JOIN USRecently, a member of the Rajasthan State Commission of Women, Somya Gurjar, lost her job for taking a selfie with a rape victim. Clearly, it was an insensitive act on her part to publicise the photograph.
Selfies suggest an obsession with oneself and to that extent bring out the selfish side of human beings. Evidently, selfie is an image; one which an individual wants to project to the world.
Today, selfies have become part of the lifestyle of young digital natives. Even some older digital immigrants born decades before the digital age like to take selfies and post them on social media. The selfie has become a social phenomenon because of the digital medium coupled with deep internet penetration which influences users across all age groups and sections of society.
Only after the ubiquitous mobile phone was integrated with a camera, was the concept of selfie born. While the selfie is in its nascent stage, it has started to impact our lives and has definitely pushed the boundaries of normal social behaviour. Several governments and regulatory bodies across the world have started taking measures to regulate taking selfies. India may also have to follow suit.
In early 2015, Russia launch-ed a ‘Safe Selfie’ campaign to warn avid mobile phone snappers about the dangers of posting a selfie with a lion. This was after a lion killed a man in the Delhi zoo in September 2014, which went viral. The man atte-mpted to take a selfie with a lion and by an error of judgement fell into the cage. Envisaging dangers of clicking selfies, in September 2015, some areas at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad were declared “No Selfie Zones”.
Though associated with the digital age, the selfie is an old phenomenon, of expression of self through paintings like self-portraits. Legendary artists like Van Gogh also sketched self-portraits and even kings of yore had their portraits displayed in palaces. Royalty would also portray themselves through poetry or writings for their subjects.
All these are examples of self-indulgence or exhibitionistic tendencies. Selfies are also perceived as a narcissistic indulge-nce. Apart from homo sapiens, in 2011, even a Macaque monkey in Indonesia, took a grinning ‘selfie’. The monkey used photographer David Slater’s camera which made news and later became a copyright issue.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as, “a photograph that one has taken of oneself”. In 2012, Time magazine considered selfie as one of the top 10 buzzwords of that year. In 2013, selfie was the international word of the year. In 2014, Indians danced to the Bollywood number ‘selfie le le re’.
High profile dignitaries who indulged in taking selfies and popularised the phenomenon include: Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Queen Elisabeth II; President Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian, who released a compendium of selfies taken from 2006-2014. According to Google Trends, the selfie fever has risen eightfold in 2014 over 2013. It has become a craze to make world records in selfies.
Threatening life
Selfies have threatened human life. In July 2015, two men in the Russian Ural Mountains were killed after they posed in the act of pulling the pin of a hand grenade. In September 2015, a Japanese tourist fell down and died while taking a selfie at Taj Mahal. A young man, Abhishek Gupta, fell down from the Bhimgarh fort in Jammu, in January 2016, while trying to take a selfie on the edge of its ramparts.
In another case, insensitive people handed over a baby dolphin to one another, posing for selfies on a beach in Argentina this February. The dolphin, due to lack of water, died of oxygen starvation. In November 2015, posting a selfie with a prize ticket proved costly for Chantelli, an Australian woman. One of her Facebook friends used the barcode from the selfie and made away with $900 prize money.
The selfie has come to symbolise the modern day obsession that individuals have. The facilitator may have been the digital age, but the selfie itself is a modern manifestation of the human need to provide a self portrait which may reflect or gloss over the real world context. The advent of the pervasive technology has resulted in a constant need to share and reflect one’s present status.
Ideas of privacy and reservation have been substituted by the far more pressing need to constantly remind oneself and all others of what we want to feel like; we must be happy and show it to a camera. Even if we are not feeling what the selfie portrays, it is a constant reminder of nothing more than an image: an image of what one would like to be remembered as, but not necessarily the essence of who one is.
(The writer is Dean, Vivekananda School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, New Delhi)