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This chapter looks at the online circulation of breastfeeding selfies — or brelfies — and asks what their benefits might be in terms of making breastfeeding easier. It looks at brelfies as social media activism, drawing attention to embodied mothering, and upending assumptions about the solitary nature of maternity. It argues that brelfies provide a means through which breastfeeding can emerge from its existing practical, conceptual, and imaginary confines, by communicating images of breastfeeding to an almost limitless audience. Not only have brelfies attracted extensive media coverage, raising awareness about breastfeeding in the community, the images also provide a unique form of communication between breastfeeding mothers and their friends, families, and children, as mothers see themselves in the act of taking their own photos. By considering the implications of increased images of women breastfeeding in public — as well as the increased circulation of images of women breastfeeding generally — this chapter argues that brelfies invite us to reconceptualise breastfeeding in public as breastfeeding in social contexts more broadly: in short, to reimagine breastfeeding in relation to its many publics.

There are ample connections between the period this book studies (1839-1895) and our contemporary moment, which has also witnessed rapid technological changes in visual representations of selfhood. Portraits—selfies, snapshots, more—continue to be a site of active production of the possibilities of selfhood.

This chapter examines the affordances of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the different intergenerational practices of oversharing online. Using the concepts of ‘aesthetics of appearance’ (representation that endures over time and space) and ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ (constant presentism), it asks what prompts oversharing, what oversharing reveals about our life stages and the state of being human in an age of over-acceleration dominated by ICTs, and how oversharing affects our embodied phenomenology. The chapter first provides an overview of ideas about acceleration and the resulting aesthetics of disappearance, as proposed by philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, before discussing how the phenomenon of oversharing is mediated by social media platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat. It then considers whether posting selfies on a Facebook page constitutes oversharing and whether oversharing (real-time presence) achieves what Virilio calls an aesthetics of disappearance. Finally, it explores how oversharing impacts social interactions and intergenerational relationships.

In this chapter, we explore the case study of mobile media and loss in the South Korean Sewol ferry disaster of 2014. This specific disaster was one in which mobile media featured, especially in terms of lingering incriminations from the mobile phones of the 250 drowned schoolchildren. We explore the ways in which grief and loss are culturally specific, including an array of various social responses, rituals, and cultural prescriptions. We trace a contextualized view of postmortem photography and the intimate and memorialized publics. As demonstrated in the Sewol disaster, mobile media practices like selfies and vlogs are being deployed by the soon-to-be-deceased, and thus become self-eulogies.

The concluding chapter revisits our major themes and highlights next steps for exploring mobile-emotive practices and loss. We also seek to provide a set of propositions for future areas of study. We explore the limits of funeral decorum through understanding selfies at funerals, virtual veneration, and the challenges of a new kind of public mourning. We discuss further the crux of our book: how the personal nature of mobile devices positions them to uniquely play a role in bereavement. We examine digital legacies and the impact of the increasingly likelihood that we will be co-present at the moment of death for some, thanks to live mobile media broadcasting. We conclude with an analysis of shifting cultural understandings of death and imagine a mobile-emotive afterlife.