What Can Selfies Tell About Us
Many people consider the self-portrait of Robert Cornelius from the first half of 19th century to be the first “selfie” ever produced. However, a long time before Cornelius used the so-called daguerreotype process to take his famous picture, painted portraits were already being used to convey many things beyond just appearance including social status and wealth.
The question is, what do selfies tell about us in the time when we take more than 1 trillion photos every year? According to a study published in the academic journal Social Networking, self-portraits are often linked with narcissistic and selfish behaviors. They present a great opportunity how to craft a very specific expression of one’s own identity and quickly share it with a large number of people for instant validation and confidence boost. The important thing to note is that the study doesn’t say that taking selfies makes one narcissist, instead, it points to the fact that narcissistic people use them as one of many different tools to fuel their self-centeredness.
While modern self-portraits tend to get a lot of bad reputation due to their contribution to self-objectification, they can also serve as a wonderful tool to document and remember some of the most important moment of our lives in their full and unaltered intimacy. Even more importantly, several different cancer awareness campaigns have managed to raise millions of dollars under hashtags like #NoMakeUpSelfie, #SmokeThis, or #bluelipselfie, just to name a few. This nicely demonstrates that there are two sides to every coin and it’s up to us to decide which side we are going to choose. Using the words of 17-year-old Lauren Giraldo, who has 4.4 million social media followers, we can say that it’s up to us to be as genuine or not as we choose.
Photo: Wikimedia
