Generation Selfie

We can all be considered as honorary members of the so-called “selfie generation”, existing in a society in which figures as apparently disparate as Kelly Brook and Hillary Clinton are in the grip of a (somewhat) narcissistic urge for social media self-aggrandisement and public affirmation. Anointed by Oxford Dictionaries’ editors as the word of the year in 2013, following a 17,000% increase in its usage, the “selfie” is surely what Jonathan Freedland has termed the “ultimate emblem of the age of narcissism”.  Much like the doomed figure of ancient Greek myth, we cannot stop admiring our own reflection. As of this June, there are over 250m photos on Instagram with the hashtag #me.

The selfie is not only about me, me, me but how I look, look, look.

Despite the obvious advantages of the selfie, which empowers us to connect with others through the boundless realms of social media, it is self-centred in the most literal sense; it’s not only about me, me, me but how I look, look, look. You post a shot of yourself and await the verdict, your self-worth bolstered by a cheerful spate of ‘likes’, or demolished by the opposite — an emphatic silence. The American writer John Paul Titlow has described selfie-sharing as: “a high school popularity contest on digital steroids”.

This need for approval that Titlow’s comments pinpoints can be read as an extension of the relentless pressure to achieve, and to be seen to achieve in late capitalist society.  All this, Paul Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification.  In a world in which all that is solid has, in Mark Fisher’s words “melted into PR”, we must all live by the same rules or perish.

Widely used photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Facebook can be understood as cultivating the depression and loneliness that plague us

Paul Verhaeghe writes that these shifts have been accompanied by an astounding rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.  Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both competitors and evaluators – the only roles for society that neoliberalism (market fundamentalism) admits.  In this sense, widely used photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Facebook can be understood as cultivating the depression and loneliness that plague us, a point reinforced by a study by the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen in 2015, that found that leaving Facebook for a week improves happiness levels and could reduce stress by up to 55%.

In its revolutionising of how we gather autobiographical information about ourselves and our friends, the selfie is so much more than a social-media phenomenon that allows us to artistically ‘self-manage’ the image we present to a wider-world, it is also a portrait that captures the isolated condition of postmodern woman (or man), sometimes desperately using a preoccupation with ‘me’ as a means of finding an ‘us’.