I take selfies; I’ll admit that much. I take hundreds at a time; to the point where my friends hate my taking their phones to do them. I have mastered the art of the ‘Selfie gif’, whereupon I take enough selfies that they might be strung together in a masterful sequence to tell a story, namely that of the phones owners anger at me.
In 2005, Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the first Youtube video; ‘Me at the Zoo’, an 18 second clip in front of an animal cage. Shot from the shoulders up, Jawed describes an elephants trunk, explaining that they are both really long, and really cool.
On March 21st, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the first Tweet; “just setting up my twttr”. He would go on to have 2.88 million followers (as of 7th March 2015), with over 16,000 posts.
While the first image uploaded to Flickr on December 3rd, 2003 was a simple ‘Test Image”, titled as ‘Big_Test’. As of 2014, Flickr has over 92 million users, with 1 Million shared photos daily
These sites allow us to communicate faster than ever, from almost anywhere in the world; allowing us to quickly show our support or disdain for social situations, share our opinion on another’s thoughts, or to simply show that we had bagels for breakfast. The advent of the Selfie, therefore, should have been expected as a foregone conclusion rather than a surprise development; in a society where time is money, sometimes simply sending a ‘pic’ tells the story better than a simple tweet could, without the time consumed in producing an up-loadable video.
There lies the argument that Selfies are by nature ‘Narcissistic’, showing a vain tendency to show off or brag. This is a potentially reasonable statement to make based solely off of the selfies nature; a photo taken, directed and posed for by one person for the sole purpose of being uploaded and viewed may indeed seem to exist solely for the furthering of ones egotistical desire to be seen as prettier than the rest. Psychology Today released an article back in January, describing a study designed to find a link between the ‘Dark Triad’ (Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy), called thusly for their connotations with evil in todays society. While those with Narcissistic tendencies did indeed show upload more photos than those without, it was found that there is very little linking Machiavellianism to the narcissistic or even psychopathic tendency to upload photos.
A separate study, presented at ‘Interact 2013‘ proposes that ones online presence (specifically ones presence on Facebook) is very much a representation of the self; claiming that those with lower self esteem are more likely to fret over what gets posted, while those with higher self esteem are more likely to focus on content, as well as producing a personal brand. Perhaps social media may be more of an amplifer than a modifier of a persons tendencies, and perhaps this could be extrapolated to Selfies.
Social media has existed and flourished for almost a decade, with the same issues and complaints flourishing as new forums and mediums are born; The Huffington Posts Dainius Runkevicius made the same claim that Facebook users are not just Narcissistic, but may also be Neurotic in their activities, while studies have found that trolls on sites such as youtube and online forums exhibit a tendency towards Narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy.
What this represents is a universal problem with social media rather than simply that of the Selfie; No matter the forum, humanity has a small portion of its population with psychopathic and Narcissistic tendencies that are revealed through what we post online.
The Selfie is merely the symptom, not the disease.