#XTownSelfies USC & UCLA

Across town, Miriam Posner, who coordinates and teaches in the UCLA Digital Humanities program, is also teaching a course on selfies, with a slightly different emphasis.  Her course, Selfies, Snapchat, and Cyberbullies, focuses on contemporary media shifts, moral panics, and the myths and myth-busting about millenials. (Did I get that right, Miriam?)  From her course site:

Still, perhaps something about life is different for people who grew up with the Internet. So how do we think about these differences without defaulting to alarmist diatribes about sexting, or utopian proclamations about the Internet as a realm of boundless freedom? How do we talk about generational difference without flattening diversity or ascribing supernatural power to technology?

In an show of selfie solidarity, we've teamed up with Miriam's course in a number of projects.  One of them is the Cross-town Selfie Challenge.  For this project, students from USC's #SelfieClass are posting selfies that Miriam's UCLA students will recreate, changing one aspect.  We'll reflect on what happens when you present yourself in someone else's pose, walk a mile in someone else's selfie, or perhaps in another framing, use selfies for a dialogue, as Jill Walker Retteberg described in her book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology.   We'll be using the hashtags #Xtownselfies and #SelfieClass. Selfie On!