Selfies: why we just can't get enough of ourselves The Sydney Morning Herald, July 14 2017
Ally Garrett, a 29-year-old body-positive or "fat acceptance" activist, has a tattoo on her left thigh that helps explain why she's so passionate about posting selfies. It shows a yellow rose above a big red heart emblazoned with a single word: MYSELF. It's inky testimony to the millennial conviction that loving yourself, and being public about it, is nothing to be embarrassed about. It would have horrified my grandmother, fond of frosty Calvinist maxims along the lines of "Self-praise is no recommendation". Selfies can be an act of defiance. For a fat girl teased at school, for a fat woman living in a thin-worshipping world, it took courage for Ally Garrett to post her first bikini selfies on social media some years back. Now there's no stopping her. The selfie trend itself shows no signs of slowing. We just can't get enough of ourselves. In 2016, Google calculated that more than 24 billion selfies were posted in 2015 on its Google Photos app alone. In 2014, the company claimed that Android devices were capturing 93 million selfies every day. One estimate claims that 74 per cent of all images on Snapchat are selfies and that 1000 selfies are uploaded to Instagram every 10 seconds. When the Oxford Dictionary made "selfie" word of the year in 2013 columnists, academics, misogynists, feminists and bloggers of all stripes had something to say about the apparently innocuous act of taking a photo of yourself. Did selfies indicate clinical narcissism? Just another Me Decade with added me-ness or a cry for help from a generation lost in a celebrity swamp? How could selfies be said to "empower" or build communities when they thrive on consumer capitalism's great drivers: comparison, envy and fear? The debate goes on. Selfies as a worrying sign of the times are touched on in a recent book by journalist Will Storr, called Selfie: How We Became so Self-obsessed and What It's Doing to Us. What are the consequences of taking such a confected pride in ourselves, but also living in an age of judgemental perfectionism? If all this, playing out in selfies and social media, is supposed to build people up – all those likes, comments, all that hyperbolic feedback – then why are eating disorders, depression, suicide and self-harming on the rise? Why do many studies show people feel worse about themselves after they've been on social media sites? And what message do selfies send to women in particular? Yes, there are all those body-positive hashtags, but even there the focus is still on women's appearance. It's hard to ignore the mountain of selfie sites where "hotness" remains the revered female commodity. All those teenage girls needing to hear, over and over, "OMG, you're so pretty/hot/gorgeous!!!!" There is something poignant, at least, about some selfie-posting. "Selfies are all about presenting a face to the world," agrees 32-year-old Mimi Johnson*, as she recalls a work trip to Bali. "There I was, staying in the most beautiful villa, with my own pool and an amazing tropical garden. All I was doing was spending hours near the pool, taking selfies and trying not to fall in with my phone. I took hundreds, wanting to get the perfect one. "Finally I thought, this is stupid, I'm in this incredible place and I'm not actually enjoying it. All I'm doing is worrying about presenting this image to other people. 'Hey, look at me having the perfect holiday.' " She thinks part of her motivation was simply wanting to connect. "I don't think it was narcissism, really. I think I was a little lonely and a little bored. When people post back, it's like an endorphin hit – that instant moment of validation. And now there's this hard-wired need, compulsion, to share. It's like you haven't enjoyed an experience unless you've put it on social media."
