Month: March 2015

Just a quick word of warning; the spam is about to become real. I’ve decided to attempt a photo a day, for as long as I can. I’m not saying I’ll take a photo a day, merely that I’m going to publish one a day. To help, a friend is showing me how to use macros to auto-post from my lightroom exports- IE the photos I enjoyed taking. Hope this doesn’t annoy anyone!

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 21^st, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the first Tweet; “just setting up my twttr”. He would go on to have 2.88 million followers (as of 7^th March 2015), with over 16,000 posts.

While the first image uploaded to Flickr on December 3^rd, 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.

As I sit down to write this blog, I dramatically look around my desk. 2 cameras sit, one waiting for a new lens that will never come, on a small clearing to my right. Copious models lie in various states of disarray to my right, their stare of blind acceptance as penetrating as any Adam Sandler movie should be (take that as you will). A sword of minecraft sits pinned to my corkboard above a plain white mask and below a picture my parents got me for my 6th grade graduation. 3 hard drives glare at me with blinking lights, urging me to finally get my shins together and finish that documentary I promised Mrs Shannon over the last few months. She’s a lovely person, and I feel bad for letting her down. It’ll be up soon, I think. My computer is dying slowly, it’s harddrive making screeching noises every now and then. I’ll get a new one soon enough, but I fear it’s getting too late. On my monitor I have the godfather playing; the way dramatic beats work in that film is interesting to me, but I have it playing at halfspeed, and silent, so that each actors individual reactions can be gauged properly. Point of this is; I don’t do deep attention, I skim. Unless it is something I truly engage with, I skim until I reach something different. This is a weakness of mine that I have yet to correct, but I’ll get to it.