Selfie notes from a narcissistic, self-objectifying quasi-pychopath

Funny thing about human society: it always seems to be headed to hell in a handcart. The causes and evidence may change over time—from the “penny dreadfuls” of Victorian England, to jazz music, to television, and to the latest culprit: selfies.

According to Time magazine last month, a new Ohio State University study suggests men who regularly post selfies—particularly if they edit them beforehand—are more likely to show signs of psychopathy, along with narcissism and self-objectification—“a set of personality traits known as the Dark Triad” (Linshi).

As with pretty much every societal malaise over the years, critics focus their concern on young people (perennial culprits in the ongoing downfall of civilization). In a guest editorial for Issues in Mental Health Nursing, University of Tennessee nursing professor Marian W. Roman bemoans the selfie obsession of younger fellow passengers on an Alaskan cruise. Instead of properly appreciating nature all these whippersnappers literally turned their backs to it, preening and posing with cell phones held at arm’s length. “These individual and group selfies trumped any courtesy, social contract, or even common awareness of the other. It seemed to be a generational phenomenon; Seniors, Boomers, and Gen Xers did not seem to indulge” (Roman).

Yes, young people like their selfies, and that worries us. In generations past, we worried about their obsessions with rock and roll, or comic books. Young people occupy the front line of cultural change, and whenever the rest of us fail to keep up with them we place the blame on them, not on ourselves.

I would argue that selfies are merely the current expression of our innate desire to affirm and document our existence in time and space: Look at me. This is where I am right now.

Photo: Mariano (2000)

It’s not a new tendency. More than nine thousand years ago, in Argentina’s Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands), people used their own hands as stencils, spraying paint onto cave walls to record their handprints. We can’t tell exactly what they were thinking, but it may have been something perfectly simple: “I was here, and this is my hand.”

In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh took his love of self-portraits one step further when he began exchanging them by mail with fellow artists, including Paul Gaugin and Émile Bernard (“Self Portraits”). Sure, it was an inexpensive way to build a collection of artwork, but it’s interesting that Vincent was mailing self-portraits rather than starry nights or sunflowers.

In short, we have always loved to share visual depictions of ourselves with others—to be both creator and subject—using whatever artistic medium available to us. The difference now is the incredible ease with which we can create and distribute those images. With the arrival of the Internet, digital imaging, and social media, selfies aren’t some kind of aberration; they’re an inevitability.

Oh, right—I’m supposed to be using this blog to critically evaluate examples of selfies. I better get down to it.

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Joseph Byron/Byron Company/Museum of the City of New York

What was that I was saying, about selfies not being a new phenomenon? In 1920, a group of photographers posed on the rooftop of their studio building for the photo (with one of them stepping out to shoot the scene from the side, to illustrate “the way the photograph was made”). It absolutely qualifies as a selfie.

This photo startles us with the familiarity of its composition—apart from the clothing, and the fact that the camera required two outstretched arms instead of one, this group selfie could come direct from Instagram (sepia filter applied).

At the time this shot was taken, photography was still something of a novelty even in New York City. This selfie perfectly captures the giddiness of a group of guys playing with their new high-tech toy. They could have settled on a more traditional portrait, but then one of them would have been missing from the frame.

To me, this selfie says, “The future has arrived, and we’re going to be part of it.” It feels energized, spontaneous, improvised. It’s not a static, carefully composed formal portrait; it’s a moment captured in time. It’s also serves, to borrow Levin’s words, “as a ‘real-time’ performance of self oriented towards an audience situated elsewhere.”

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Credit: Warfield (n.d.)

Over the course of 2012, designer Kyle Warfield took one webcam selfie every day (366 total) and uploaded it as his Facebook profile picture. He approached each selfie as a single frame in an improvised animated movie—matching his pose from the previous day and then modifying it slightly. At the end of the year he had a hugely entertaining animated GIF, which he also turned into a photo flip-book for sale.

By doing so, Warfield simultaneously embraced and subverted the selfie genre. “I sought an alternative to the faceless stagnation I observe in online profile pictures—motivated in part by the banality of popular selfie memes, the omnipresence of the duckface, the ubiquity of Facebook users consistently applying the same gestures in every photo of themselves, and so on.”

When I saw this selfie (okay, 366 selfies) it hilariously brought to mind the Horning reading — “always changing with each image, as opposed to a static ‘real self.’” Nothing static about Warfield in this selfie. He literally portrays himself from every side, and with every conceivable facial expression—from neutral to goofy to grotesque. He even depicts himself drooling on his shirt—something that everyone can identify with, but few would deliberately display.

I’m nowhere near this creative, but, like Warfield, I do try to use selfies to express my own constantly changing nature.

"we're not crying, we're just allergic to goodbyes"

Evelyn Rollans (Instagram, 2015)

I include this photo as a response to Rutledge’s post at Psychology Today. Rutledge makes some great points in her article (“[W]hat if taking selfies is perfectly normal?” she proposes), but at other places she gets it demonstrably wrong.

First a bit of context. My two daughters, Evelyn (left, age 19) and Claire (right, age 21) have been travelling together for the past three weeks in Europe. Last Friday morning (Feb. 27), they parted ways when Claire saw Evelyn off at this London bus depot. (Evelyn is travelling in Europe for another week before heading to New Zealand, while Claire headed to Kenya later that day for a three-month volunteer posting.)

“A selfie is the documentation of a passing moment, not a larger expression,” writes Rutledge. “[Selfies] are not meant to standalone (sic) as a single message or withstand the passage of time.”

These assertions may be true for many (likely most) selfies, but certainly not all. This photo, for example, captures an informal, fleeting moment, but it also expresses so much more: intense sisterly love, the sweet pain of parting, nervous anticipation for solo adventures to come. Will it withstand the passage of time? I expect to treasure this casual, slightly-out-of-focus snapshot for the rest of my life, and I expect my girls will as well.

So there, Pamela Rutledge.

Other thoughts: Cynics might decry this photo as a textbook example of the oversharing rampant in selfie culture—a deeply intimate moment transformed into a self-conscious public performance. I say: screw that. I say it’s beautiful.

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Scott Rollans and Claire, 2000

I thought it would be fun to look back at my very first “proper” selfie (i.e., taken by myself with a digital camera and immediately shared on the Internet).

I took this photo in 2000, right after I got my very first webcam (hence the photo’s low resolution). I’m at my desk with my then-seven-year-old daughter Claire.

At the time I had recently set up my own website (scott.rollans.com) as a freelance writer/editor. I promptly used this photo on my home page—in 2000 terms, effectively setting it as my Facebook profile photo.

In other words, I liked what this selfie expressed about me—not just personally, but as a professional. I’m at my desk with my kid on my lap, and we’re both rumpled, dishevelled, and having fun. If you hire me for a writing project, you’ll be hiring precisely this person. I used this photo on my home page for at least the next decade.

It was my first experience with the sensation Miroiu describes: “Creating an online identity and choosing the way of presenting the self become[s] a matter of clicking and screen-touching.”

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Scott on Brokeback Mountain set, 2004

I took this photo in 2004 on the set of Brokeback Mountain. My wife worked on that movie as director Ang Lee’s personal assistant, and on one visit I decided I might as well throw on a costume and join the crowd of extras for a scene shot at a rodeo.

At one point, sitting on top of a fence overlooking the corral, I was startled to look down at the dirt and see the sharply defined shadow of a quintessential cowboy. And, that cowboy was me!

I fished my digital camera out of my pocket and took the photo with my left hand, holding the camera in front of my abdomen so that it wouldn’t be visible in the shadow. This is an artsy variant on the familiar bathroom-mirror shot, and so I’d argue that this qualifies as a selfie (I also shared it online as soon as I had an Internet connection).

Of course, I was utilizing this photo to groom my online image. I’m not a cowboy, and I don’t generally hobnob with Hollywood—but, look at me! I’m a cowboy, and I’m in a movie! And, I’m a clever photographer!

Horning writes about selfies as a form of self-advertisement: “[S]elfies don’t tap a suppressed inner essence; they develop the ‘self’ as an artisanal product line.”

Guilty as charged.

Horning continues, “The selfie is sometimes condemned for its inauthenticity, but in its explicit constructedness, the selfie may herald the emergence of a postauthentic self: a[n] overtly manufactured self that is confirmed and rendered coherent in an audience’s reactions and always changing with each image, as opposed to a static ‘real self.’”

If I interpret this correctly, a constantly evolving, overtly manufactured self isn't necessarily unusual or evil. In fact, it may even have more validity than what we normally think of as the "real me."

Phew. I guess I’m okay after all.

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References

Byron Company. (1920) Uncle Joe Byron, Pirie MacDonald, Colonel Marceau, Pop Core, Ben Falk-New York Dec. 1920 [Photographs]. “Selfie view” retrieved from http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UP1GVKBD91&SMLS=1. “Side view” retrieved from http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UP1GVKB8UO&SMLS=1.

Cueva de las Manos. (n.d.). Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_las_Manos

Horning, R. (2014, November 23). Selfies without the self. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/selfies-without-the-self/

Johnson, P. (2007, July 3). Van Gogh. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5tKG39G6Qk

Levin, A. (2014, Spring). The Selfie in the Age of Digital Recursion. Retrieved February 27, 2015, from http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/the-selfie-in-the-age-of-digital-recursion

Linshi, J. (2015, January 11). Men Who Share Selfies Online Show More Signs of Psychopathy, Study Says. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://time.com/3662838/men-selfies-psychopath-narcissism/

Mariano. (2005). Hands, at the Cave of the Hands [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_las_Manos#mediaviewer/File:SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b.jpg

Miriou, C. (2014). The Selfies: Social Identities in the Digital Age. Retrieved March 1, 2015, from http://www.anzca.net/documents/2014-conf-papers/796-the-selfies-social-identities-in-the-digital-age/file.html

Roman, M.W. (2014). Has “Be Here Now” become “Me Here Now”? Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 35, 814. doi: 10.3109/01612840.2014.954069

Rollans, Evelyn. (2015). We’re not crying, we’re just allergic to goodbyes. Retrieved March 1, 2015 from https://instagram.com/p/zmrOttAKNi/

Rutledge, P. (2013, July 6). Making Sense of Selfies. Retrieved February 28, 2015, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-media/201307/making-sense-selfies

Self-Portraits. (n.d.). Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/selfportrait.html

Warfield, K. (n.d.). #lastyearofselfies. Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://www.lastyearofselfies.com