Are all of those selfies making us narcissists?
I was recently chatting with an acquaintance who teaches high school English. I asked her what her biggest pet peeve was when it comes to her students and technology and she was quick to answer.“Selfies,” she said. “I don’t mind if they use the phone to check the time or send a quick text to their friend, but it drives me crazy when they take pictures of themselves during class.”
And they do it all the time.
Her students will spend class time on Snapchat, sharing pictures of themselves with doodles and captions scrawled over them complaining about how bored they are.
What happened to the good old days when you just passed elaborately folded notes in class?
Some days it seems the age of self-absorption is following on the heels of the digital age.
Hop on Facebook, Twitter and especially Instagram and your feeds will inevitably feature photos of users (mostly girls and women) have taken of themselves. They’re making faces from silly to sultry to sad and showing off everything from a new outfit to their exposed posteriors (seriously, just look up #butts if you dare).
The third most popular hashtag on Instagram is #me and #selfie has generated more than 35 million posts on the photo-sharing site. The Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the word of the year for 2013.
Teens in Asia are so obsessed with self-portraits some are using a so-called “selfie stick” – an extendable metal wand that clips to a smartphone and allows them to snap pictures of themselves and their friends at a distance using the phone’s self-timer.
Everyone from Pope Francis to Colin Powell have posted pictures of themselves (the former secretary of state posted a self-portrait he had taken of himself 60 years ago).
And Ellen DeGeneres broke the Twitter record for most retweets (currently at 3.4 million) for the star-studded pic she took with the likes of Bradley Cooper, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Kevin Spacey at the Oscars.
For the most part the selfie phenomena seems to be harmless fun. Yet there are plenty of times when it just seems … well … wrong. The classroom selfies, for instance, seem incredibly disrespectful to teachers. There are a disturbing number of photos of women in underwear or bathing suits taking sexy pictures while small children play in the background.
And then there are the people who snap goofy pictures of themselves at the most inappropriate of places – the Anne Frank House, the 9/11 Memorial or even funerals.
You read that right.
There’s a whole Tumblr page devoted to pictures people have snapped of themselves while saying goodbye to loved ones.
“Love my hair today. Hate why I’m dressed up. #funeral” reads the caption under one.
And if you think the pictures are appropriately somber, think again. Sure, there are some pics of people with exaggerated frowns, but for the most part it’s standard selfie fare –fashion shots showing off funeral attire and goofy faces.
Even President Obama has participated snapping a shot of himself alongside the British and Danish prime ministers during Nelson Mandela’s funeral last December.
The #me explosion got me thinking – is all this selfie absorption making our children and us more narcissistic?
In an article in Psychology Today, Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, says we shouldn’t be all that worried. Western civilization has a long history of self-portraiture. It was once only reserved for the elite, but now modern technology has enabled everyone to try a little self-exploration.
“One of the most effective ways to know yourself is to see yourself as others see you,” she writes. “Selfies offer the opportunities to show facets of yourself, such as the arty side, the silly side, or the glamorous side. We learn about people by accumulating information over time.”
She lists several other reasons that selfies shouldn’t be synonymous with narcissism, but one in particular caught my eye (especially since I’m the mother of two girls): Selfies help normalize how people look. When pop culture and mass media deliver a message that all women should look like super models, selfies show us “real people.” And with the popularity of social media, this means we’re all being exposed to more “real people” of all shapes, sizes and colors than ever before – and that’s a good thing.
Beyond that experts suggest that selfies and social media sites are a way we can claim our identity and showcase different facets of yourself to the world.
This also excites me.
Remember all that labeling that occurs in middle school and high school? The jocks, the geeks, the drama kids, the cheerleaders, the stoners, etc. Well, if kids can now claim their online identity via selfies on social media, maybe that will help them address all the pigeonholing head on and force others to see how multifaceted they actually are.
Or maybe I’m just #dreaming.
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