Well, where do I start?
With my generation, the ones who are spear heading this trend into existence. Or shall I start at an even younger generation, where having over three or four thousand 'friends' on Facebook.
Lets start with understanding what a selfie is, as I just released while starting to write this post. I have no idea how it is 'officially' defined on a dictionary or in the streets, or this case the social media jungle network.
occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself every day isn’t necessary"Going to a more relaxed view of selfie, I turned to the urban dictionary which puts it very bluntly as:"A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera."With all this said, what is the point of my ranting today?
I saw a post on Facebook by someone who was like me baffled at the number of people fighting to get more likes on their photos. I mean I personally enjoy it when I get a large amount of attention on what I post or share. It is nice to be given attention. However that raises the question, how much of the attention is genuine, and how much of the attention is actually real?
What am I getting at is, that we have a tendency to like things that come on our news feed at random. Similar to a mechanical motion, constantly on our phones attached to the media, social media. We are seeking and at the same time giving out this perceived notion of 'attention' in the form of Facebook likes, Favorites on Twitter, re shares, shares and however each unique medium promotes our sense of narcissism. Personally, as I said, I love it and that does make me a narcissist, however I am not destroyed if something I post does not get much attention.
With that said the number of people who are hurt, who feel they are not normal and due to the lack of attention on social media, try hard and harder to get the eye of the internet on them for that split second of fame. If they do not get that attention they feel something is wrong with them, or how they act. They do not feel normal, this probably comes with the millions and millions of followers famous people have. Who get so much attention when they even blink, and that blink is caught on a photo, and that photo is uploaded to the internet.
What is not understood by the people, who do not have millions of followers is that only a very few people have such fame, and such fame. Does not last long on the internet. I like to mention a rather famous you-tube channel, which has recently fallen into shambles. Epic Meal Time, once the gods of the internet, the lords of bacon, the sauce boss. Now, they barely get 200 - 400k views, you tell me that's a lot of people. Well they used to get over 4 million in a few hours back in their time of glory.
However I have tangented quite from the point, the title, why the title, #philosophical. Well, I noticed that my wall this morning, was filled with selfie's, that had quotes that would be worth for self improvement books, or deep existential questions. What do you find, in response to such deep meaningful quotes?
"You look gorgeous babe!"
"Stunning xx !!!!"
"ARAH!!!"
Now not to say, that these are wrong, not at all compliments such as these are nice and do help the people who receive them. Yet as everything there is a fine line, a fine line between good and bad. More often these comments slip to the bad side. Rather than the bad side, to be over exaggerated. With some profiles, getting more the 100 comments, talking about how gorgeous the person is, every other week.
Then those who do not get this treatment, ask themselves, but what do I do wrong? Want to know the answer?
Nothing, you simply weren't lucky enough to either, have that good a Photoshop expert to fix your photo to make your best features stand out more then normal. Or you simply posted your photo, of your face at the wrong time of the day to get attention, yes there is actually people who post their photos according to which time most people are online. (I can say I am sometimes guilty of this myself with this blog, when I post it does significantly affect my viewership.)
With that said, this is my opinion, my honest and sincere opinion. POST photos of yourselves online, take selfie's, yes of course take them. However, do not expect to get a million likes in a few hours, do not expect to have it shared time and time again. The internet is an unforgiving place, it remembers everything, so before sharing something. You will need to come at piece with yourself, are you willing to let others see what you will share. Rather are you willing to receive criticism and people judging you for what you will post. If so, then you can share, if not, then do not.
