The worst kinds of selfies
There are worse things than narcissistic selfies: I would now like to talk about another type of selfie: many controversial Tumblrs have surfaced online like “selfies at serious places”, “selfies at funerals”, “selfies with homeless people”. All of the Tumblr pages were created by Jason Feifer, who is the chief editor of the website Fast Company. He took selfies uploaded on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and collected them on Tumblr. He explained that he created Tumblrs in order to point out the excesses of selfies; it is not a glorification of those practices. In an interview, he also explained that he created the collections to ask why users post things like this to social media.
Selfies at serious place
The Tumblr http://selfiesatseriousplaces.tumblr.com/ collects selfies taken in places of memory like the Holocaust Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, and the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Here are some photos:
I don’t want to seem moralistic, but in my opinion, this is inappropriate behavior. A Memorial serves as a place of remembrance for those who lost their loved ones and a place for meditation for everyone as a reminder to “never forget”. It is not the time or the place to take a funny selfie, it is unethical. Maybe they haven’t fully thought through, but you have to think about photos you share on the Internet.
The third case is interesting, because we can see a blocked-out face and blurred-out Twitter handle and an apology. The guy who took the photo explained that after criticism of hundreds of thousands of people, he realized what he did was wrong and that he made himself look like an idiot.
Selfies with homeless people
The latest selfie trend is perhaps the most shameful so far: selfies with homeless people. People are posing with homeless people to make fun of them or to impress their friends.
These photos feature subjects posing with a smiling homeless person
But these photos are worst:
In these photos, the posing occurs without the consent of the individual in question. I think that the worst thing is that sleeping homeless people are not treated like human beings: they become the backdrops of the images. We can see their distress, their poverty but here, they are presented as architecture and people don’t hesitate to make fun of them, to laugh about this tragic situation. This trend might lead us to question humanity and there have been many reactions. A group of French students has decided to fight back: they have taken photos of homeless people and changed their signs with Photoshop with the hashtag #fuckyou at the end.
They wanted to give them the freedom of speech that they can’t have on the Internet and on the social networks in order to make people react to that shameful trend.
We can still find exceptions, for instance, thanks to a “homeless selfie”, a man was able to go back in Jamaica. Jenny Baker, an English woman met Michael, a homeless person and took a selfie with him. His dream was to go back to his hometown in Jamaica, but he couldn’t afford to finance his trip, so Jenny Baker promised him to raise funds for him. She created an operation on a crowdfunding website “Get Michael home” to raise 800 pounds. The operation was relayed on the social networks and traditional Media and in a few days, she reached her goal.
Selfies at funeral
“Selfies at funerals” is a morbid Tumblr, which shows a collection of teenagers showing off their black clothes using the hashtag #FuneralSelfie.
I know that we all have different ways to be in mourning, we are free, but the idea itself to take a picture at a funeral seems to me very weird and inappropriate.
First of all, I would never think of taking a picture during a funeral ceremony and above all, I won’t have photographs of a tragic day like this, it doesn’t make sense. If I want to take a selfie with a nice dress, it won’t be at a funeral. The selfie with the dead grandmother in the background shocks me, especially because the coffin is open unlike in France. It is like a mark of disrespect.
After-sex selfies
When you are surfing the Internet, you can find many other trends. The last one is the “After sex selfies”. A number of couples have been taking selfies right after they have had sex. They just want to share their post-coital bliss on social networks. I will spare you the photos, but they all look happy, relaxed. I guess that they want to show to the world how fulfilled they are in life and love, how good they look during sex. It is always the same need to control your own image, but I really can’t understand why couples want to share life’s most intimate and private moments. Making love is an intimate relationship between two people, the “After sex selfie” is a way of pushing digital boundaries to a new level. Social networks drive us to reveal our intimacy more and more. What people do in private doesn’t interest me, but nowadays there are no more boundaries and people are not always aware of the risks of sharing photos on the Internet. I will never think about uploading a photo of myself half-naked, because you can’t erase that photo and you don’t know who will look at it. I agree to say that posting selfies can be a nice thing to do, some people can express themselves through selfies but trends like “selfies at funerals, after sex selfies” are going slightly too far.