An Open Letter to Mass Media explaining, definitively, the meaning of selfies.
Dear Mass Media Outlets,
You’ve got it all wrong, yet again.
People who take selfies aren’t confidence-depleted narcissists, rather they are confident identity explorers.
I know, I know, mass media. It’s hard to hear the words ‘you’re wrong’, but you keep doing this and somebody, I’m afraid, has got to take you to task.
I get it, mass media, you like boxes. Good things, go here in this box. Bad things go there in that box. Boxes are easy to use, they are handy and they clean things up. Your various communication outlets, like TV, Movies, News, Music, advertizing, like being the social institutions responsible for organizing and interpreting new social phenomena for us, the masses. Who wouldn’t!? It’s empowering! When something new comes along, you get to tell us, the naïve masses, how to make sense of that new trend and which box (good or bad) we are to put it in. But, I gotta tell you, mass media, these boxes you are using are old, outdated, often offensive, and, to be blunt, just plain uncreative.
You are using the same old good and bad boxes to talk about selfies. First, let’s talk discourse—that’s what communication peeps, like Michel Foucault call the ‘conversation’ you folks perpetuate that shapes the way we come to think about and therefore judge topics of social interest[1]. Discourse is the ‘talk’ that often leads to something being put in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ box. I say "Middle East" you tell me ‘bad box’. I say “USA” you tell me “good box”. We could play this game of ethical categorization all day long. The term and phenomenon of Selfies have been put in a ‘bad’ box which is why North American pop culture publications continually talk about selfies as narcissistic[2], self-absorbed[3], and very much a reflection of the “Me, me, me generation[4]” of Millennials. A recent article by Sherry Turkle (damn, Turkle, you are at the cutting edge of this stuff!) suggests and critiques the shortened attention-spans of cell phone culture: “when you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.” In short, cellphone users and selfies takers skim through life rather than dwelling in it deeply. This is typical of the discourse around selfies. They are superficial and trivial as are the people taking them. I disagree, but we’ll get to that in a sec.
I want to talk further about the way you, mass media, have taught us to think about selfies after this past year of their mass popularly. First off, it’s not just selfies that you’ve put in the bad box. It’s everything that youth culture creates. And this trend of lumping all creative productions of youth into the bad box is just old hand for you. Flapper culture, beat writing, rock and roll music, hip hop, street fashion: this is just a short list of the many popular cultural products of youth that initially you, acting out your typical role as the paternalistic, curmudgeonly old-white-dude, judged as morally-debasing. With a shout out to my stomping ground of Canada, of the 156 Globe and Mail articles from 1950-60 that comment on “rock and roll”, the most common terms associated with ‘rock and roll’ were “ill-effects”, “garbage,” “noise”, “rebellion”, and my favorite “so-called” as if the Globe and Mail wasn’t quite ready to even accept the existence of rock and roll music and so they present it as a somewhat fictional musical bad dream. A quote from one of these anti-rock and roll articles can be applied to my argument about the discourse you’ve perpetuated about selfies. Any creative product of youth “is a rebellion—it has had its counterpart in every generation since the world began”[5]. Rock and roll was a rebellion, so was punk, and so are selfies.
But you don’t present the youth who take selfies as rebellious or creative, you present them as, self-centered, and narcissistic and therefore incapable to producing anything of value. But this too is a boring and uncreative discourse, mass media! Moralist and popular author, Christopher Lasch chronicled and criticized the rise of the ‘self-centered’ mindset of the baby boomers through the 60’s and 70’s. This discourse on ‘narcissism’ traces much farther back past Karen Horney’s neo-Freudianism, past Sigmund Freud himself, all the way back to early myths that put excessive self-reflection in the ‘bad’ box, like Narcissus gazed into the water in Greco-Roman times and the sin of vanity, an excessive form of self-idolatry. What’s the embedded lesson? You aren’t suppose to praise your self image! And what is a selfie? It’s a praising of one’s self image! Shame on you, Justin Beiber! Shame on you, Miley Cyrus! Shame on you, everyone who takes a selfie!
But this criticism you seem so keen to perpetuate, mass media, is such a double-standard! When it comes to selfies, you say, “you are looking at yourselves too much! You are too preoccupied with your self-image!” But then for decades and decades, you have told us (especially us girls and women, because that’s who I’m interviewing) that we ARE to be looked at! This idea is embedded in visual culture historically. Look at any painting of the female form. Women were the subject of the audience’s gaze but they were rarely the artists painting the nude. Moving the timeline forward to the medium of motion pictures, Laura Mulvey presented the notion of the “male gaze” arguing for a gender asymmetry in the visual documentation of film. First, women are rarely ever the lead or hero, second, the camera lens of Hollywood cinema predominantly sees the world through the eyes of men. This is why in recent years we have “pseudo-progress” because we have more female super heroes but the only way they can be on the screen is if the male gazing lens gets to see them as sexy. Mulvey also argues that with enough socialization, women embody the male gaze and start to police other women’s actions and physical appearance based on their standards established and reinforced by you, mass media. It’s a shitty double standard lesson you are teaching, mass media. Mass media, you can’t criticize people, especially women, too much for looking at their self-images (read: selfies) if YOU, for generations, have been teaching us that one of our primary roles is to be looked at.
So my suggestion, mass media, is this: instead of chastising youth like every paternalistic iteration of media before you, using those age old good and bad boxes, why not be creative! Instead of looking down off your stool upon youth like they are akin to an uninvited mouse in your house, why not get off that stool get down on your knees, face those kids eye to eye like they are smart, informed and agency-filled humans. And while you are down there, ask them with curiosity and without judgment: “excuse me, friend, but I see you like to take these things called selfies, could you tell me about them?
And, I tell you mass media, if you did this, you’d have to toss that fraying-paper box containing the discourses on both ‘youth’ and ‘selfies’ into the fire along with the Yule log and start afresh because this is what they would tell you:
1. Selfies are empowering and counter-hegemonic, especially for girls
“I see these photos of girls in magazines, and when I take a photo, it kind makes me sad because I see that I’ll never look like that. But then I keep taking photos and eventually I find one where I think I look good. And that gives me a boost and that’s the one I post.” (Anonymous, age, 16)
“I like having the camera in my own hands. I like seeing my face in the camera. I like being in control of the image and what I’ll look like.” (Anonymous, age 18)
“The desire to see beauty in myself at all times. Often, I'll take a photo and scoff at it ... only to come across it days later and notice the beauty in it.” (Anonymous, age late 20’s
“I often take them when I feel the need to stop and see myself FOR myself.” (Anonymous, age 23)
“Sometimes I will be disappointed because they didn't turn out as I had intended. But I can usually find magic in one of the shots. Sometimes I am in awe of my beauty. Many times I do not know the person I see in the photos and that inspires introspection.” (Anonymous, Age 22.)
2. Selfies are play.
“I like trying out different outfits. I like playing around with my make up and hair. Sometimes I do it and I look at the photos and I know it’s not me. But that’s cool. It’s like dress up.” (Anonymous, age 16)
“I feel almost as if I have to be a character, like an exaggerated version of myself.” (Anonymous, age 20)
“Sometimes I just go for it - other times I design a shot from apparel to place props and the whole nine yards” (Anonymous, age 22)
3. Selfies offer a chance at introspection
“I am present in this moment” (Anonymous, age 38)
“Either I'm experiencing some kind of emotion that is very strong and I just need to get it out somehow - self-expression, I guess - or I'm just bored. (There can be other things of course, but I'd say those are the two big ones).” (Anonymous, age, 26)
4. They are the new way to say “hi”
“Instead of sending a text, I’ve started just sending a selfie. It’s like I’m just saying ‘hi’!” It’s more personal. Like I’m there.” (Anonymous, age 20)
The popular twitter post: “when I send you an ugly selfie, you know you are a true friend”
“Sometimes I can’t get the right words but I just take a photo and my friends know.” (Anonymous, age 20.)
You see, mass media, these quotes are from the horse’s mouths: young men and women aged 16-25 who are avid selfie takers. My online questionnaire about selfies asks people who take selfies directly to tell me what they feel when they take these self-portraits and their answers are much different from those that your are broadcasting The problem is this, my friend: if you picture a selfie as a person’s self-reflection posted publicly, your focus, mass media, has been up until now only on the front side of the mirror. You are making sense of what you see through YOUR eyes, with YOUR inherited values and codes. You are looking at the image without talking to the image makers. I invite you, mass media, to step through the looking glass and look at selfies through the eyes of the people who make them. Talk to the producers. Look at the mirror head on, because if you do, your analysis of selfies, I’m sure, would be quite different.
[1] Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969.
[2] "Selfie Nation" ABC News. April 4 2013. Youtube. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22511650
[3] Titlow, John Paul. "#Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie". ReadWrite. January 31st 2013 http://readwrite.com/2013/01/31/instagram-selfies-narcissism#awesm=~oqiV60Dt2vrHI2
[4] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2143001,00.html
[5] Rock and Roll Seen Adolescent Rebellion. The Globe and Mail (1936-Current); Jan 20, 1959
You’ve got it all wrong, yet again.
People who take selfies aren’t confidence-depleted narcissists, rather they are confident identity explorers.
I know, I know, mass media. It’s hard to hear the words ‘you’re wrong’, but you keep doing this and somebody, I’m afraid, has got to take you to task.
I get it, mass media, you like boxes. Good things, go here in this box. Bad things go there in that box. Boxes are easy to use, they are handy and they clean things up. Your various communication outlets, like TV, Movies, News, Music, advertizing, like being the social institutions responsible for organizing and interpreting new social phenomena for us, the masses. Who wouldn’t!? It’s empowering! When something new comes along, you get to tell us, the naïve masses, how to make sense of that new trend and which box (good or bad) we are to put it in. But, I gotta tell you, mass media, these boxes you are using are old, outdated, often offensive, and, to be blunt, just plain uncreative.
You are using the same old good and bad boxes to talk about selfies. First, let’s talk discourse—that’s what communication peeps, like Michel Foucault call the ‘conversation’ you folks perpetuate that shapes the way we come to think about and therefore judge topics of social interest[1]. Discourse is the ‘talk’ that often leads to something being put in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ box. I say "Middle East" you tell me ‘bad box’. I say “USA” you tell me “good box”. We could play this game of ethical categorization all day long. The term and phenomenon of Selfies have been put in a ‘bad’ box which is why North American pop culture publications continually talk about selfies as narcissistic[2], self-absorbed[3], and very much a reflection of the “Me, me, me generation[4]” of Millennials. A recent article by Sherry Turkle (damn, Turkle, you are at the cutting edge of this stuff!) suggests and critiques the shortened attention-spans of cell phone culture: “when you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.” In short, cellphone users and selfies takers skim through life rather than dwelling in it deeply. This is typical of the discourse around selfies. They are superficial and trivial as are the people taking them. I disagree, but we’ll get to that in a sec.
I want to talk further about the way you, mass media, have taught us to think about selfies after this past year of their mass popularly. First off, it’s not just selfies that you’ve put in the bad box. It’s everything that youth culture creates. And this trend of lumping all creative productions of youth into the bad box is just old hand for you. Flapper culture, beat writing, rock and roll music, hip hop, street fashion: this is just a short list of the many popular cultural products of youth that initially you, acting out your typical role as the paternalistic, curmudgeonly old-white-dude, judged as morally-debasing. With a shout out to my stomping ground of Canada, of the 156 Globe and Mail articles from 1950-60 that comment on “rock and roll”, the most common terms associated with ‘rock and roll’ were “ill-effects”, “garbage,” “noise”, “rebellion”, and my favorite “so-called” as if the Globe and Mail wasn’t quite ready to even accept the existence of rock and roll music and so they present it as a somewhat fictional musical bad dream. A quote from one of these anti-rock and roll articles can be applied to my argument about the discourse you’ve perpetuated about selfies. Any creative product of youth “is a rebellion—it has had its counterpart in every generation since the world began”[5]. Rock and roll was a rebellion, so was punk, and so are selfies.
But you don’t present the youth who take selfies as rebellious or creative, you present them as, self-centered, and narcissistic and therefore incapable to producing anything of value. But this too is a boring and uncreative discourse, mass media! Moralist and popular author, Christopher Lasch chronicled and criticized the rise of the ‘self-centered’ mindset of the baby boomers through the 60’s and 70’s. This discourse on ‘narcissism’ traces much farther back past Karen Horney’s neo-Freudianism, past Sigmund Freud himself, all the way back to early myths that put excessive self-reflection in the ‘bad’ box, like Narcissus gazed into the water in Greco-Roman times and the sin of vanity, an excessive form of self-idolatry. What’s the embedded lesson? You aren’t suppose to praise your self image! And what is a selfie? It’s a praising of one’s self image! Shame on you, Justin Beiber! Shame on you, Miley Cyrus! Shame on you, everyone who takes a selfie!
But this criticism you seem so keen to perpetuate, mass media, is such a double-standard! When it comes to selfies, you say, “you are looking at yourselves too much! You are too preoccupied with your self-image!” But then for decades and decades, you have told us (especially us girls and women, because that’s who I’m interviewing) that we ARE to be looked at! This idea is embedded in visual culture historically. Look at any painting of the female form. Women were the subject of the audience’s gaze but they were rarely the artists painting the nude. Moving the timeline forward to the medium of motion pictures, Laura Mulvey presented the notion of the “male gaze” arguing for a gender asymmetry in the visual documentation of film. First, women are rarely ever the lead or hero, second, the camera lens of Hollywood cinema predominantly sees the world through the eyes of men. This is why in recent years we have “pseudo-progress” because we have more female super heroes but the only way they can be on the screen is if the male gazing lens gets to see them as sexy. Mulvey also argues that with enough socialization, women embody the male gaze and start to police other women’s actions and physical appearance based on their standards established and reinforced by you, mass media. It’s a shitty double standard lesson you are teaching, mass media. Mass media, you can’t criticize people, especially women, too much for looking at their self-images (read: selfies) if YOU, for generations, have been teaching us that one of our primary roles is to be looked at.
So my suggestion, mass media, is this: instead of chastising youth like every paternalistic iteration of media before you, using those age old good and bad boxes, why not be creative! Instead of looking down off your stool upon youth like they are akin to an uninvited mouse in your house, why not get off that stool get down on your knees, face those kids eye to eye like they are smart, informed and agency-filled humans. And while you are down there, ask them with curiosity and without judgment: “excuse me, friend, but I see you like to take these things called selfies, could you tell me about them?
And, I tell you mass media, if you did this, you’d have to toss that fraying-paper box containing the discourses on both ‘youth’ and ‘selfies’ into the fire along with the Yule log and start afresh because this is what they would tell you:
1. Selfies are empowering and counter-hegemonic, especially for girls
“I see these photos of girls in magazines, and when I take a photo, it kind makes me sad because I see that I’ll never look like that. But then I keep taking photos and eventually I find one where I think I look good. And that gives me a boost and that’s the one I post.” (Anonymous, age, 16)
“I like having the camera in my own hands. I like seeing my face in the camera. I like being in control of the image and what I’ll look like.” (Anonymous, age 18)
“The desire to see beauty in myself at all times. Often, I'll take a photo and scoff at it ... only to come across it days later and notice the beauty in it.” (Anonymous, age late 20’s
“I often take them when I feel the need to stop and see myself FOR myself.” (Anonymous, age 23)
“Sometimes I will be disappointed because they didn't turn out as I had intended. But I can usually find magic in one of the shots. Sometimes I am in awe of my beauty. Many times I do not know the person I see in the photos and that inspires introspection.” (Anonymous, Age 22.)
2. Selfies are play.
“I like trying out different outfits. I like playing around with my make up and hair. Sometimes I do it and I look at the photos and I know it’s not me. But that’s cool. It’s like dress up.” (Anonymous, age 16)
“I feel almost as if I have to be a character, like an exaggerated version of myself.” (Anonymous, age 20)
“Sometimes I just go for it - other times I design a shot from apparel to place props and the whole nine yards” (Anonymous, age 22)
3. Selfies offer a chance at introspection
“I am present in this moment” (Anonymous, age 38)
“Either I'm experiencing some kind of emotion that is very strong and I just need to get it out somehow - self-expression, I guess - or I'm just bored. (There can be other things of course, but I'd say those are the two big ones).” (Anonymous, age, 26)
4. They are the new way to say “hi”
“Instead of sending a text, I’ve started just sending a selfie. It’s like I’m just saying ‘hi’!” It’s more personal. Like I’m there.” (Anonymous, age 20)
The popular twitter post: “when I send you an ugly selfie, you know you are a true friend”
“Sometimes I can’t get the right words but I just take a photo and my friends know.” (Anonymous, age 20.)
You see, mass media, these quotes are from the horse’s mouths: young men and women aged 16-25 who are avid selfie takers. My online questionnaire about selfies asks people who take selfies directly to tell me what they feel when they take these self-portraits and their answers are much different from those that your are broadcasting The problem is this, my friend: if you picture a selfie as a person’s self-reflection posted publicly, your focus, mass media, has been up until now only on the front side of the mirror. You are making sense of what you see through YOUR eyes, with YOUR inherited values and codes. You are looking at the image without talking to the image makers. I invite you, mass media, to step through the looking glass and look at selfies through the eyes of the people who make them. Talk to the producers. Look at the mirror head on, because if you do, your analysis of selfies, I’m sure, would be quite different.
[1] Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969.
[2] "Selfie Nation" ABC News. April 4 2013. Youtube. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22511650
[3] Titlow, John Paul. "#Me: Instagram Narcissism And The Scourge Of The Selfie". ReadWrite. January 31st 2013 http://readwrite.com/2013/01/31/instagram-selfies-narcissism#awesm=~oqiV60Dt2vrHI2
[4] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2143001,00.html
[5] Rock and Roll Seen Adolescent Rebellion. The Globe and Mail (1936-Current); Jan 20, 1959
