Theorizing zoomie technoculture: embodied netnography to capture the connected self

The zoomie is a technologically-mediated self-portrait snapshot, snapped by an individual with a smartphone or a webcam in the flow of a Zoom platform experience (or other similar internet-based videocommunication platforms such as MicrosoftTeams or Google Meet) and then shared on social media. Conceived as a natural evolution of the selfie, the zoomie practice, after being globally popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, has given rise to a new “zoomie technoculture”. Zoomie technoculture designates the system of meanings, actions, discourse, technologies, people, objects, places, and interactions used by people to present their self, build their relationships and craft their content within and through videocommunication platforms such as Zoom. While literature on selfies is abundant, studies are missing that theorize the new stylistic canons and cultural codes of the zoomie, looking at it as a new object of evolving technoculture (Kozinets, 2019). Through a netnography (Kozinets, 2020), this study provides an inductive theorization of the zoomie and of its stylistic canons and cultural codes of self-presentation and contrasts them with those of the selfie. To this aim, this work highlights the techno-materiality of the zoomie, depicting how technology captures, frames and enables the representation and the circulation of the zoomies in social media platforms. Self-presentation captured in a zoomie reveals a shift from the beautifying and curated logic of selfie to the unkempt and comfy logic of zoomie. While selfies “publicize the private gaze”, carefully embellishing the self, the spaces and the objects with contrived authenticity and commodifizing them as objects of consumer desire; zoomies, in contrast, “privatize the public gaze”. In zoomies, people invite others into the interior, genuine, intimate space of their own subjectivity and make them part of a flow of experience where the self is crafted in connection with other people (see Figure 1). This highlights that the practice of self- presentation performed on technological platforms affectively, productively, and playfully reaffirms how the self is always connected with and constituted by multiple others (Ngai, 2022). In theorizing the zoomie, netnography plays a crucial role, acting not only as a method to collect, get immersed into, analyze and interpret the variety of the zoomies, but also as a material and discursive embodiment (Barad, 2003) of the zoomie. Notably, in the investigative, interactive and immersive research operations, netnography discovers, represents, curates and enriches the zoomie, co-constructing its multifarious embodiments as emergent deep data. In the netnography process, the zoomie takes its own shape as a technocultural object which reveals meanings, values, actions, affordances and interactions. Hence, in this paper we discuss netnography as an embodied set of technocultural research practices where method and data coalesce assuming fluid, dialectic, co-constitutive dynamics. As netnography adapts its practices and procedures to form a unique combination that is new and different for each phenomenon, with this study we also advance our understanding of how embodied netnography captures meanings and practices that today can be increasingly obscure, elusive, slippery, and hidden in the depths of human interactions through and with technologies (Gambetti & Kozinets, 2022).