Blog post #1: The reason behind 'selfie'

Since this generation has been more “techie”, everything has changed. All of it. The way we send our mails has been replaced by emails, the way we talk to people personally has been replaced by chatting, the way we make friends personally was replaced by Facebook and the way how keep our pictures in albums has been replaced by Instagram. Instagram is a social networking site wherein we can take our pictures that we’ve taken wherever we are, whether we are in school, office and beautiful views that we’ve only seen for the first time, but the most controversial thing in Instagram is selfie.

According to an article entitled “Psychology Explains Why We Take Selfies” by Anna Davies in yahoo.com, states that taking a selfie can be fun at first but once you take selfies almost every 5 hours in a day or find yourself looking for situations that will look good in instagram, that’s the time you need to think about how selfie affected you, psychologically. The point in taking selfie, according to the article, is that you get to control on how you will look in the picture, you’re just taking pictures of yourself and then you post it and then you wait for couple of minutes and see how many people will like your picture and if no one notices your picture or likes it you will take another or a fewer more selfies then replace the photo you’ve already posted, and that’s the reason why many people are more into selfies because they like the attention they are getting from their followers or friends then they post more pictures of themselves because they think they’re already popular in the social networking site because they garnered many likes from other people, but some people will eventually get irritated to you, which is inevitable, because everyone will now label you as vain and narcissistic.

This article interests me because it gives an eye-opener to everyone who are very addicted to selfies that they should limit on taking selfies, it can really affect them psychologically which is not good for an individual because if you keep on doing things that will affect your personality you will gain haters, it’s a reminder that what you’re doing is not healthy anymore and it’ getting annoying and people will think that you just want attention from everyone.

Anna Davies says, "Spend too much time pulling a duck face at the lens or putting every hair in place and not only are you wasting time, you're also missing out on the spontaneity and imperfections that are part of making memories."

I think this quote pretty much sums up what are the pros and cons of taking selfies. You spend too much time beautifying your pictures to make it look perfect when everyone sees it in the internet but your mainly missing out the fun in taking selfies, the candid pictures that are naturally beautiful instead of those pictures that you organize just like having a photo shoot but by yourself.

If I’m going to consider the view of the psychologists about selfies and how it affects us and how to overcome it then there is a deeper answer on why people are addicted in taking selfies then I will probably know the root of this selfie mayhem in social networking sites. That’s where the philosophical point of view comes in.

According to an article by Megan Murphy in feministcurrent.com entitled “Defense of the ‘selfie’ confirms that this era will forever be known as the stupidest of all the eras.” states that we are naturally self-centered at times and we think that everything we do is just for ourselves, we never think about what other people might think about our actions and about ourselves. She stated in her article that she watched a debate about selfie that was discussed by Sara Nicole Prickett, a writer, and Andrew Keen and Hal Niedzviecki. Keen stated that selfie is an act of ”extreme narcissism” that will surely affect our history. If you will think it that way, he was actually true, imagine in the textbook of our children’s children they will read in their history books that our generation will be famous for taking too many selfies in a day. That’s just terrible. They will remember us as the vainest generation. Prickett points out that, it is true that we are living in a narcissistic time, but the term called narcissism points out who do selfies most – women. Women are the most influenced by the selfie trend because they want men to notice them. A photographer said that selfie is a form self-expression and self-love, one does not simply call someone ‘vain’ just because he or she posted a selfie for the first time, we don’t even know what his motive on posting his selfie is.

Megan Murphy says,"When we internalize the male gaze, we see ourselves through that lens. So we turn the camera on ourselves, or we objectify other women, or we objectify ourselves — because that’s how we have learned to see women and to see ourselves. Simply because a man is not literally looking at us at the very moment we ‘choose’ to objectify ourselves or simply because our audience may be comprised of some women, does not erase the male gaze from our psyche."

This quote surely answers why women were the most influenced by the selfie mayhem. It is because they want to express themselves who they really are and they want to show to men that they should start looking at women literally when they start expressing themselves not just by looking at their bodies.

This article interests me because it gave me the answer to what I was looking for. I realized that there are many reasons why certain people got into selfie, it’s not just for fun but they want us to notice them and appreciate them, though as the saying says: “You can’t please everyone.” Is actually true, eventually you will have haters in every social networking site and it’s inevitable.

The two articles that I have written, though from different perspectives, they still connect each other and gave me the answer that I was looking for. It just show that, yes selfie is narcissistic and somewhat vain, but people do it for fun and they just wanted to be noticed because maybe at some point in their life they were neglected all the time or they were shy back then and the solution they found to gain confidence is through selfie, what we can do then is just to let them be. Let’s not judge people immediately.

We shouldn’t judge people immediately just because they posted picture, we should analyze the situation first, but at the same time those who post their pictures frequently should learn how to control themselves because the world doesn’t revolve around to one person only, it revolves to everyone and don’t just post something just for “yourself”, post something that everyone will look at and be appreciated by everyone.