This is what we look like, smiling like idiots.
The world's social media is now just a seflie festival. Just one massive orgy of forced smiles, superficialness and alarming levels of falsehood. Why do we take selfies? I think deep down many know why, but are not willing to admit it. In today's society taking selfies and posting them are seen as being sociable, as having an active social life. "Look at me, I am at the bar." "Look at me, I am at the restaurant". it's has turned into a massive competition for likes, recognition, attention. It's pathetic that so many people have become like this. It has made us as a race ridiculously superficial and shallow. We take these false images, images which are not at all a true representation of our true selves, and post it for the world to see because we want others to like us, to love us. Through social media we have begun to crave attention and as a result we have become more insecure as a species. We compare our lives with those around us, we see their selfies and what they are doing and we become upset and disheartened at what our friends are doing with our lives and so we feel the need to then show that we are doing something sociable which leads to these endless circles of becoming more depressed with our lives. It doesn't help that we then cheapen our social activities by stopping midway for selfies...More on that later.
Structural damage from being too thin
Now in China, we can see how the perfect selfie can be taken. There exist websites that tell you how to take selfies, How to make your body look thinner by turning your hips, how to make your face look thinner by holding your hands next to them. Posing with fingers, clothes to wear, catching the right light etc...
click here for example <------Exhibit A
What everyone fails to mention is how this is yet another example of how bad body image is spread. Girls refusing to eat food because they look ugly in their selfies and they want to look like some stupid model they see on the tv (Seriously, who the hell is angelababy and does anyone actually care? Only people who don't have a life of their own to live it seems.) We spread and pass on these selfies, without ever thinking of the consequences. Little girls think that they need to grow up looking like these girls. They damage their own bodies to achieve the ideal of beauty in this society, an idea reinforced by all these people taking selfies. So next time you decide to take a selfie....think of what you are doing.
The destruction of art...and photography as an art form.
Victorians never smiled in photographs...
Another point is an article I read recently about old victorian pictures and why they do not smile yet are simply far more evocative as images. Nowadays we just smile like idiots trying to give everyone the impression that we are having a whale of a time all the time when we all know this is simply not true. In the future people will look back at this point in time and wonder why we are all smiling like idiots....all the time.
I want to post an extract from the article I read on victorians not smiling and their comparison to us...
"....Why are old photographs so much more moving than modern ones?
For the existential grandeur of traditional portraiture, the gravitas of Rembrandt, still survives in Victorian photography. Today, we take so many smiling snaps the idea of anyone finding true depth and poetry in most of them is absurd. Photos are about being social. We want to communicate ourselves as happy social people. So we smile, laugh and cavort in endless and endlessly shared selfies.
A grinning selfie is the opposite of a serious portrait. It’s just a momentary performance of happiness. It has zero profundity and therefore zero artistic value. As a human document it is disturbingly throwaway. (In fact, not even solid enough to throw away – just press delete).
How beautiful and haunting old photographs are in comparison with our silly selfies. Those unsmiling people probably had as much fun as we do, if not more. But they felt no hysterical need to prove it with pictures. Instead, when they posed for a photograph, they thought about time, death and memory. The presence of those grave realities in old photographs makes them worth far more than our inanely happy Instagram snaps. Perhaps we should stop smiling sometimes, too."
by Jonathon Jones. Click name for article.
They ruin many of the activities we are doing
Look how much fun we are clearly not having...
My final pet peeve about selfies is how in so many social activities, the fun has to be stopped to show everyone else that we are having fun. It feels so unnatural, so forced that, for me, it ruins my night. We are literally mid- conversation, drinking, eating having fun and suddenly I have to stop because some insecure moron wants to show his friends how much fun we are having? Well thank you for ruining my evening sir. Thank you for creating this unnatural block on our atmosphere simply because you do not know how to act in social situations.
So what do you think? Are selfies ruining the world?
Please feel free to join in the debate and leave comments below. If you wish to share this article please quote my name.
请你们在下面写你们的想法。文明发表言论，转发注明出处
I searched funny selfies and that came up in baidu...
The newstory behind that picture is hilarious. Animal rights groups are saying the monkey, because he took the picture himself, should get all the money from the picture and not the human photographer. One of the strangest stories I have read recently
We are not on friendly terms?
Don't misunderstand, I am merely debating my point with you, I am just saying that selfie's are not harmless. I am not being unfriendly to you at all, there is a difference between a debate and an argument
People can debate civilly, we do not need to fall out and argue. By explaining our points of view we come to a closer mutual understanding
But aren't the negative effects n our health worth considering? Look at my second point, the reiterate the idea of beauty. Then you have young people starving themselves as they don't look as pretty as the person in that selfie they seen. Selfie phones come with programs which make you thinner, or whiter...and people assume this is what beauty is.
I would be interested to know why a selfie taker does take so many selfies
"generally, the majority of good-looking people would like to take selfies"
Exactly my point....define good looking. Read point 2
well i like taking selfes, i dont think i ruined the world. technically, the advantages of talking selfes: 1, record the moment what you did at the certain time because i have bad momery. today i reset my password of bank, but after few minutes, i have already forgot it then i reset it again lead to i have to set all of my passwords are the same! 2, generally, the majority of good-looking people would like to take selfes
dont punch me!
3, when the dark is coming and lying on the bed, i will check my history of wechat moments, its really happy to look back . hahahha sometimes i deleted some pictures, maybe some of my friends will abuse me and hide my moments
Maxwell Smart was the lead character in the long running US series "Get Smart". It was a satirical spoof on spies and Cold War espionage between USA and the pack of fiendish, heathen, nasty enemies out to pollute the precious body fluids of the world's most powerful nation ( cf. "Doctor Strangelove" ). Partly inspired / created by Mel Brooks, I use to catch some episodes of the show many years ago on very late night tv in Beijing where I'm fairly sure the satirical angle wasn't understood and it was simply viewed as a criticism of USA. The cartoon series "Roger Ramjet" was ilk of similar humour.
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