At arm's length: What selfies say about our society

What do macaque monkey Naruto, NaMo and Kim Kardashian have in common? They're all part of the selfie brigade (Yes the monkey too — in fact, PETA has sued wildlife photographer David Slater to ensure Naruto gets the copyright for his selfie shot on a camera that Slater had set up in 2011. More on that later).

The penchant for the self-portrait has become so ubiquitous that there is hardly a verb left in the dictionary that has not been archived as a selfie. For selfie lovers, every event, however significant or ordinary, transforms into a backdrop for one. Wake up? Selfie. Eat? Selfie. At work? Selfie. On vacation? Selfie. Spotted a squirrel? Selfie. Drink? Selfie. Party? Selfie. Drive? Selfie. Got into an accident? Definitely a selfie. In hospital? Selfie. TLC from the nurse? Selfie. TLC from your pet? Selfie. Back home? Selfie. Not doing anything? Selfie.

A recent study by Google found that Americans who spend more than 11 hours a day on their phones click an average of 14 selfies per day. That's more than 400 photos in a month! No comparable data is available about the number of selfies shot by Indians. But for the snap-share-swoon generation, clicking selfies is as de riguer as sporting bell bottoms was for the 1970s hippie generation.

"I take a selfie if I like the backdrop of a place I am at or if I'm with someone or if my pet is around. I also take selfies when I don't have access to a mirror," says Reshma D'souza, who prefers the side profile selfie. "Taking a selfie is a very personal thing... it comes naturally to me."

D'souza estimates that she clicks about 500 selfies a month. That's an average of 16 a day. "I don't take that many every day," she protests, but one look at her photos and it is easy to tell that she derives much pleasure from photographing her self. "They are just multiple shots to see which ones turn out well. I edit the best one using different apps, such as picsart, and then upload them on Instagram, Whatsapp or on Facebook. I usually get a lot of comments," says D'souza.

Journalist Shubhankar Chakravorty, who changes his profile picture on various social media platforms once a week, says he took his first selfie five years ago at the age of 21 when he was trying out new clothes. "I take selfies for my own amusement and then share them on social media," says the Bangalore-based news agency reporter. "Reaction from others in the form of comments and likes feels good. But unlike a lot of others who delete photos that don't elicit reaction, I don't bother."

Manoj Sharma, additional professor of clinical psychology at Bangalore's National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), says that sharing moments from our lives online has taken precedence over sharing in the offline context. "We shared aspects of our lives with our peers earlier too. But we now seek opinion from them online," says Sharma, who also founded India's first internet de-addiction centre, Service for Healthy Use of Technology, or SHUT, clinic.

Neither new, nor narcissistic

Indeed, this is not a novel phenomenon. The 'selfie' is nothing but the self portrait rediscovering itself in contemporary times. The word was first used by an Australian youth who took a photo of his swollen lip after a drunken fall in 2002. The term was first hashtagged on Instagram, the single most popular platform for selfies, by Jennifer Lee, an American life coach from Oakland in January 2011.

Two years later, in 2013, Oxford Dictionaries determined it the International Word of the Year for the "phenomenal upward trend" in its use throughout that year. It defined 'selfie' as 'a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website' — making it distinct from the self portrait in its characteristic of being shared on a massive, public scale. Pointing out that the word was initially spelled with a -y but was later widely accepted with -ie because of Australia's affinity for 'ie'-suffixed words, Oxford Dictionaries' editorial director Judy Pearsall then noted: "... The use of the diminutive -ie suffix is notable, as it helps to turn an essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing."

The 'narcissistic enterprise' prism is one through which many view the selfie clicking phenomenon. "Selfies reflect consumerist narcissism," says poet, cultural theorist and curator Ranjit Hoskote. "They celebrate a sense of arrival and being there... One tracks one's own experience and archives it. Besides, technology allows us to amplify it."
Lev Manovich, who helmed the pioneering selfiecity.net project, a theoretic, artistic and quantitative study of 3,200 Instagram selfies from five cities in 2014, counters by saying that there has been no research that links selfies with "narcissism" in academic writing. The computer science professor at City University of New York (CUNY), who has been listed among the 50 most important people of 2014 and also among the 25 people shaping the future of design, attributes "such language" to attempts by journalists to catch readers' attention.

"The selfie is a typical product of the present day global culture," say Manovich and his research assistant, Selfiecity team member and art history candidate, Alise Tifentale. Drawing on photography historian Geoffrey Bacthen's "burning desire" concept (a human need and desire to make certain types of images that influence and inspire development of corresponding technologies), the duo state that the selfie "is a new sub-genre of vernacular photography, closely related to the availability and accessibility of smartphones and internet connection, but also part of the history of photography and history of self-portraiture." In this context, they point out, the selfie phenomenon raises questions about self-representation, self-fashioning and interpersonal communication through visual means.

No semblance of time, place

D'souza, of the 16-selfies-a-day-average, adds credence to this when she admits to changing her look for selfies she clicks for her profile image. "Either I change my hairstyle or eye makeup or wear different earrings," says the 28-year-old and a proud selfie stick owner. "Keep clicking until you get that perfect selfie. Explore with your looks and angles too," she offers heartily. But such is the enamour of the selfie that it is critical to understand the fine line that distinguishes it from being a harmless act to being a risky, even destructive enterprise.

Several fatalities and many more injuries have been reported from around the world by those attempting the modern day self portrait. Just last month, Japanese tourist Hideto Ueda, 66, died after a fall while taking a selfie at the Taj Mahal in Agra. In August, David González Lopez, 32, was gored to death by a bull when he attempted a selfie during the annual bull running festival in Spain's Villaseca de la Sagra.

The risk of loss and injury has prompted authorities at more than a dozen institutions and organisations to ban the selfie stick on their premises. The extension paraphernalia is now forbidden on 1,195 stations, including Osaka, on the West Japan Railway line, at Beijing's Forbidden City, at Disney theme parks across the world, at Rome's Colosseum, at Amsterdam's Van Gogh museum, at Wimbledon and at Manchester United's Old Trafford in the UK as well as at Brazil's carnivals and at soccer matches. Among the religious centres that say no to the selfie stick are the Sistine Chapel in Italy and the Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Closer home, district authorities went a step further by designating 'no-selfie zones' on the ghats of Nashik and Trimbakeshwar on certain days during the 2015 Kumbh Mela.

"We realised that taking selfies could be one of the most dangerous things that could happen at the Kumbh for its potential to snowball into a stampede," says Sandip Shinde, who along with Mahesh Gujarati, Sachin Pachokar and volunteers of innovation platform Kumbathon Ventures was instrumental in instituting the ban. "In the run up to the Kumbh, we saw people indulge in risky behaviour to take selfies... they would stand on the barricades and atop the Gandhi Jyot. In the context of a crowd of lakhs of people, such behaviour can be disastrous," says the 34-year-old. On August 29, September 13 and September 18, with a collective turnout of about 117 lakh devotees for the shahi snan, the ghats and a few other areas were designated no-selfie zones.

Unlike in Nashik, where the authorities sought to regulate human behaviour, there've been many instances that have resulted in cringe-worthy images. For instance, the thumbs-up or duck-face selfies clicked at former concentration camp sites, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, the 9/11 Memorial or the Chernobyl disaster site; funeral selfies too are deemed to be equally inappropriate. This was amply evident when US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and then Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt snapped a selfie on Thorning-Schmidt's phone during apartheid leader Nelson Mandela's memorial service in South Africa in December 2013. The media storm that ensued was not just over the 'world-leaders-having-a-normal-people' moment but about their gleeful smiles at a sombre event.

Stretching the limits

And if comprehending funeral selfies is not bizarre enough, there's the case of animal rights group PETA slugging it out with photographer Slater over the 2011 'monkey selfie'. The controversy erupted after Naruto's selfies went viral. Wikimedia then posted the monkey's images on their website, distributing them for free, contending that non-human animals can't hold copyright. Slater, obviously, viewed this as a copyright violation, but in December 2014, the US Copyright Office stated that works created by a non-human are not subject to US copyright. Adding to his woes, PETA has now filed a lawsuit against Slater, saying Naruto should own the copyright to her selfies, and that all proceeds from the images be spent on macaque conservation.

In the end...

Whether it is a monkey or the Danish prime minister, it is undeniable that a self-image shared on a social platform is as good a confidence-shot as any. NIMHANS' Sharma feels that selfies are beneficial for introverts and those with anxiety issues. "In a way, selfies help them gain social acceptance. Online platforms, where they post their images, help such people open up and have interactions that they would otherwise shy away from participating in, in the real world," he says but quickly warns that while "online validation is rewarding, it should not be at the cost of the offline context".

For Manovich, Tifentale and the rest of their team, selfies and other social media images, are pools of data that can unlock the answers to an array of questions about ourselves and our environment. For one of the components of their ongoing research project — Do Happy People Take Happy Images? Measuring Happiness of Cities — the team will study selfies shared on social media in order to "develop new ways to understand the well-being of a society, and the what, when and where of a society's needs".
As vernacular and family photography, selfies have a history as long as the history of photography itself, they contend. "Over the course of this history, there have been numerous different sub-genres and types of images that become popular at a certain time and later are forgotten, pushed out by more up-to-date ones. We believe that the present-day selfies belong to this history, and it's a matter of future scholars to see how long- or short-lived this sub-genre will be."

Snapshot view
More photos are now taken every two minutes than the whole of humanity took in the 1800s.
93 million selfies are taken every day, according to a 2014 Informate Mobile Survey.
Selfie sticks are passe; the selfie brush and the selfie spoon are the latest 'it' accessories.
A selfie comes in many avatars: a helfie is a picture of one's hair, a belfie is a picture of one's butt, a drunken selfie is called a drelfie, a workout selfie is called a welfie and so on.
Kim Kardashian, the selfie queen, posted a nude selfie to shut up rumours that she was faking her second pregnancy