Selfies and the Ethics of the Face

Taking the 2015 refugee crisis and its extensive coverage in European news as my starting point, I explore the complexities of the selfie as moral practice by addressing the following questions: What does it mean for refugee selfies to circulate on Western media platforms? In what ways are their faces inserted in ‘our’ visual economies? How is their news value justified? And what role do these justifications play for Western media, not only as news platforms but also as moral and political spaces?

In the course of addressing these questions, I also develop an understanding of the selfie as moral practice. This understanding stems from two aspects. First, it stems from the function of the selfie to confront us with the face of the other (as a locative ‘here I am’ and an existential ‘here I am’) and, in so doing, to demand a moral response from us. Second, it stems from the capacity of the selfie to flow across digital networks, both horizontally across social media (intermediation) and vertically onto mainstream news platforms (remediation), around excluded or marginalized groups whose ‘face’ struggles for visibility in Western media space.