MY SELFIE-IMAGE: AN ARTIST’S MULTIMEDIA PERSPECTIVE TO SELF-DISCOVERY

The world we live in today is filled with different types of media and images constantly. Online technology allows for the exchange of this mass media instantly. With so much media swarming our daily lives, social media and visual imagery have become a part of our culture creating new forms of visual and perceptual communication to thrive online. Social media allows for an organizational system in which symbolic and expressive elements of visual culture are formed. This visual culture draws new platforms of social structures and interactions that include visual imagery such as pictures, videos, emoticons, gifs, memes, etc. Every tiny moving picture, to the personal information you post online, to the video clips from the news and captivating videography among various social media, how can we define which of these images matter? Visual communication & social media theory have changed the ways in which we acquire information, foresee connection, communicate, and make meaning in society. This thesis dives into the past of a young artist and picks apart her understanding of self throughout the duration of four years. Selfies are presented as new forms of socialization that continue to develop and innovate the ways in which we form our perception of the world. This perspective gives us a grounded view on how visual imagery can be defined within specific social media platforms. Specifically, the influence of digital images in our youth’s perception of the self, self-identity, or “selfie” has provided a specific form of image interpretation. Without a clear understanding of what selfies do to our perception we may become blinded by misguided intentions. As a society we need to put a focus on the study of visual imagery in the media and its effect on the selfidentities. We must broaden our understanding of what these pictures are, how they create new communicative processes, and why they hold such value in our social world.


CHAPTER 1
The Perception of My Body 1A. My Selfie-Image -Personal Rhetorical Narrative When I was around eight or nine years old, I had this hobby. It wasn't like your normal little kid hobby like knitting or playing hopscotch. No, this hobby was different. I would take blank white pieces of computer paper 81/2x11 and fill hundreds of them with drawings of girls, as you can see on the right in Figure 1.1, that I named "Rows and Columns." So, you can even picture, to everyone else I was just another girl with a knack for doodling. But what appeared to be a fond pastime was undoubtably an obsessive passion. When I was little, I would fill notebooks upon notebooks of these girls in endless rows and columns. The same image. Isn't that crazy? Einstein says if you do you the same thing over and over again you might as well consider yourself crazy. But what I was really doing was imagining each one of these girls with a completely new and unique identity.
They all had their own personality, relationships, and style in a world created purely in my imagination. Now look at today. There's this world of Instagram.
Where profiles and pictures of people come by the millions. I don't have to draw up these doodles. Dream up these people. They exist. On a platform of social media technology. The made-up girls in my sketchbooks are now the girls I follow online. Their incredible dream-like lives are clickable and accessible. The rows and columns of pretend people has become this interface of images within a social network. And the obsession I had with creating a picture-perfect reality is now the way I manifest my own online identity.
I believe people associate feelings and memories with millions of forms of media in the world today. Everything from looking back to an Instagram, sharing memories on Facebook, or YouTube. We use media to create a history of our lives. We also use media to create an archive of shared items that describes exactly who we were at each moment in our lives. Text, pictures, videos, music, and art all have meaning to us. For me, every time I post on social media I feel as though I'm contributing to an online world of communication that lets me be whoever I want to create for myself. Media can connect us to the most innate human nature in us. It can hook our attention, satisfy our needs, and experience a feeling. For me, the feelings I get when I experience media have shaped me into the person and the artist I am today. In Figure 1.2, "Van Gogh" you can see me standing in front of one of our greatest murals of art history. I'm in awe by this creation. It fuels me to want to make my own mark on art history. Ever since I can remember, since the day I was born, I've been creating art. It is the most passionate thing about my existence that drives every force of my entire being.
So, for someone who is so invested in art I live for that type of media that lets you curate and collect various forms of digital content.
Media is my favorite place to take in inspiration as an artist. There are realistic videos and beautiful artistic photography that dazzle my sight. I can't get enough. I've been attached to photography my whole life. In 5 th grade I got my first camera and started keeping a huge collection of photos on my computer that I looked at all the time that represented memories of my life. I would draw or paint anything that was pleasing to my artistic eye. You could say I am obsessed with media. All I do is consume it. I wake up and the first thing I do is check Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, any or all type social media I'm feeling in that moment. It's written in my DNA that social media is something I naturally gravitate towards viewing daily. I'll admit I'm a millennial for looking at my phone 24/7 and am a product of the generation that has the attention span of a thirty-second YouTube clip thanks to the rapid speed at which we consume almost everything. It's absurd how much social media has changed the way I communicate. I hate to admit that it has become an everyday habit, checking social media. But is it really that shocking? Thanks to my iPhone and smart phones in general, this little block of weight is holding our accessibility to the outside world in the very palm of our hands. Since the beginning of Freshman year of college, I wasn't always consumed like this. Or maybe I was? The first type of social media I can remember was using AIM, Instant Messenger, then Myspace, then Facebook, Instagram and so on. So even at the early age of eleven I was addicted to sitting in my dad's office, using the family computer for hours, sending messages to my friends, browsing the internet, and playing games online.
As life through the eyes of an artist I studied images in the media to understand the world.
In   Instagram was about my art, but it wasn't me, it didn't come naturally, it felt fake.
I was forcing myself to fit into a picture I didn't belong. Instagram's platform focused me to become obsessed with images of beauty, notions of perfection, and a warped idea of popularity. I was drawn to the most unrealistic expectations of who I had to be on this platform, how I was going to "be somebody" with a lot of followers, but with no real message. I used my Instagram to express a false sense of confidence with an incredible judgmental conscious that was hiding beneath every "perfect picture". This was three years ago. I had just graduated college. I was debating applying to graduate school because I was going through the most exhausting self-identity crisis that destructively controlled my life. I had self-esteem issues, I had body image issues, I had a therapist, I had anxiety, I had depression, and worst of all, I had an eating disorder. I had stopped drawing and painting with an unexplained confusion as to why I gave up doing the thing I love the most. I felt unhealthy, self-destructive, doubtful, anxious, fearful, powerless, hopeless, depressed, confused, forever failing, and never good enough. I tried so hard to push out these negative thoughts and feelings. I tried so hard to push the negative thoughts out of my head and not care about what I thought of myself. Something was telling me there was more to discover, more to this mental disorder. More to why was I so damn depressed. Why couldn't I stop binge eating? And why could I kill hours on my phone, computer, watching TV, instead of focusing on the things in life that make me truly happy? Clearly something was wrong when I would regret every day I didn't paint, which happened to be every day. I was letting myself fall into what seemed like a bottom-less pit of self-pity and an unshakable laziness. I cared so much about trying to change that I applied to graduate school. My life needed a serious push of effort in the right direction and more knowledge felt like the best answer. I took communication theory, media and emotions, and interpersonal helping relationships courses in graduate school. The combination of these classes was the hardest first step in starting to analyze myself through theory. When dealing with all my personal stress and the way I felt about myself I constantly related every theory I read in relation to how it could answer some of my own problems. By the time second semester came around I had considered that I had a problem with myself and that I was in the process of fixing, learning, making mistakes, and moving forward. The first communication theory to my research methods class described of something of a life event called a "turning point." The term referred to the more important transitional phases throughout a romantic relationship. I instantly compared it to my life, how is it relatable then? Well if anything this thesis process has taught me is that I've been in a relationship with this damn project, and it was time to make the first turning point in that relationship. led me to see a change in the way I was using social media and making art. The experience of enveloping myself into an analytic experiment and come out enlightened on the other side. This will be me, My-selfie image.

1B. Grounded Theory & Self Identity
And so our research begins with a simple question. Who am I and why do I think the way I think? What can I use as a backdrop, to organize every theory that's influenced me in every interesting way? How do I collect all my theories about media into an understandable systematic process? This is where grounded theory lays out a canvas to begin questioning this experience as a methodological procedure. Through the beginning of grad school, we're taught communication theory and research methods as tools for the construction of our own cognitions.
Albert Bandura (2009) picks at the human mind through the social cognitive theory of mass communication. He writes "seen from the socio-cognitive perspective, human nature is characterized by a vast potentiality that can be fashioned by direct and observational experience into a variety of forms within biological limits… These advanced neural systems for processing, retaining, and using coded information provide the capacity for the very characteristics that are distinctly human-generative symbolization, forethought, evaluative selfregulation, reflection self-consciousness, and symbolic communication." (Bandura, 2009, pg.62) Each of these processes, symbolization, forethought, evaluative self-regulation, reflection, self-consciousness, and symbolic communication, this is all the very foundation upon which I make sense of my world. Yet this information was never laid out explicit for me to realize how powerful my thought process really is. What is my thought process? How do I go about forming symbols in my own thinking patterns? What if it is so warped that I can't find a way to make sense of it? What really are my habits for self-regulating and reflection? Does that happen? When? How? I had all these crazy ideas swarming my mind without a basic understanding of how to organize them. This is where grounded theory comes in handy because it provided a format for theory development in the most lament terms and allowed my malleable mentality to begin to take its composition.
In order to fully grasp the entirety of putting my conceptions into a full blown thesis I needed to study different methods of how theory is conceptualized.
Theoretical conceptualization means that grounded theory researchers are interested in patterns of action and interaction between and among various types of social units (Corbin, Strauss 1994, pg.278 guidelines for attaining conceptual (not merely descriptive) "density," variation, and conceptual integration. (Corbin, Strauss, 1994) If this is the case for conceptualizing theory then forming a general procedure, such as a master's thesis, with a proposal and thesis statement can be considered a composition of those processes. Grounded theory orchestrates the development of representational processes with an importance on memory and retention. When I started to read about social media theory, visual imagery, and How was I supposed to identify which influences were the driving forces behind my behavior? I started to contemplate how this was going to be possible. I couldn't relate everything I was learning to everything I was doing because my thesis would be never ending! The next step in creating this thesis was then organizing my theoretical conceptualization into a concise applicable methodology. But how? Grounded theory methodology is designed to guide researchers in producing theory that is "conceptually dense"-that is, with many conceptual relationships. These relationships, stated as propositions, are, as in virtually all other qualitative research, presented in discursive form: They are embedded in a thick context of descriptive and conceptual writing (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, pp. 31-32;Strauss, I 987, pp. 263-264). (pg.278) Two defining properties of the grounded theory method create the conditions for emergent inquiry: (1) the systematic, active scrutiny of data and (2) the successive development and checking of categories. From the initial stages of research throughout the process, grounded theorists scrutinize their data by asking both action and analytic questions: "What is happening here?" and "What (theoretical category or theory) are these data a study of?" (Glaser, 1978, p. 57). The first question pushes the researcher to examine the empirical world-in close detail.
The second question links this world to theoretical possibilities early on during data collection. Both questions encourage researchers to follow emergent leads systematically. (Charmaz, 2008, pg.161 Grounded theory development allows for a straight forward format of a theory to plant its seed. It lays out the method from forming those first wild thoughts into specific modes of analysis. It's strategies "prompt the researcher to reach beyond pure induction and involves creative problem solving and imaginative interpretation." (Charmaz, pg.156) This thesis quite literally "grounds" itself in grounded theory's flexible and emergent definition for theory development. It was becoming a thought process I aimed to unravel. Once deciding that my thesis was going to establish itself through grounded theory, I knew I needed a simple but challenging method that would reveal how this theory would emerge. I need to find out what made my perspectives so disturbingly discursive… 1C. Awareness & Acceptance In the beginning of my second semester of grad school I took a media class where my professor asked us a thought-provoking question. Does the media reflect reality or shape reality? She asked the class to stand on one side of the room if you thought one way and on the other side if you thought otherwise, and in the middle if you thought it might be both. I was torn between all sides of invisible spectrum she laid out for us. There were arguments for every way to look at it. I remember being so confused in my head because I had this idea that I was in control of the media I posted to social media and how it created an image of who I was. But that didn't feel right, I created it and it also created me, and there were so many ways this was happening. From the decision to upload a certain picture, to the very tweets I read, and the exact music I listen to has molded me into the person I am today. I thought how I can be in control of how media creates me when I have no simple understanding of how large of relationship that can be? What is really happening here? This was the first process I saw myself go through this idea of media awareness or media literacy. So I relate it back to our basic human nature or social cognition. In Bandura's research for social cognition theory of mass communication he looks into the reasons why people are apt to thinking and communicating in a certain way. He sates "among the self-referent thoughts that influence human motivation, affect, and action, none is more central or pervasive that people's judgments of their efficacy to exert control over their level of functioning and events that affect their lives." (Bandura, pg. 64) Well I had no control over how engrained my thoughts were within media. The only control I had was over my self-destructive habits which included: taking pictures, posting media, taking selfies, binging media, binging food, judging myself, feeling shitty, and having it all start over again. I would only post my art to social media when I felt it was beyond exceptional and worthy of the public's eyes. It was with this piece of research that I could start to see where my perception of myself and the media I absorbed were functioning at levels that I could not control. It makes so much sense. From there all self-referent thoughts, motivations, affect, and actions were affected by this lack of control, or better yet, lack of awareness. I had this goal to better myself or to fix my eating disorder or try to exert some type of control over these extreme actions. But how do you conjugate the ability to produce a desired or intended result when you have a warped perception of the problem itself? Without becoming first aware of this thought it's impossible to invoke immediate action or motivation to change it. This begins the construct or theoretical category of awareness and acceptance.
Without being aware of what kind of problem this thesis presents how can we begin to define and analyze it? Bandura also mentions "peoples beliefs in their personal efficacy influence what courses of action they choose to pursue, how much effort they will invest in activities, how long they will persevere in the face of obstacles and failure experiences, and their resiliency following setbacks" (Bandura, 2009, pg.64). It seems impossibly overwhelming trying to fix depression, anxiety, and bulimia, all while learning how to accomplish the innerworkings of completing a master's thesis. I had to organize all my complex cognitions into a form that I would be able to explain to a professor. Scary! But slowly I learned. I was beginning to make connections between communication theories and the way I communicate on social media every day. It forced me to consider how much value I put on these new forms of interactions. I started to become more aware of my attitudes while I was on social media and started to put my most puzzling assumptions about myself into my research. I wanted to think that studying this kind of information would immediately change my habits regarding media. Yet I was met with extreme uncertainty when realizing further researching only brought further questioning, which just created even more anxiety, and blocking this attempt to fix my life. Awareness of a problem only gets you so far. People can be aware they suffer from depression or aware that they have a need for media, but does this awareness suddenly change your behaviors? No. I struggled throughout the entire thesis process and experienced an up and down roller-coaster of a battle.
But I had this belief that my personal efficacy would trump my setbacks and having awareness was the crucial first step in that journey. In hopes to figure out what was causing me so much anxiety and depression I was going to have to start asking myself hard questions, receive criticism, and open myself up to letting the work be a part of me.

CHAPTER 2
The Body of work-Information through a visual lens This next chapter encases the body of work. Here is where you will really start to see this complex paper start to take its shape. Similar ideas of grounded theory development and self/social cognition paint a figurative and literal pathway to understanding myself through media. This section dissects the large bulk of varied research that makes this thesis multidisciplinary and attempts to advance proposed hypotheses and research questions. The body of work outlines this paper's conceptual instrumentation and artistic techniques that together form a unique thesis methodology. You will begin to see the patterns of similar thought processes that were used to analyze such a large proposal as well as start to see a visual representation of the entire thesis project.

2A. Conceptual Reimagining
This awareness opened up a plethora of new interactions that were defining me, a clear pattern on what behaviors that I was enacting daily. In Figure 2.1, "What?
Why?" I questioned my artistic process while scribbling the same words repeatedly until it made a bigger picture. Was this method really working? I was beginning to take notes. What was happening? What was different? How could I put a definition to the process of being more self-aware? Why was I starting to feel more content and acting differently? Grounded theory starts with an inductive logic but moves into abductive reasoning as the researcher seeks to understand emergent empirical findings. Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference which starts with an observation then seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation. Abductive reasoning aims to account for surprises, anomalies, or puzzles in the collected data. This type of reasoning invokes imaginative interpretations because the researcher imagines all possible theoretical accounts for the observed data and then forms and checks hypotheses until arriving at the most plausible interpretation of the observed data" (Charmaz, 2008, pg.157) As I attempted to construct this thesis I started to understand the simplest most logical reasons for my own personal issues. It needed to be addressed and brought into a new light. I started to find personal bits of art and images that felt like guiding answers, an example would be Figure 2.2, "Calming Technique" was an art image that felt therapeutic. It needed to be conceptualized and identified in order to reimagine a new interpretation. Yet the means for finding these definitions were still extremely vast and overwhelming. But it forced me to dive right back into the grounds for which I could develop this thesis. How can I organize legitimate evidence for the hypothesizes I was forming?
Researchers constantly ask themselves "What is happening here?" and "What (theoretical category or theory) are these data a study of?" By interrogating their data repeatedly with these two questions, grounded theorists explicate, expedite, and enhance intuitive strategies that other qualitative researchers often invoke on a descriptive level. These strategies include probing beneath the surface: comparing data, checking hunches, refining emerging ideas, and constructing abstract categories from data analysis. Simultaneously, grounded theory makes these strategies more efficient and analytically effective by indicating how and when to use them. (Charmaz, 2008, pg.161) I was writing a lot more. I was making lists of the negative things I felt. I was organizing my beliefs and perceptions into hypothesizes and theoretical categories. In Figure 2

.3, "Sick
Reasons" I came up with a purely negative list for the reason why binge eating and purging was harmful. In In an initial attempt to improve upon prevailing structural-functionalism theories but in reality, weakening this paradigm from within, the Manchester School of anthropology introduced the ECM (Extended Case Method) (Gluckman, 2006(Gluckman, [1961) and 'situational analysis' (van Velsen, 1967). In This increased focus on duration and complexity entailed a redefinition of what was understood as a 'case' and a shift from a theoretical illustration or an empirical exemplar from which one can extract a general rule to 'a stage in an on-going process of social relations between specific persons and groups in a social system and culture' (Gluckman, 2006(Gluckman, [1961: 16). (Tavory and Timmermans, pg.247) So how is this thesis a theoretical illustration or empirical exemplar? By extracting a general rule, or a self-identity crisis, to "a stage in an on-going process of social relations between specific persons and groups in a social system." I started to compare how my own personal issues were met head on when I truly looked at how they were not only affecting my motivation and selfesteem, but the way I constructed my art process. There's a drawing method that artists sometimes use to transfer their small thumbnail drawings onto larger canvases. It's called "The Grid method." In a nutshell, the grid method involves drawing a grid over your reference photo, and then drawing a grid of equal ratio on your work surface (paper, canvas, wood etc). Then you draw the image on your canvas, focusing on one square at a time, until the entire image has been transferred. Once you're finished, you simply erase or paint over the grid lines, and start working on your painting, which will be now be in perfect proportion.
Usually when I start painting on a large surface, I jump right into drawing the figures in the proportions that I felt best represented them. The images always felt, and then in turn, looked unplanned and messy. I'd judge my method and almost give up on trying to fix the proportions, knowing I started off with an impulsive and over simplified idea of how I would go about the painting. For a long time, this was the pattern my art took on. Scattered pictures were scattered-brain thoughts. I thought about how some of these norm conflicts, or patterns of behavior and disputes were a representation of my failed attempts at applying a structured method to my art. It disheartened me. Art is hard and so is writing a thesis. Yet something truly inspiring happened while I was thinking about systematic coding procedures while starring at my painting.
I was studying the first painting in this thesis, Figure 2.5 "Awareness," and I saw grid lines. It was one of the first attempts I had made at using this method and I did it without thinking about it. This painting was a prime example of how I had taken the larger concepts of what I was trying to identify and put them into a systematic structure. The painting itself then began the referent example for how I conceptualize theory, or in my case, my own self-reflective image theory. I analyzed the grid lines, and saw right there, the structure for my thesis format. As I explored and tackled on a vast variety of topics, I saw a pattern in way I was organizing information. I was free-sketching my ideas and stumbled upon Figure 2.6, "Structure of a Thought," where each color represents a specific section. I began to organize the more important parts of my research into color coded constructs that were representative in the artwork I had been working on alongside this project. These eight constructs, concepts, or sections literally "ground" themselves through multiple disciplines of theory and exemplify processes of communication theory development and methodology. In Figure 2.7, "Starting Titles," I summarize my sections by twelve colors. This grid-like format divides the paper into four chapters that include three sections each. At the end of each chapter there is an underlined transitional phase that I recorded through the exploration of four separate paintings. One painting for each chapter in the thesis.
It was through using this information that I came to a major revelation in the way By homing in on only the parts of my research that had a distinct influence or change in my behavior helped me narrow my focus to the core conceptualization of this thesis project, or now identified as thesis process. These first two chapters and four sections have landed me with a methodology for reconstructing the same, but deeper evaluation of myself and my relationship with media. This is where my thesis takes a visual turn because it is where I discovered that this theoretical composition and thought process has been entirely based upon my perceptions from a visual perspective. It happens sporadically and develops over time, constantly creating cognitions and visualizing the effects in my head this picture represents that process. Figure 2.8 "The Guide" is an example of how visualizing the process through art in a grid method has led me to conceptualize theory in a pattern of empirical behavior. This behavior represents itself through understanding my narrative, relating it to grounded theory, accepting myself, rearranging the contradictions in my head, and systematically structing the concepts that have emerged through this project.
Burawoy states "We begin with our favorite theory but seek not confirmations but refutations that inspire us to deepen that theory. Instead of discovering grounded theory we elaborate existing theory" (Tavory and   Timmermans

2C. Visual Identity
This is the 2 nd transitional process of my thesis. If we take this section as a process formed from the four sections before it (personal narrative, grounded theory, conceptual reimaging, and systematic structure), then, the first piece of empirical evidence that should compose this section would be an example of how my personal narrative has changed throughout the process. Well. It's not that simple. My story is ever changing. It's being recorded in the form of art, journals, and vague experiences happening daily. How it is possible to summarize someone's personal narrative into a theoretical compositional process? To be able to go back into our own personal life story takes memory recall, and  followers (which I secretly hoped for) I would be able to let lose any thought or idea without the pressure of my peers who followed my other social media accounts. This one was special because it was just for me. By continuously going back into these recorded evidences of my story I saw many conflicts that were arising. With a re-reading of my old journal entries or scholarly writing I was being constantly reminded of this reoccurring depressed mindset. It doesn't just take recalling these shitty events. It took recording them for me to see what was there. To psychically write, record, and analyze my self-loathing content I started to see how this pure form of art expression was really helping. Even though my posts got no views or reaction it felt abnormally satisfying that this tension or personal event was released off my chest. For my thesis to progress I still had to trim down what was relevant and what was fluff. In the process, I sought out grounded theory for advice on my analysis of the work. As this process proceeds, potential tensions increase between invoking theoretical sensitivity and drawing on extant theoretical concepts. Glaser has relied on "theoretical codes" to guard against such tensions. "Theoretical codes" are an ad hoc, loosely integrated formulation of varied theoretical families of concepts, such as Glaser's wellknown "Six Cs: Causes, Contexts, Contingencies, Consequences, Covariances, and Conditions" (Glaser, 1978, p. 74). Other coding families include those that invoke major sociological concepts such as "means-goals," "identity-self," and "consensus codes." (Charmaz, 2008) If we go by Glaser's Six C's, the cause of this theory would be me and my depression, my self-image, and my art, in which case provides a person or thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition. The next C or context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea. Okay feeling this specific thesis process wasn't just about trying to fix myself, but to identify a larger phenomenon about depression and anxiety within social media.
Where Gluckman viewed societal conflicts as expressions of societies, Burawoy saw them as results of pervasive macro-forces. Extended case method, according to Burawoy: applies reflexive science to ethnography in order to extract the general from the unique, to move from the 'micro' to the 'macro,' and to connect the present to the past in anticipation of the future, all by building on preexisting theory. (Burawoy, 1998: 5) Each section felt like a "micro-force" that was adding to this macro effect of depression and anxiety among adolescents on social media.

Rather than merely including formal structural summaries of fieldwork data, Van
Velsen further argued for providing concrete empirical instances of actual behavior to allow the emergence of 'exceptional' and 'accidental' instances in terms of the general theory used (van Velsen, 1967)." (Tavory and Timmermans, pg.247) If by using my personal narrative as a stepping stone into analyzing myself through ethnography then some theoretical codes should arise. One code may be considered the identification of this process, but also in the different ways of how I had been analyzing the self and how it relates to more than just my personal When I look back at my artwork they all point to specific themes that compose who I am as a person and an artist.
In this thesis I take my collection of art as a form substantive empirical evidence. So this collection, these sketches or journal entries were very abstract and imaginative. They didn't speak like a scholar and they make different sense to a variety of different audiences. What kind of theoretical code can you give to such a complex body of work? This body of work is everything to me. It's all my research, perceptions, and artwork. It has affected the way I think and how I feel.
It has changed the way I read, sleep, and even how I consume food into my body.
With a theoretical code so complex I needed a way to conceptualize this thesis as a form of me. And what a better way to represent that through the visual images in my art that reflect my self-identity? It's gotten to be that identity is term that advocates for a multitude of interpretation among a monstrosity amount of people.
It's come to be a social phenomenon that's defining me and puzzling me in so many ways.
David Buckingham in his book, Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (2008) revels over this idea of how identity is such a complex item in our society. He states "the fundamental paradox of identity is inherent in the term itself. From the Latin root idem, meaning "the same," the term nevertheless implies both similarity and difference. On the one hand, identity is something unique to each of us that we assume is more or less consistent (and hence the same) over time.
(Buckingham, 2007, pg.1). As Buckingham introduces a digital environment, he emphasizes that identity implies a relationship with a broader collective or social group of some kind. When we talk about national identity, cultural identity, or gender identity, for example, we imply that our identity is partly a matter of what we share with other people. (Buckingham, 2007) In this structure identity is about identification with others whom we assume are similar to us (if not exactly the same), at least in some significant ways.
I took to his position on identity immediately. I also seek multiple identifications with others, on the basis of social, cultural, and biological characteristics, as well as shared values, personal histories, and interests. On one level, I am the product of my unique personal biography. Yet who I am (or who I think I am) varies according to who I am with, the social situations in which I find myself, and the motivations I may have at the time, although I am by no means entirely free to choose how I am defined. Buckingham (2007) mentions that much of this debate around identity derives from the tensions between two aspects. I may struggle to "be myself" or to "find my true self." I thought if grounded theory is reflection of how a person develops theory, can it be used to create a template for how I create myself? Be myself? Find my   abstract level. This methodology has made it available to identify such a theoretical code that can fit under Glaser's umbrella of "means-goals," "identityself" in which my own identity or self is directly correspondent to my art process.
The study of identity in the communication discipline is constructed from a vast variety of theory and questions of defining the self, similar to how I have breaking down my own definition of self. Identity has become a magic word in the disciplines of social sciences and humanities due to the impact of globalization, scholars examine the concept from different aspects and encourage people to find, maintain, and negotiate their identity from personal, group, cultural, national and global perspectives. (Chen, 2009, pg.109) Identity is such a complex word to occult for a billion different people living a billion different lives, with a billion different perspectives about the world. Identity is vast. We need some awareness of where our identity derives from in order to truly understand where we come from. On a personal level, I felt a deep emotional connection to my art as a form of my identity. From a group level, I felt a weird, uneasy, anxious and nervous self that could never be as good as the person next to me. And from a cultural perspective, I really had no idea where myself began or ended from the fact that culture is thrown at me from every angle of an online media driven world.
Identity theory treats society as a differentiated but organized system, thus the self is a multifaceted and organized social construct emerging from one's roles in society, and the difference in self-concepts is dependent on the difference of individual's role identities. (Chen, 2009) "It is the self-defining role identities that provide meaning for self, though meanings acquired by role identities are originated from social interaction" (Chen, 2009, pg.109). It was this deeper selfevaluation that led me to think about how this visual self can be stretched to a broader context of one's "role identity" from the perspective of multiple socially constructed spaces. What were mine as an artist? A student? A depressed millennial? The roles I play throughout society are boundless and overwhelming. Representing different perspectives and cultural backgrounds? Alexis Ren is an Instagram model. Venus is a goddess. They are both woman of many selves, renderings, and individual perspectives. Yet they exist in different worlds. And there it was. There was this image that was emerging through the art I saw myself painting. It was a visual representation of me. And everything I looked at within media I saw a visual message that influenced the way I interacted with social media.
It was through this sort of conceptualization or interpretation of imagery that glued the information in my mind. Bolton (1981)  consciousness forced me to question the environment upon which my true self is created. By understanding our identities inside a specific group or community, (ex. woman, artist, scholar, social media user, etc.) we can begin to understand how these concepts when placed together point to a valuable relationship between the self and the culture in which that self is created. It's a word that binds the self to external world. Culture. Without the context of any socialization or culture an identity has little to build from. Before establishing a sense of my own visual identity, I needed to look at the culture that identity is built from. This transition into Chapter 3 takes the presented social scientific research and looks at it from a visual cultural perspective.
Body Image through Culture These last two chapters will take you through the second half of my thesis a little more rapid than the first half. Here, I will attempt to summarize an understanding of visual culture and the symbolic production processes that contribute to the formation and assertion of my individual and collective cultural identity. I will continue to form a repeated process of using emerging grounded theory in a step-by-step personal conceptualization pattern and self-reflective analysis. By the end of the chapter I should establish a visual relation to the changing pictures-visual imagery unpacked. I will attempt to keep using the process of going through each category of research and continuously relate it to this creation of a new and improved visual imagery understanding.

3A. Visual Culture
When we think about the many communities and diverse cultures that we take part of and experience everyday day, sure there's a physical one, as in your hometown, state, even country. But it's never that simple is it? At least not with analytical communicators like myself. I feel like my brain is it's own world sometimes. I feel sometimes I could sit in my bedroom for days and experience a social culture through the interactions on my phone alone. But even from there, culture is limited, but also not limited. With today's technology the number of cultures in which our personalities interact through social media is exponential and growing fast. "Identity is then encapsulated by the boundary which marks the beginning and the end of a group or community, and the cultural experience of the group is a bounded symbolic whole covering with a range of meanings for the development of norms and values that in turn provide a collective sense of identity (Chen, 2009 Pg.111) So, what is my cultural experience that arises my identity? This idea brought me back to the awareness and acceptance phase of understanding this thesis. I wanted to introduce this chapter with a general perspective on culture seeing how our identities are so engrained from it. Little did I know the research would make me realize that I had no concreate conception of the culture I defined myself through. So, to even understand we in a new age digital first have to identity the existence of a specific culture. This got me thinking about how I consider myself part of a generation that has grown up with the technology to be able to assimilate our own cultures for ourselves, and not be defined by the psychical culture we are confined to.
Whether you're sending a text to a friend or opening up a news article those systems of communication that were never once available to you in the palm of your hand, now create a world of culture at your fingers tips. Jenkins (2008) suggests that individuals define their roles as being consumers rather than producers, and that we are more like participants within our surrounding culture.
He brings up a very relatable context in regard to culture and its relationship with media. "Media can be seen as the key drivers and accelerators of a growing integration between culture and commerce. Brought down to first principles, media mediate -between people, communities, organizations, institutions, and industries. In the classic model, a small number of media companies were homogenizing culture through their dominance over the means of production and distribution of media content." (Jenkins, 2008, pg.5) In middle school, my generation was hooked on AIM or myspace. Then  (Duncum, 2001, pg.103) "Visual culture is immediately apparent that this emerging field is far more inclusive than anything we would want to be involved" (Duncum, 2001, pg.104) The shift towards visual culture is occurring for many reasons, but principal among them is a recognition that, whether economically developed society is seen as "a society of the spectacle" or a society "of surveillance", there is little doubting that the "cultural turn" society has taken is also "a visual turn" (Duncum, 2001, pg.102) I thought about my own visual culture theory. I see the way my fingers click through a world of visual culture. Where exactly every time you click a link there is a visual turn in the kind of media you're seeing. Something new on every webpage. Something pretty to catch your eye. Something informing to get you wondering. Culture is seen not as something that is high and refined, but, rather, as Williams (1981) says, culture is ordinary. Culture is an everyday experience. Mirzoeff (1998) writes, "In the present intensely visual age, everyday life is visual culture" (p. 125). Visual culture then is not something special, but something we all possess and practice all the time. (Duncum, pg.103, 2001) Even literacy educators, who have long focused on words alone, now refer to multiliteracies where language texts are related to audio, behavioral, and visual modes of making meaning (Duncum, pg.103, 2001) Throughout the exploration of these visual cultural theories I questioned why I What makes it visual as a whole? It is not a physical space, or a technological picture but an interconnected web of social images. The presented research provided me with enough evidence to detect that visual culture existed but slacked on providing a concrete understanding of how different visual modes of meaning making are created.
In search for a more specific definition of visual culture we can refer to the production of culture. In surveying this perspective, like most of the other contemporary perspectives in cultural sociology, it views both culture and social structure as elements in an ever-hanging patchwork (Anand, Peterson, Richard, 2004) From this unified idea that culture forms symbolic meaning through various structural systems, it would make sense that visual culture is created by a similar production. How do you show visual culture, when the visual is so vast and the word culture is so diverse? The pictures in my social feed are constant everyday implications of visual culture taking place with no physical world being built, it's as if this culture is formed on an invisible ground floating inside the internet. It's this structure that duplicates every day. Websites, apps, the interworking's of an iPhone have become a mantle for reproduction and emerging forms of social communication where visual culture is continuously creating itself through some sort of invisible multidimensional platform. What does that structure look like? "Following Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) distinction between tree-like structures and a rhizome, he argues that, whereas art education is like a tree with roots, a trunk and branches, visual culture is like a rhizome." (Duncum,2001, pg.103) What is a rhizome? A "rhizome", depicted in Figure 3.1, is a modified subterranean stem of a plant that sends out roots from its nodes. They strike new roots out of their nodes, down into the soil. The rhizome also retains the ability to allow new roots that grow upwards, also called creeping rootstalks and rootstocks.
Rhizomes develop from axillary buds and grow horizontally. This rhizome activity represents a form of plant reproduction also are used for storing plant nutrients. (Wikipedia) You're probably wondering why I'm talking about plants.
Well just coming off of having no structural idea of what visual culture is defined as I looked for a metaphorical framework or systematic structure that I could understand visual culture inside. Rhizomes aren't necessarily just fragmenting of plants that allow for reproduction. The term is also philosophical. Deleuze and Guattari use the terms "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. "As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of 'things' and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those 'things.' A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by 'ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.' (Wikipedia) As I'm picturing visual culture I think about the botanical structure of a rhizome and while doing so I'm also thinking about the philosophical structure. You have this one seed that grows a plant and then through that plant grows underground roots and through those underground roots grow more roots, and more plants, and it "ceaselessly establishes" connections between an ever-growing patchwork of more plants and more roots. "Rhizomes also work on the principles of multiplicity and rupture, where a connection might be made to any other thing and, even where a connection is broken, the rhizomatic structure will rebound time and again with new developments along old lines or the creation of new lines." (Duncum,2001,103)    photography also ensures that the meanings of the images are in some measure available to everyone, drawing on shared values and systems of thought as well as aesthetic criteria. (Ibrahim, 2015) The sharing of the everyday aestheticizes the banal; commodifying and aestheticizing the non-event, the routine and the perfunctory encoding performance to the familiar. The poetics of the everyday is equally implicated in memory making. As numerous authors have noted photographic images act as an aide memoir or as a 'trigger' to memory. They become the material repositories that allow people to engage in forms of 'memory work' that is both individual and collective, enabling appropriations of both time and space. (Ibrahim, 2015, pg. 44) This embedding of the mobile phone on the body extends our ability to augment our visual memory with mnemonic devices where these enable both storage and retrieval. The commodification of the everyday into digital objects constitutes banal imaging. There is nothing novel in it like capturing a cup of coffee with a fresh swirl of cream or the cat going about its everyday routine of a daily slouch in front of the window; a scene or object that produces the comfort of the everyday while in some ways ritualizing the everyday through imagery and initiating a perpetual visual contact (Ibrahim, 2015) In the years since Zappavigna's definitions and outline of Instagram's format was researched, Instagram, and social media in general have exponentially exceled through technology advancements. The communicative constraints that had once held us back from creating messages have been surpassed by new semiotic modes of interactive. People are sharing photos that contain not just one, but multiple threads of pictures, videos, and multimedia configurations made from inside and outside the application. Pictures on Instagram don't refer to or look anything like polaroid's, as they once resembled. Images inside this platform now resemble popular culture, visual culture, social media culture, and provide a network of self-referential photos that represent multiple populations of its users.
Image constructs have bonded with linguistic contexts inside the platform through image construction alone. Individuals can now create images through external photo manipulation apps that cover an extensive list of features and ways to edit a photo. Facetune, Photoshop, Gimp, Afterlight, PhotoDirector, Vosco, Perfect365, are some of my favorites. Although with the availability of this list, people still opt to using the Instagram's photo editing service as well as others like Facebook and Twitter. Almost every social media app has the ability not only to share photos, but to change them.  Awareness and acceptance of myself gave me this kind of therapy that felt helpful and became helpful. After that, this thesis felt like a step by step therapeutic program. Taking from visual identity I can see now that picture did not fit the image and from there I have to acknowledge why, and understand how, so that eventually, I can change.

3C. Acknowledgement & Understanding
Acknowledgement & Understanding has been the hardest piece of the thesis puzzle to conceptualize because it is the hardest thing to do for anyone with any problem. Acknowledging you have a problem and understanding why it occurs. Four years ago, I was suffering from depression bad. Psychologists are beginning to seriously question the psychological consequences of engaging in social media platforms. Findings reveal that much needs to be done to further clarify the processes associated with these outcomes.
Social media studies can flexibly propose interesting psychological questions. So, I had to ask myself, why do I use social media? One of the prominent theories that explain social and psychological needs that motivate users to adopt the media is the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) (Blumler, 1979 andKatz et al., 1973).
The key concept of UGT is that the choice consumers make when consuming media motivates their desire to gratify a range of needs. (Kamarulzaman, Zolkepli, 2015) Uses and gratifications theory differs from previous mass media theories in that it assumes the audience actively selects media to satisfy specific needs rather than passively receives media. (Gao, Feng. Pg. 869) According to this theory as a media user I actively select media rather than passively select media for specific needs. Although it didn't feel that simple. Do I? How can I tell? It didn't feel as though I was actively scrolling through Instagram and searching out the most beautiful pictures to "like." It didn't feel like I was actively choosing to scroll through an endless feed of pictures for two straight hours. UGT assumes that users are goal-directed in their behavior and are aware of their needs. Purposive value, self-discovery, entertainment value, social enhancement and maintaining interpersonal connectivity are the key needs that are widely adopted for online media usage (Cheung et al., 2010). I remember thinking this is wild because I wasn't aware of this behavior until basing my thesis project on it. I know that I tend to sit around my house on my phone and use social media, but I didn't realize that there was empirical evidence for the motivations and uses of this habit that was done through scholarly research. I mean I guessed the information was out there, but sometimes I just didn't feel like knowing it or learning it. I thought it was just a regular bad habit but even my motivations surrounded this media obsession. UGT outlines the ways of classifying media needs, gratifications, and motivations. For instance, media is used to satisfy immediate and deferred gratification, as an informational and educational resource, for fantasy and escapism, and also as a means to connect or disconnect from reality (Kamarulzaman, Zolkepli, 2015, pg. 190 gratification. My mother would drill it into my brain that we are so lucky and privileged to be part of a generation that has information at the tip of our fingers that we have become blindly reliant on it. The affect it has on our needs, our brain, and our decision making, have all hindered the millennial brain. And it's true. I've become attached to that "I want it now, I need it now" type attitude. Attached to a device that gives me the ability to never be disconnected from my  Zolkepli, 2015, pg.191) Other dimensions that are used to link to media consumption include loneliness, anxiety, creativity and sensation seeking. It has been found that mood and content preference are strong predictors of selective viewing and thinking. (Kamarulzaman, Zolkepli, 2015, pg.191) After reading this information I became aware that I was actively choosing to participate in social media as a disconnect from my reality, a reality that people's reactions to photographs they had shared on Instagram through the lens of their need to belong. They asked Instagram users to answer a series of questions about their recently shared photographs, along with a photograph that made them feel happy. In their results, they found Instagram photographs that made people feel happy were more likely to contain a known other than any given recent photograph. Known others refer to people that the user had a social connection with. The nominated happy photograph was more likely to contain the self than the average recent photograph. However, sharing more photographs of the self was not associated with greater satisfaction. Thus, perhaps only certain photographs of the self are viewed positively. Photographs of the self would likely elicit self-awareness and could evoke negative feelings if people felt they were not meeting their standards (Silvia & Du-val, 2001).
For example, viewing a shared photograph of the self might not be satisfying if people felt they were not as attractive as they would like to be or were not behaving in line with their standards in the photograph. However, content shared on Facebook profiles (which includes photographs) has been found to be self-affirming (Toma & Hancock, 2013), so there is also the potential for high levels of satisfaction when viewing photographs of the self.
(Chulpaiboon, Pitchaya, 2016) In our case, it is consistent with the idea that sharing photographs of known others is one way that people maintain their relationships and sense of belonging. Photographs of our friendships, families, and close acquaintances provide a visual reminder of one's relationships, which should help to satisfy the fundamental need to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995;Gardner et al., 2005). (Chulpaiboon, Pitchaya, 2016, pg. 304) Also supporting the role of social connection, they found that receiving more comments on recent photographs was associated with greater satisfaction looking at and sharing those photographs. Such associations shed light on the motivations that underlie different behaviors. These findings show that we can better understand people's subjective experiences on SNS (social networking sites) by taking a fine-grained look at the content they share. (Chulpaiboon, Pitchaya, 2016, pg. 309) Taking a fine-grained look into the content I share-All pictures of myself, my art, fabulous locations I had traveled. The relationships I had with the photos. The caption I put with them. The stories behind these images all mean a great deal to me. These pictures bind me to a culture, a community, a network of friends. But where was the sense of belonging? The satisfaction came from sharing photos of strictly me when I had rarely met my own idealistic standards.
This last social media theory that affects a psychological view on the self is Social Comparison Theory or Social Comparison Orientation (Yang, 2016).
The theory (Festinger, 1954) postulates that people engage in comparison with others to fulfill a basic human need for self-evaluation, in the absence of objective and non-social criteria. These comparisons are cognitive judgments people make about their own attributes against others whom they perceive as ideal goals. Body image is something I've always struggled with. It's hard to admit, let alone be aware, accept, acknowledge, and understand why. When I open Instagram, I see beautiful girls looking to be living their best lives. They are incredibly pretty and have the ideal mediatized figure. They travel, make art, make money and remain gorgeous and happy in all their photos. Is this real? Is this even normal? Is this really the standard that media projects through visual culture? In today's highly mediatized environment, the majority of adolescents' peers and celebrities have an online presence on SNSs. Platforms serve as a comparison incubator that provides greater affordances for social comparison with the user's peers and celebrities  Particularly for women, the desire to be thin is the focus as the female body shape in the media has undergone mass involvement toward thinness over time. This contributes to the increase in women's overadaptive behaviors to conform to contemporary body image ideals; research has shown that exposure to thin images by the media has a small to moderate effect size on BID and eating habits ) BID (or body image dissatisfaction) is a negative assessment of an individual's body with regard to size, shape, weight, or muscularity, and it is a function of the discrepancy between a person's idealized body type and their perceived body image. As for the second concept of interest, adolescents' drive to achieve ideal body types it is defined as the preoccupation to engage in behaviors to actualize one's ideal body. The study applied social comparison theory to examine how social comparison with peers and celebrities via SNSs, as well as celebrity involvement relate to young people's BID and their drive to achieve idealized bodies.  This study extended the social comparison theory to the context of SNSs and highlighted how the unique affordances as self-presentation manipulation, uninterrupted flow of information, as well as perceived realism facilitate social comparison with friends and celebrities and the consequential effects on adolescents' BID and their drive to achieve an ideal body. .

The technological affordances for interpersonal surveillance and interaction of
SNSs happen to facilitate social comparison due to the greater exposure to ideal body postings by peers as well as celebrities-who are often sources of BID. Yang (2016) suggests individuals who engage in social comparison, look to peers upward, or comparing themselves with superior others, to improve themselves; they can also conduct downward social comparison, or comparing themselves with inferior others, to enhance their subjective well-being. (Yang, 2016, pg.704) Different types of SNS content consumption may be more detrimental than beneficial. For instance, SNS surveillance has been found to relate to envy, which leads to higher depression. (Yang, 2016, pg.706) SNS postings can be a channel for support seeking, but such support seeking messages are sometimes vague.33 It is possible that frequent Instagram broadcasters are seeking attention or support through this undirected communication. And yet, if their followers fail to recognize the intention or do not feel motivated to respond, it could make the broadcasters feel unsupported and isolated. (Yang, 2016, pg.706) Once again I look back at my Instagram as an example for comparison. In

4A. Visual Rhetoric
Every media organization and media outlet create their own visual identity or the implicit boundaries where information is included and excluded for their readers. This identity is created around shared cultural meanings that maximize the functionality and aesthetic appeal of the product for consumption in a competitive marketplace. Within developed countries, shared meanings often circulate around an ideology of consumption. (Richard A. Peterson1 and N. Anand2, 2004, pg331) This specific visual perspective has been successfully applied to a range of quite different situations in which the manipulation of symbols is a product rather than the purpose of the collective activity. We have been subjected to social media's organization whose collective activity that involves profiling people in an attractive aesthetic. Visual imagery is created to sell something, a product, an idea, an organization within a culture that is hyper- Celebrities. I challenged myself to study trends on the social app, and pictures of known others, your face, your selfie, and your body, typically receive the most attention. I even remember uploading my first Facebook profile picture when I was 14 years old. I can remember taking a fine-grained look at all the photos I had of myself and exclusively judging each picture. There were even steps I took to search, edit, crop, and transform the photo to showcase the best version of myself.
I thought if I didn't look perfect, I wouldn't be considered friend-request worthy.
As a girl I grew up with this adolescent idea that your face, and your body, needs to be shared on apps like Facebook and Instagram or you'd be considered an outcast, anti-social, even characteristically unfavorable as a person. But maybe that was just the way I was seeing it. Visual communication can transcend textual limitations and instantly convey complex emotions in addition to factual evidence. Visual communicators exist within a mutually inter-supported nexus that simultaneously reflects and perpetuates social contexts. As such, visual imagery must not be understood as purely evidentiary. Visual frames need be contextualized within an ideological position. (Kenix, 2013 pg.837) There are sociological, political, and cultural cues embedded within visual messages that all coalesce to expose the ideological constituency of those who created the media message. Visual images are central to how we make meaning and communicate in the world around us. "Given that images are often the first items scanned within a mediated message, they also generally form the longestlasting impressions on memory" (Kenix, 2013, pg.837). While the center of linguistic communication is based upon words, the center of visual communication creates the symbolic convergence of meaning through photo sharing sites like Instagram. There seems to be cultural ideology that media exposes us to an insane number of images as well as an photographic standard.
Recognizing faces and sharing photos of our community provides us with belonging and a self-presentation through visual imagery. It reveals the pull towards the visual in our human makeup and conception of the self; the role of the visual in memory and recall, as well as its vital role in representing the real or in authenticating and chronicling events in our everyday lives, in forming connections with others, offering an indexicality for conversations and equally its role in self-representation and self-expression. (Ibrahim, 2015) We've become so obsessed with ourselves and making our mark on the world that it really messes with our actual behaviors. It's given me an ongoing  (Charmaz, 2008, pg.160) Throughout this entire paper grounded theory has paved me a pathway into understanding theory development. I've used this initial research to guide my process with exploring myself and the many concepts that created this project. I would consider myself a constructivist in this project since every piece of the project has a huge weight on me as a product of the research. I consider ALL of it valuable. Since it has changed me, I've been recording it through this thesis.
The constructivist position views research as an emergent product of current times, social conditions, and interactional situations. Constructivists argue that researchers' perspectives will direct their attention but not determine their research (see also Clarke, 2005Clarke, , 2006.   meeting that stuck out. There was a concern for what type of messages I was going to be creating in my initial proposal and how they would influence the audience I was communicating to. I thought about this. I remembered my major professor's comment. That it wasn't going to be about the relationship between me and this external population of my fellow social media users. It was to be focused on myself and the relationship I had within this platform. This made me realize embedding myself in the research process becomes overbearing and risky. Warfield (2014) identifies three different formats of the selfie. She recognizes the digital subjectivities that young women experience through the phenomenon of selfies parallel the multimodal format of the selfie itself. She proposes if the selfie is a camera, a mirror, and a stage, then through the image making phenomenon, young women experience themselves at once as if they were 1. on a stage (a self-conscious thespian); 2. in a photo (as a model); 3. on a mirror (as the #realme). Many young women contemplate the ethics selfpresentation in online spaces. She finds for many plugged-in young women, digital subjectivity should rather be digital subjectivities because subjectivity is experienced as multi-layered and multi-modal, which is why it can at once be disembodied, and body-focused, while at the same time felt, emotional, and subjectively embodied. This reflective, dialogic, and qualitative approach could be expanded to explore the layered digital subjectivities of any number of diverse social groups. Through social media, young women experienced themselves as photographic subjects. Most of the young women Warfield studied both presented themselves photographically, by adopting conventions in their selfpresentation, and assessed the quality of their self-images through photographic standards of aesthetics. Many young women would assess and adjust lighting/exposure, locations/composition, post/ posture/ expression, and hair/makeup. The women searched for "good backgrounds" and judged the physical space they were in from a perceived audience. They viewed themselves differently being, "good and sexy" or "chastised and blurry." Other women critiqued their smiles, hair, skin. Many young women described how, in the process of reflecting on, deleting, and seeking the right image, they would feel happy and validated if they could find a good one but felt "defeated" and "sad" if they couldn't produce a good image. (Warfield, pg. 1-4) The step-by-step process young women use to produce a selfie is a highly emotional one. Several young women said that the process made them happy but equal to this were young women who said the process made them feel "ashamed", "silly", "vulnerable", "exposed", and "embarrassed". In this search for the right image, most young women said they sought an image that they felt was "authentic", "real", "not fake" and "not forced". Some women only post the best pictures of themselves. This statement illustrates well the multi-subjectivity of the image producer as she mediates between the photographic self and what she proclaims to be the "authentic" self." Young women experience various subjectivities in the production of the selfie and these subjectivities are framed by the dominant subjectivities propagated by the converged technologies that make up the selfie: the photograph, the mirror, and the stage.
As much as I look at the selfie as Warfield does, I am reminded this is my subjective selfie-making process. Seeing myself on a stage puts too much pressure on myself as someone who goes through a lot of emotional roller-coaster being mentally fragile. Seeing myself as a model basically feels unnatural for someone who has judged and felt ashamed of the physical/aesthetic appearances of my selfimage. Seeing myself as a mirror, or the real me, has forced me to accept that I have these psychological dispositions. Warfield (2014) mentions that alongside the dominant subjectivities of these three technologies, an important subjectivity that is experienced by many of the young women is an embodied subjectivity influenced by body, space, place, and feelings. If this is my subjective selfiemaking process, then seeing myself on a stage has brought clarity to the presence of a digital subjective-self. Seeing myself as model provides a platform for which I can show these dramatic findings as methods for inspiration and more honest communication. And seeing myself as mirror has given me a range of formats of the self that I had never known existed.
Earlier in the thesis I highlighted this concept of a visual identity. The connect was inspired by the many channels the word identity can cling to. I'm conceptualizing my identity in a million different ways through a million different perspectives and processes. Through intense self-reflection, multiple communication methods, and most importantly, an analysis of my own art making process, I've found myself. Warfield's (2014) research reveals that through the material, spatially located, embodied offline subject is felt, experienced and connected to the subject of the image in the often-online selfie. Whether that "felt" connection is a transcendental connection to a pure sense of self, whether the 'felt' connection to the image is one's psychic connection to an imagined or symbolic self, whether the connection to the self is the recognition that the image of the self-aligns with the aesthetic tropes, it regiments motives through conventions and standards of beauty established by social photographs and more broadly mass media. (Warfield, 2014) Myself, my self-image, or my "selfie-image" is the subject of which my online selfie is created. At the same time, I want to contribute to society online, I want to remain unbiased from its manipulative visual nature. But that only seems impossible considering the value I put on my self-image and artistic brain.
Looking back now I can see my multimodal format of this selfie project can be a trip. After all, it's an art piece. An art collection. A composition of the increasingly large rhetoric on self-image research. It's personal and complex, while being culturally assigned and relative. It's textual and it's visual. It's an incredibly intricate paradox among self-image and visual imagery within the media. Warfield's discourse presumes that selfies are primarily visual texts to be read. And if this is the case, then when a selfie exhibits the body of a woman, the female body in the image becomes textual, flattened and reduced to a 2dimensional disembodied deflated site of power relations. This "reading" process entirely neglects or ignores the subjectivity of the women in the image, her intended uses of the image work, and the embodied and felt experiences of the image producer. By exploring the person producing the image, the place of production, as well as the potential emotional and bodily relationships users had to these new digitally-circulated images as a connected whole process, the discussion became not just one of what the images say to various readers, but rather what the relationship is between the producer and the image in the process of image-making and how does that relationship provide insight into the emerging digital subjectivities for this group of plugged-in young women? Is it possible to extend the materiality of phenomenology to the non-material space of the Internet and social media? (Warfield,2014) The relationship between the producer (me) and the image in the process of image-making is imagined through my perception of that experience. These internal forms of representations I thought of as my selfies, or self-images were spread over the across not only my modeled self (or Instagram images) but my perceptual processing of the self. My entire collection of art. My incredibly large library of digital photos. Perception is a process of information reduction whereby a welter of sensations is reduced into a simpler and more organized form. These organizational processes result in our perceptions being structured into units corresponding to objects and properties of objects. It is these larger units that will be stored and later be assembled into images that are experienced as quasipictorial, spatial entities resembling those evoked during perception itself (Kosslyn, Pomerantz, 1977, pg.57) We can think of the "mind's eye" as a processor that interprets perceptual representations (or an underlying perceptual experience) in terms of "conceptual" categories. When these interpretative processes are applied to remembered perceptual information instead of information that comes from the senses, an image rather than a percept will be experienced. (Kosslyn, Pomerantz, 1977) Ultimately I perceive my self-image through a vague definition of visual culture that highlights the usage of visual communication in a public world of social media. The "selfie" or self-image making process reinforces an intersubjective nature of consciousness. These image-making processes become that of a visual rhetoric that comes from using visual communication for creating symbolic meaning. Selfies are visual texts to be read. They provide a visual phenomenology of an interplay between text and imagery. Imagery and seeing. Seeing and experiencing. While pictures are concrete objects that exist in the world, on the platform, images are ethereal entities that occur in the mind. The experience of an image resembles the experience of seeing the referent of the image. Similar internal representations are posited to underlie all forms of visual experience (whether perceptual or imaginal), and these representations may be activated by information from the sensory periphery (when one is viewing a scene or picture), or by information from long-term memory. (Kosslyn, Pomerantz, 1977, pg.58) My selfies are not just the pictures I share on Instagram but also it's the way my mind organizes certain knowledge into conceptual categories about myself. The same happens with the way I process visual imagery within the media, everyday pictures from my camera-roll, and especially artistic imagery that inspires new perspectives.
These images give me material ground to access the self upon. The images create a physical and metaphorical body of work that is me and my art. Regardless of whether they are sensory or imaginal in origin, internal representations may be processed in ways appropriate to the processing of sensory data. At some point in the data-processing stream, images and percepts have a common format, which differs from the format of representations of other sorts of information. (Kosslyn, Pomerantz, 1977, pg.58) It's through this self and art making process that I can reduce my complex cognitions into a simpler and more organized form. I was looking deeper into the images, consciously painting, placing, and analyzing each concept or category into visual representations that helped me understand myself.
Always coming to the same conclusion that I am my art. Taking   Happening all in our head at once. whatever you imagine it's your own imagined story, your perception of reality. It's every little bit, every moment, its teaching you about you, every chapter defining a new sense of being, existing in our lives.
Imagining having this collection of archived memories at your fingertips. The entire history of you in your very own phone or social media profile. This is what I posted: "Instagram, I need to express something, something I've kept bottled inside out of fear of being judged. The truth is, I've been deceiving you all. 4 years ago, I created this account to share my art. Little did I know a few thousand followers would influence me to showcase my body. The first photo set a precedent for a f**ked-up idea of perfection. I spent hours posing in the mirror, countless efforts editing the shit out of my pictures, and continuously shaping myself into someone I didn't recognize. Someone who judged herself in the face of a thousand strangers. This platform makes everyone's lives look so damn glamorous, and its fake, or it's real, or it's whatever you think it is because images are ambiguous, and misleading, and impacting us on an emotional level that's beyond our basic understanding of the app. And. Well. I'm fucking over it. I'm over hiding behind a pretty picture or trying to fit into an ideal that society has created. For the past 3 years I've suffered from depression, anxiety, and a horrible eating disorder that took control of my entire life. When you look at these pictures you see a beautiful girl. But what you don't see is the churning empty stomach, the bags of puke hidden in my closet, or the constant pain of never feeling perfect enough to be truly happy. I'm sharing all of this not for pity, but for self-EMPOWERMENT, and to move forward. Because if it wasn't for this entire experience, I wouldn't be strong enough to sit here and admit my faults in hopes to inspire others. To show the effects of social media, to express who I really am, and to finally share how to overcome your shit-self and be better than you were yesterday, because it's exactly what's happened to me. So, in the words of Oprah "what I know for sure, is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have." Trying to build bones. Missing a heart. Missing blood. Missing parts of the brain.
But it's in the middle of the body that the heart grows and pumps blood. My thesis would be nothing without a definition of the connections between myself, visual images, and social connections. That was my real self. These visual images or forms of art. Learning how to methodically create it in a way that I could understand the process. It visually represented my identity. If I went back into my passions about art and life, I finally found structure, balance.

4C. Transformative Process
From the beginning this was always a plan to be a completely observational experience with myself as the researcher and the social experiment.
Grounded theory and communication theory all go through processes of symbolization, forethought, evaluative, self-regulation, self-reflection, selfconsciousness, and symbolic communication. From day one of graduate school and even in my senior year of college I was always contemplating what my mind was going through with my relationship to social media. Questioning why it affected me and how I behave. Understanding theory development and selfcognition I started to see how my brain was justifying what I repeated to do. By putting myself a product of social media I was again hooked into a culture of selfjudging and constant comparison of my peers. Everything is influence by an algorithm or your ability to capture the attention of a community. It's an insane amount of public pressure on a network like Instagram's, that is firmly encrypted on the beauty of a square picture with an assigned value. My aunt recently told me how when she's feeling lonely or sad, she will pull out one of her scrapbooks.
This woman is infamous in our family for trying to stop every kodak moment.
She will always get everyone to pose for EVERY family holiday or life event.
She'll even sneakily snap a shot of the happening moment without anyone's knowledge. Hannah describes her beloved habit with having the ability to "hold onto those memories" and keep them like "screenshots of her life." I instantly Looking at emergence as a concept helps one to clarify its progressive use in grounded theory. The concept of emergence assumes epistemological understandings and a theory of time. Researchers would agree that emergence means movement, process, and change. This concept of ever occurring event takes into account that the unexpected may occur. The past shapes the present and future but does not make either wholly predictable. understand where that person comes from takes looking into past, present, and future acts of that individual. I can't even begin to describe how different I feel from sharing this experience. This thesis is the most important writing creating and self-analyzing that I've ever done so far in my life. It's driven me completely crazy. And through these realizations I've come to change the way I think about myself. I've gone through thousands of speeches, blurbs, rants, thoughts, crazy abstract compositions of ideas repeated over and over in my head. Images hold a sense of value in our society. That when combined with a personality complex of a current millennial may cause images or "selfies" to become incredibly valuable and distinct in a sense of personal individuality. As an artist I hold pictures dear and true to my heart. They speak to me on another level. They make sense of complex structural systems such as color codes, symmetry, composition, and perspective. In Selfies are so intertwined with our identities in today's culture that it's unfathomable how exponential technology allows that perception to be stretched.
Where I don't just have my physical self as an indication of my self-image but now, I have multiple platforms and pictures for myself to exist and communication on. It's complicated and unique but at the same time it points out a lot of similarities through the same types of messages I've seen throughout every media network. And it's almost as the answers were sitting in front of me the entire time. And to be completely blunt, it's difficult to identify conclusions when the topic of interest is myself and many patterns through which my brain makes sense of imagery and social media. I just had never acknowledged that they were what I needed. That it didn't just take knowing that tools exist to fix my problems. It took seeing them, researching them, applying them, and understanding them.  last painting is that I started it first, before any initial notes or research questions. I subconsciously started to transform my painting process. Before I even had a clue what to write for my thesis, I started this painting as an exploration of colors as emotions. It's significant that it was the first started painting in the collection because it sums up of the entire point of this thesis. That there's a never-ending process happening between people, their identities, and the way we see and understand ourselves in relation to everyday media. The chapters of visual identity, visual culture, social media imagery, acknowledgement and understanding, visual rhetoric, therapeutic art, and transformative process are all a part of my conceptualization of self. Since the first day I picked up a pencil to my latest Instagram post something has been happening to me. Since the first day I made myself throw up to the latest eye-opening therapy session something has been happening to me. Since the first day of graduate school when I was just struggling to get out of bed. Sleeping at hysterical hours of the day and night.
Trying so hard to understand what was wrong with me. Since that first day of graduate school something has been happening to me. I finally learned. I finally saw. I finally applied myself. And I finally understood who I am and how I change. And at the end of this chapter I can truthfully admit that with some minor fallbacks my eating disorder has significantly dissipated since controlling my life 3 years ago. It's truly incredible that the work I put into this thesis actually saved my mental health and even my physical health. In the past three years I went through weight gain and weight loss. Happy times and depressive episodes, but one thing remained the same. It was this constant re-creation of self. Building the body. Transforming the brain. Understanding my anxiety and depression. It never stops. It never feels over. That's why its taken me forever because my identity changes with each new day. I grow, I age, I mature like fine wine with a pinch of wisdom. I always have to remember though that with every new day comes a new opportunity to be a better self than yesterday.