideshow on Google Drive – if you follow the link and click the little “settings” cogwheel at the bottom right you can open speaker notes and read a short version of what I said.

I’ve structured my book project around three modes of self-representation that I argue are important in our culture right now: textual, visual and quantitative. During the presentation of this talk to the communications department at UIC, someone asked about musical self-representation, and what about dance? There are probably other modes of self-representation I could look at, though I think these three are the most important online at the moment. Certainly curation should be seen as a fourth mode of self-representation. Steve Jones noted that Will Straw had written interesting things about self-curation in relation to record collections. Certainly Pinterest and Tumblr and various other media set curation as key.