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Society
Self-LOVE, self-assertion, self-praise and self-aggrandisement were turned shamelessly enchanting by selfie in 2013. Turning the ‘me, my myself’ generation a bit more selfie-sh. Narcissism, the good-old 10-letter word fails to contain its connotations. The high-brow, propah manners be damned, selfies of pretty bottoms, of dog legs on holiday, of the cakes you’ve baked, of the dress or the glasses you need an opinion about… are flooding the virtual universe. After an overdose of smileys and emoticons, the verbally challenged generation has found one more device to express itself, going overboard with visuals of the self! For the uninitiated, a selfie is self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a digital camera or camera phone. These pictures float in the virtual world, documenting life’s movements — with all its profanities. In the texting age when spellings read like abbreviations and books treated as museum piece, ‘selfie’ was declared the Word of the Year, according to Oxford English Dictionary. Not that selfie is a discovery of the 21st century. Self-portraits were a prerogative of many artists in the past, from Freida Kahlo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh to our own Amrita Sher-Gil attempted to show the world the way they looked at themselves. Technology has democratised this privilege of a few. If the father of psychology Sigmund Freud enlightened us about layers of id, ego and super-ego, the three parts of the psychic apparatus, selfie compressed them all into one. The selfie user turned all derogatory aspects of self-love into an asset. While the older generation accused the teeny boppers of drifting away from reality, the selfie replaced the smileys with their own faces, shot from weird angles. Pleasing moms and dads. Soon one discovered, the line between public and private was getting blurred. It was fine till you posted pictures, brushing your teeth, groggy — just out of bed, but things began to change when pictures of just the thigh, or the bottom, the chest shots and then, to things too private were posted without qualms. While a group of young girls were trying to document holidays in all details, some pervert was looking at their sex appeal. In the virtual world, the face could be morphed, used, abused. The dividing line is thin. The seductive pout of a pretty girl clicked in lingerie for fun could feed a voyeur’s lust. The virtual world does not respect bounds of reality. If Google images would throw up superfit women in the tiniest of bikinis, a quick twitter search would throw up related searches: selfies in shower, selfie sluts, selfie nudies, it leads to the unimaginable for the codes of civility one is used to in the real world. Facebook had already turned our universe into a picture album, but the selfie phenomena flooding Instagram feed has pervaded the cultural, social and technological arenas with such brazenness leaving sociologists dazed. One doesn’t know whether selfie is a dark, sexually tinged, porn fantasy, or just a harmless act of clicking and sharing. How to get a perfect selfie Kim Kardashian offers some tips:
Selfie Pop — Raising the pitch
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