Vanity Fair Magazine - Why the Selfie Is Here to Stay lyrics

Selfies: such a cute niblet of a word, and yet I curse the day it was coined—it's like a decal that won't come unpeeled. Taking a picture of yourself with outstretched arm seems so innocent and innocuous, but what a pushy, wall-tiling tableau it has become—a plague of “duckfaces” and gang signs and James Franco (the Prince of Pose) staredowns. In my precarious faith in humankind's evolution, I had conned myself into hoping, wishing, yearning that taking and sharing selfies would be a viral phase in the Facebook millennium, burning itself out like so many fads before, or at least receding into a manageable niche in the Internet arcade after reaching its saturation point. When Ellen DeGeneres snapped the all-star group selfie during the live broadcast of the 2014 Academy Awards, a say-cheese image that was re-tweeted more than two million times, it seemed as if that might be the peak of the selfie craze—what could top it? Once something becomes that commercialized and institutionalized, it's usually over, but nothing is truly over now—the traditional cycles of out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new have been repealed, flattened into a continuous present. Nothing can undo the crabgra** profusion of the selfie, not even its capacity as an instrument of auto-ruination. It has proved itself again and again to be a tool of the Devil in the wrong, dumb hands, as then congressman Anthony Weiner learned when he shared a selfie of his groin district, driving a stake through a once promising, power-hungry political career. A serial bank robber in Michigan was apprehended after posting a Facebook selfie featuring the gun presumably used in the holdups. A woman in Illinois was arrested after she modeled for a selfie wearing the outfit she had just nicked from a boutique. A pair of meth heads were busted for “abandonment of a corpse” after they partook of a selfie with a pal who had allegedly overdosed on Dilaudid, then uploaded the incriminating evidence to Facebook. Tweakers have never been known for lucid behavior, but one expects more propriety from professional men and women in white coats, which is why it was a shock-wave scandale when Joan Rivers's personal ear-nose-and-throat doctor, Gwen Korovin, was accused of taking a selfie while Rivers was conked out on anesthesia. Korovin emphatically denies taking a sneaky self-peeky, and had the procedure been smooth sailing this story would have fluttered about as a one-day wonder, a momentary sideshow. But Rivers didn't survive, she went down for the count, and Korovin's name, fairly or not, was dragged through the immeasurable mire of the Internet. Celebrities are especially ripe for selfie exploitation because a far richer premium is attached to their faces and birthday suits. In what became known as “The Fappening,” due to the masturbatory frenzy it churned among America's male army of indolent horndogs, hackers using pa**words and other account information hit the jackpot for hundreds of alleged bold-faced selfies and nudies of stars such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kaley Cuoco, causing a furor. Just as the first froth of controversy and prurience had waned, a second leakage, in late September, replenished the voyeur lobes with alleged shots of Vanessa Hudgens, Leelee Sobieski, Aubrey Plaza, and Kim Kardashian. After Emma Watson made a stirring speech at the United Nations about feminism and gender equality, an anonymous troll announced he would be leaking nude photos of Watson and posted a countdown clock on a Web page. While the nude or indiscreet selfie is often used against feminists as a backlash “gotcha,” the selfie can also be a medium of empowerment and personal testimony, an evidentiary statement. A Tennessee woman who claims to have been physically beaten by her boyfriend posted a selfie of her blood-red eye and purple-bruised face under the caption “Does this look like LOVE TO ANYONE OF YOU?” The public exposure of selfies ought to be the result of an individual decision, not a search-engine pantie raid. As Lena Dunham tweeted after the initial dam burst of nude celebrity selfies, “The way in which you share your body must be a CHOICE.” In her recently published collection, Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham credits her artist mother with inventing the selfie. “Sure, there were self-portraits before her, but she perfected the art of the vulnerable candid with an unclear purpose.” Indeed, the selfie is as old as photography, a**isted by the strategic use of mirrors and, as in the case of Dunham's mother, the handy timer on the camera body which enabled the photographer to compose the shot, then swan into the frame before the iris opened. The Polaroid instant camera was also a major selfie provider. But none of these technologies “scaled”—it was the marriage of digital photography and the Internet that provided the delivery system for potential ma** proliferation. As Allure magazine noted in its amusing history of selfies, the addition of a front-facing camera to the iPhone 4, in 2010, was the ignition starter of the selfie explosion. It turned the phone into a hand mirror where millions could behold themselves and share “the gift of me.” Now no cell phone with any self-respect dares venture out in public without rear- and front-facing lenses, healthy pixel counts, an entourage of imaging apps, and instant transferability to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Smartphones have carved such a huge chunk out of the traditional camera market that major brands have brought out their own selfie-friendly models, among them the Samsung NX mini and the Olympus PEN E-PL7, which utilize flippable touch screens. But even the most ingenious body design is limited by the length of one's arm, so some enterprising entrepreneur has marketed an extendable self-portrait monopod with an adjustable ball-head holder that enables the shutterbug to tilt the camera aloft and at a greater distance, making self-included group shots easier. I've seen these selfies-on-a-stick in Times Square, where tourists use them to capture keepsake moments with escaped convicts, registered s** offenders, and surly panhandlers disguised as lovable Sesame Street and superhero characters whose costumes could do with a good wash. Times Square selfies, even those involving a shish kebab device, are an improvement over the more prevalent custom of visitors' asking pa**ersby such as myself, “Would you mind taking a picture of us?,” and offering me their camera. Selfies at least spare the rest of us on our vital rounds. But it is difficult to find any upside to the indulgence of selfies in public places intended as sites of remembrance and contemplation. There is a minor epidemic of visitors taking grinning selfies at the 9/11 Memorial pools. And it isn't just students on school trips for whom social media is the only context they have; it's also adults who treat the 9/11 Memorial as if it were just another sightseeing spot, holding their camera aloft and taking a selfie, indifferent or oblivious to the names of the dead victims of the 1993 and 2001 attacks inscribed on the bronze panels against which some of them are leaning. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, D.C., before the advent of the selfie: the reflective walls etched with the names didn't serve as a backdrop for a personal photo op. Today no spot is safe from selfie antics. Outrage exploded over a teenage girl posting a grinning selfie in front of Auschwitz, outrage that was compounded when she reacted to the ruckus by chirping in response, “I'm famous yall.” There are those who an*lyze and rationalize the taking of selfies at former concentration camps or some stretch of hallowed ground as being a more complex and dialectical phenomenon than idle, bovine narcissism—as being an exercise in transactional mediation between personal identity and historical legacy, “placing” oneself within a storied iconography. Sounds like heavy hooey to me, if only because the taking of selfies seems to be more of a self-perpetuating process whose true purpose is the production of other selfies—self-documentation for its own sake, a form of primping that accumulates into a mosaic that may become fascinating in retrospect or as boring as home movies. Turning yourself into a Flat Stanley in front of a landmark doesn't seem like much of a quest route into a deeper interiority, just as the museum-goers who take selfies in front of famous paintings and sculptures are unlikely to be deepening their aesthetic appreciation. Consider the dope who, intending to nab an action selfie, reportedly climbed onto the lap of a 19th-century sculpture in an Italian museum, a copy of a Greek original, only to smash the figure, snapping off one of its legs above the knee. As if weary-on-their-feet museum guards didn't have enough to deal with. Registering a sense of pushback in the cultural ether against social media's pervasive grip, its propensity to reduce life to a popularity contest where one's worth and status ride or fall on the fickle fluctuations of likes, followers, and Facebook friends, ABC premiered a sitcom in September titled, yes, Selfie, a Pygmalion update about a contemporary Eliza Doolittle (Karen Gillan, who resembles a junior-miss Christina Hendricks) who undergoes a makeover at the hands of a gruff dyspeptic (John Cho) to rid herself of the vain compulsions and mannerisms that have made her an online darling but a real-life cootie bug whom everyone mocks. Given the snooty advance reviews, I didn't expect to find Selfie as enjoyable as I did (it owes as much to Clueless as to My Fair Lady), but I also don't anticipate it will make the slightest dent in the selfie mania. Social media is an extension of our jittery nervous systems, and the fact that its feedback loop only makes so many of its users jitterier and more dependent feeds the addiction. Once you're hooked, it's so hard to opt out, especially when nearly everyone you know keeps clicking madly away.