The Qualified Self

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image of the cover of a bookI’m reading the book The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys. It came to my attention through a tweet. Since purchasing this book, I’ve been reading and rereading some key passages. Humphreys compares and contrasts current social media productions with historical use of diaries as ways to communicate information and ‘qualify’ the self. The first piece that caught my attention was the connection to ‘ordinariness’.

“The ordinary can represent broader social values and systems that shape human conditions.” (Humphreys, p 6)

Since I’ve blogged about being ordinary, this resonated for me – Finding Joy in the Ordinary and Uncommonly Ordinary.

“Ordinariness is a process (like habit) where things (practices, feelings, conditions, and so on) pass from unusual to usual, from irregular to regular, and can move the other way (what was an ordinary part of my life is no more). There is always the “being ordinary” but there is also the “becoming ordinary.” (Humphreys, from Ben Highmore)

Being ordinary and becoming ordinary, as shared by Humphreys, is connective and contextual. In my ordinariness, I need to examine these connective and contextual

References and Resources

Highmore, B. (2010). Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. (London:Routledge) p 6

Humphreys, L. (2018). The qualified self: Social media and the accounting of everyday life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. (PDF files of chapters are accessible through Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/book/58689  with authentication)

Humphreys, L. blog site about her research http://blogs.cornell.edu/humphreys/research/