Selfie

There's an article in New York Times today which rekindled a thought process that I last had in Paris. There I saw hordes of people clamoring around the major tourist attractions, selfie sticks in hand, in a frenzied effort to shoot that perfect snap which, as I imagined, would gather the maximum number of likes on Facebook. Although technology apologists try to excuse this behavior by saying that it allows one to share the valuable moments of one's life with those who one cares about, I think this is a weak argument, although not without a certain amount of truth to it. The stronger drive behind the selfie craze, unsurprisingly and quite obviously, is a combined cocktail of two rather perilous human traits: narcissism and insecurity. And an individual's participation on the various social platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat etc.) is also primarily a manifestation, in different degrees, of these two traits. To the lofty arguments of the simple-minded idealist, this is a realist's (my) counter-position.

The need to establish an elevated social status in comparison with our peers is as old as civilization itself (see Veblen). What social media has done is that it has supercharged the mechanisms through which this status can be manipulated, projected, and interpreted. And it is has done one other major disservice by shrinking social relations and making the boundaries of society extremely fluid and arbitrary. What I realize as fundamentally unachievable for me also does not figure into my deliberations very much. It does not lead to feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. However, those things which are deemed worthy by my peers and which are within my reach if only I jumped the required hoops are precisely the ones which carry the greatest potential of engendering such feelings. Social media, by cheapening the socially admired values and by bringing a large number of people together, has created the conditions wherein the average participant is constantly being bombarded by a bevy of attributes which, if achieved, would elevate his social status among his peers. There is no end to this enticement and this race precisely because of how easy and how cheap it is to gain such attributes and to gain the approval of others. This cheapened style of existence, as I see it, is absolutely catastrophic for individual self-esteem, however, it works brilliantly for the companies whose products are those very people who are the enthusiastic participants in the brave new world.

I am interested in the logical next steps in this process. People have long been turned into commodities and the process has only accelerated in the age of the internet. People, on the other hand, have more than happily acquiesced to the state of things converting themselves, in the process, into walking billboards, zealous fanboys, and selfie-stick wielding insecure narcissists. Where does it all go from here? I have a large bag of popcorn ready!