From Mass Media Studies to Self-Produced Media Studies: Strategies of Self-Portraiture in Pregnancy and Video Diaries

This contribution examines specific strategies of self-configuration in contemporary media. These strategies in the everyday life experience of any of us, and, specifically, in our habitual relationship with media and technologies, and its consequences: the natural connection that nowadays links individuals with the 'technological park' that thanks to a vast prosthetic axtention. In particular, the chapter explores a series of practicies situated between the autobiographical and self-portrayals spaces, namely the (self-)representation of pregnancy online, especially in the Italian contex. It focuses on photographic galleries, pregnancy time-lapses, bump diaries, with particular attention to the way medical images are re-used.