The Selfie Generation

Whether it's Kim Kardashian uploading picture after picture to Instagram or your roommate posting a mid-vacation shot to Facebook, selfies receive mixed reactions. But are selfies more than, as many critics lament, a symptom of a self-absorbed generation?

Millennial Alicia Eler's The Selfie Generation is the first book to delve fully into this ubiquitous and much-maligned part of social media, including why people take them in the first place and the ways they can change how we see ourselves. Eler argues that selfies are just one facet of how we can use digital media to create a personal brand in the modern age. More than just a picture, they are an important part of how we live today.

Eler examines all aspects of selfies, online social networks, and the generation that has grown up with them. She looks at how the boundaries between people’s physical and digital lives have blurred with social media; she explores questions of privacy, consent, ownership, and authenticity; and she points out important issues of sexism and double standards wherein women are encouraged to take them but then become subject to criticism and judgment. Alicia discusses the selfie as a paradox—both an image with potential for self-empowerment, yet also a symbol of complacency within surveillance culture The Selfie Generation explores just how much social media has changed the ways that people connect, communicate, and present themselves to the world.

A recent transplant from Los Angeles, Alicia Eler is the visual art critic/reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she covers art in and around the Twin Cities. Eler's cultural criticism and reporting have appeared in various publications, including the Guardian, GLAMOUR, New York Magazine, CNN, LA Weekly, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, New Inquiry, Hyperallergic, Aperture, MAXIM, Art21 magazine, and Artforum. Her work is quoted in the New York Times, New Yorker, BuzzFeed, Gawker (RIP), and VICE, and she/they cited as a selfie expert in the Washington Post and New York Magazine. Visit her on Twitter and Instagram at @aliciaeler.

"I am taking a picture of myself as I write this blurb about Alicia's neat new book addressing the joys and hazards of phone-operated self-reflection. And in taking this selfie, I find my selfie." —Maria Bamford, comedian

"Eler a selfie semiotician. Her book is in defense of millennials and all those who dare to take a selfie."—Wired Magazine

"In this kaleidoscopic exploration of the selfie, Alicia Eler challenges the popular view of the selfie as a narcissistic act. Part Millennial apologist, part cultural sage, Eler transforms this work of personal memoir into a meditation on the deep need of human beings for social connection. The Selfie Generation exposes the level of privacy we're willing to sacrifice in order not only to meet our basic need of food and shelter, but one another." —Elaine Romero, playwright, assistant professor, School of Theatre Film and Television, University of Arizona