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. (...)
Times Square selfies, even those involving a shish kebab device, are an improvement over the more prevalent custom of visitors’ asking passersby 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 analyze 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.
by James Wolcott, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Darrow/Arte & Imagini SRL/Corbis
