Selfie Article

The article “Fear and Selfie-Loathing in America:Identifying the Interstices of Othering,Iconoclasm, and the Selfie” by Jessica Leigh Maddox mentions many ideas revolving around selfies. Personally I feel that the author, Maddox, is overanalyzing the act of taking a selfie by writing an twenty four paged academic essay on the subject. She did however bring up a few interesting ideas to think about. One of those is that the current generation takes a ton of selfies, and that selfies themselves are narcissistic, and so in turn the current generation is mostly narcissistic. I disagree that our generation is narcissistic for taking selfies. I do not think our generation is any more or less narcissistic than previous ones. Ours is the first generation that has the technology to take a selfie, so I think it hard to compare the levels of narcissism across generations via how many selfies they take because the technology needed to take a selfie was not invented until the past decade. I also mostly disagree that selfies themselves are narcissistic. To me a selfie can tell a story or can mark a spot on someone's timeline or create a memory that a person can look back on. However it can be overdone, for example if someone sits in their room and takes a hundred pictures of themself just to look at and maybe choose one to post on instagram, I think at that point the photographs do not really say anything and could be considered narcissistic. Another idea brought up by Maddox in her essay was narcissism could be measured by the amount of selfies divided by the number of hours in which they were taken: N=S/h. I think that thought was funny (and made for a good meme) but I do not find it to be entirely true. Narcissism is a personality trait that requires deeper insight that selfies to be measured accurately. There could be some truth to it though, for example suppose person A takes one thousand pictures of themself throughout the day and then person B takes only three pictures of themself throughout the day, I do not think you would be going too far out onto a limb by guessing person A is more narcissistic than person B based off of their selfie statistics. Lastly the article says that selfies are not manly and are more for teenage girls. While im not saying guys should go out posting duck faced selfies on instagram, I will say that there is a time and place for a dude to take a selfie. Jessica Leigh Maddox looked pretty deeply into selfies in her essay and came out with some interesting thoughts.