26 September

Some people see selfies as narcissism. I’ve never really believed in narcissism, it’s a pretty empty idea. When people take pathological numbers of selfies, I think it’s not because they’re in love with themselves, but quite the opposite, they have very little confidence in themselves at all, and are using selfies to try to boost that confidence. Selfies are often posed and edited for just this reason. Also women, particularly young women, take overwhelmingly the largest number of selfies. That should maybe ring some alarm bells, because it’s possibly feminism going backwards. To have women so focused on how they appear - that was what earlier feminists fought against, but now it’s literally viral. Narcissism isn’t love of the self, it’s power acting on people, to make them focus obsessively on themselves. We’ve misunderstood that and made it into some personal trait, of self-love. Or at best we see that it means a person is damaged in some way, but we see that damage again as a personal thing, rather than a social thing. I would see FB as this trend in an even broader way, how we have a global platform to interact, and what do we mostly use it for? To display ourselves. It’s important to understand why we do that.