Self-reflection in media offers insights into how a culture sees itself; that is why it matters. As a dominant trope in modern visual culture, at moments of transition, emerging or transforming screen media often self-reflect on the virtual mobility that the new media enable for its users. More specifically, in the following I will argue that today's media's self-reflections insist that navigation is effectively the primary paradigm driving digital screen media. This primacy of navigation entails more fundamental positions regarding the relations between our culture's predominant modes of address: narrative and spectacle. Both modes are centered on sense-making: from making sense as bringing logic, making understandable, and bringing about (or privileging) meaning, to mobilizing the sensory domain of attraction and affect.

To bring these implications out, I compare contemporary digital media with the first years of cinema. This comparison will show how the intimate, inextricable relationship between narrative and spectacular tendencies manifests itself, especially in navigation. I will demonstrate how media present these twin tendencies as converging in a trope of virtual mobility. This melding together of spectacle and narrative is most clearly visible in screen visions of navigation. These visions establish a particularly dynamic space of which the screen is the ground, the conduit, and the organizer at the same time. I call this simultaneous onscreen construction and representation of navigation, this dispositif where seeing and making converge, ‘screenspace’. The screenspace at issue in this chapter has a particularly revealing center, which, as I argue below, is deictic. The ride films from early cinema will make clear how this centrality of a converging deictic center makes self-reflexivity a useful tool for the understanding of the present navigational complex – to coin an analogue to the panoramic complex – as both different from and yet continuous with the early moment of the moving image.

The Point of Self-Reflection

Self-reflection is a doubly ambiguous term. This makes it both rich and at risk of becoming vague. As Mieke Bal has pointed out, both elements of the term are subject to further specification. The ‘self’ may be the work, or it can be the subject looking at it.