(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The word "selfie" finally came in Oxford Dictionary i 2013. It means "a photograph you took of yourself, often with your smartphone or webcam, and then uploaded to a social media site".
"Selfie" is also a metaphor for the spirit of the times. In the wake of Knausgård, the novels have generally become more autobiographical. Self-confession and blotting have good days in journalism and essayism. Other media follows: Gaute Brochmann calls in Morgenbladet a "selfie film": "The staging of a narcissistic I-person in a commercially successful fiction format." themselves, "they become just like us. We identify with them and therefore believe we can trust them. During the election campaign, people stood in line to take selfies with well-known politicians. This is how the feminist slogan "the private is political" takes on a new dimension.
Suck for recognition. At a time when we are facing greater economic, social and ecological problems than we are used to, strangely enough self-esteem prevails. When the crisis comes, everyone can save themselves, the social Darwinists would say. Or does the selfie trend work the other way around – which blurs when reality becomes too threatening?
The latter sounds paradoxical when the tendency toward self-production in the fiction has been explained as a "craving for reality," or that social democracy represents an existential vacuum where fiction no longer suffices, but must be supplemented by autobiography. The desire for reality is in any case related to the longing to be seen. A selfie is a demand for attention, photographer Karen Ann Donnachie points out: "Look at me, here, now!"
The fact that the "selfie" tendency expresses and reinforces the narcissism in society is a little too obvious association: He who loves himself takes pictures of himself all the time. But when the self-reflecting photograph disappears, the self-esteem goes away as well. Thus, the selfie mania can also mean the opposite, namely poor self-confidence. Narcissism oscillates between self-esteem and self-contempt.
But the selfie is also communication, not just self-reflection. Selfier creates attention, and it is "the name of the game" when it comes to building social networks, states actor James Franco in The New York Times. Everyone wants attention, and the selfie becomes a means of channeling the flow of information in your direction. The celebrity selfie sends out privileged material – "here is a piece of my privacy". A text conversation can fail to inform you about how you feel, while a selfie does so in an instant. Therefore, Franco believes that selfies are more communication tools than signs of vanity.
The question is how to use selfies in a socially relevant way that not only reinforces self-obsession.
Privacy that shrinks. What exactly is the explanation for today's increasing eradication of privacy? One can blame the technological development: We know where you are, through GPS tracking on your mobile. We know what you did yesterday, because you posted pictures of it on Facebook. By google you, we get an even more comprehensive material. Many selfies of you are online. Why should I bother talking to you face to face when I can sit at home in the living room and monitor you, with automatic notification if you should speak out in public?
In this situation, one would think that people became more paranoid, especially after reading about Snowden. But it may seem as if the self-disclosure genre is working in tandem with electronic surveillance. The new binoculars create new forms of blotting – or is it the other way around? This will also accelerate with new technology: so far we have only seen the beginning of drone development.
Public intimacy. In an article in the journal Anthropological Quarterly (2010), Levent Soysal introduced the concept of public intimacy. In Jürgen Habermas' classical public theory, it was an important point that the citizens in the 1700th century could publish their intimate experiences in the form of fiction in the literary public. But Habermas said little about the retroactive effect of these publications on privacy. This is the starting point for Soysal – that intimacy is created from outside, through globalized discourses and practices. When the social anthropologist is to study the secret or intimate life of the natives, the study objects gulp up things from lifestyle magazines, health and cohabitation blogs, television series and self-help books. But Soysal's conclusion that intimacy is constructed from the outside is a little too quickly drawn. The error consists in an exaggeration: the individual is still not completely dissolved in public discourses, this is a kind of postmodern cliché. A test of Soysal's perspective would be the following: A person who follows published recipes in the intimate area and brings Karl Evang's sexual information books to the shepherding session with his girlfriend, is obviously comical. When she stops being that, Soysal will finally be right.
Private life is thus not completely eradicated. But the possibility of being photographed or photographed has increased enormously. In principle, we act more as if we were in the public space also in private contexts. This makes the ceiling height smaller. The need for private, mobile-free or eavesdropping-free rooms will increase. The new form of self-confession and intimidating publicity will create new secret, private spaces. The boundaries will be shifted, but the distinction between private and public will remain.
The citizen as a selfie. The question is how to use selfies in a socially relevant way that not only reinforces self-obsession. An example is certain forms of performative art that use selfies. The project Inside out (www.insideoutproject.net/en) consists of organizing a group that will promote a specific issue with a slogan. Anyone can participate. The group must have at least five participants, who then submit portraits of themselves. These selfies are printed as posters in large format, and sent back so that the participants can exhibit them by, for example, pasting them up in the local community. Here, selfies can form the basis for collective, political actions.
The selfie phenomenon therefore does not have to be just an expression of growing narcissism. Jocelyn Evans at the University of West Florida talks about "citizen-as-selfie", a new starting point for engaging in civil society. Last year's Facebook campaign to raise money to fight ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) fits well with this perspective. In one month, $ 100 million was raised. Participants were given the choice of pouring a bucket of ice water over their heads or paying $ 100. And each participant challenged three new friends. The action thus spread like a virus. The intimacy of the public combined with commitment gave positive results. However, most people were most concerned with sending selfies of themselves regardless of the case. ("Funniest ALS Ice Bucket Challenges" has over 10 million hits on YouTube.)
Here we have a good example of Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) old insight that private vices can be transformed into public virtues. This technique is well suited for transforming selfie selfishness into altruism.
Tjønneland is Dr. philos. and regular writer in Ny Tid. e-tjoenn@online.no
