ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
We’ve been sliding into self-obsession for a very long time, but when the most credible way to promote our relevance rests in the number of “likes” on a selfie, well, we’re in big trouble.
That’s according to the experts but I tend to agree. I’m considering now whether to put my 20-something daughters in straitjackets, but then again, I might never see them if they weren’t such showoffs.
They simply can’t see enough of themselves. Click. Their food. Click. The places they go. Click.
By Google’s estimates, 93 million selfies are taken each day, so they are by no means alone. In 2013, "selfie" was named word of the year by Oxford dictionaries. And Twitter, last year, declared 2014 the "year of the selfie."
Indeed since migrating from social media to the mainstream, the selfie has become quite the social phenomenon. Heck I get story pitches about them all the time from brides-to-be tweeting about their engagement rings to companies marketing apps like PicPal, which combine social media and instant collages into one. PicPal provides the ability for a group of friends to take pictures at the same time in different places and the app will create a collage for you, hassle free. But that isn't all. You can then share, like and comment on them, too.
It's not surprising the addiction to selfies has set off alarms among psychological health care professionals who fear we are raising a generation that relies on attention-seeking social dependence with no compassion, understanding or identity of any kind.
Keith Campbell, head of the University of Georgia’s psychology department, launched a study last year to try to understand how personality traits, like narcissism, predict the motivation for and amount of selfies that individuals take. “We have found that narcissism predicts the number of selfies that people report taking,” he said. “Other researchers have found this as well and I am pretty confident in it.”
He still isn’t sure yet, however, if people who are narcissistic actually do take more selfies or if they just say that they do.
Kelsey Herrett, 25, takes selfies almost daily and agrees she is something of a “narcissistic showoff.”
“A selfie’s purpose is always to ‘show off’ something, is it not?” Herrett said. “Whether it be the rad shirt I’m wearing, a recent activity, or the people I’m with, most selfies are selfish. But when it comes down to it, aren’t all photos we share on social media intended to draw attention from others?”
Still, she said selfies should be taken in moderation and have some variety.
“But as Beyoncé says, ‘Sometimes I’m just feelin myself,’” she said.
In terms of broader cultural trends, Campbell said selfies seem to be following the lines of other social media practices. Social media can be used for showing off or attention seeking, but they can also be used to maintain friendships and family relationships, seeking and sharing information, and for entertainment.
He is concerned that people like Herrett who spend lots of time looking at images of themselves start to see flaws and features that they do not like.
"I have seen reports that selfie taking is pushing people toward cosmetic surgery," he said.
Gabriella van Rij, a self-described activist for kindness and author of "I Can Find My Might" — part memoir, part self-help — believes the growing popularity of selfies is having a negative effect on our collective self-esteem, especially among youths.
“Selfies are less about what you think about yourself and more about what you want others to think about you,” van Rij said. “We can take as many selfies as we want, and we can validate our outer shell with ‘likes,’ but we can’t change feelings of inadequacy unless we start to take ownership of our uniqueness.”
That requires taking ownership of the physical traits we cannot hide and those we can, she said.
As human beings, we seem to need constant validation instead of having confidence in who we are. It seems for most of us too scary to be unique. We want to belong in our family or with our friends or even our partner.
Because the selfie phenomenon is likely here to stay, van Rij said it’s up to us to determine what is real and what is not, starting with the selfie that we so carefully stage.
If the real you has gotten lost (or if you know someone who’s facing this), van Rij offers three steps to break free from the invisible constraints of social media:
- Start a dialogue on confidence, without the intense need for outward validation.
- Take ownership of those things that make you unique.
- Realize it's really OK not to belong.
I’m going to share those tips with my daughters if I ever see them again.
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