Big Think - The Quest for the Self or Searching for Selfies?

Selfies are becoming more pervasive and ubiquitous, but what is driving their proliferation? It's not so easy to take the impulse to photograph and share oneself all over social media and narrow it down to a Freudian drive or two.

The Quest for the Self or Searching for Selfies?

by Derek Beres

June 24, 2014

The selfie continues its trajectory as a major form of communication in today’s social media universe. Named the Oxford Dictionary Online Word of the Year in 2013 the selfie has continued its meteoric rise ever since smartphones flipped the camera view. Yet what exactly is it communicating?

To fans of selfies they are something to post every day, a means of saying, ‘Hey, I’m here right now’ or ‘I’m doing this,’ which essentially translates as ‘I’m doing this,’ ‘this’ taking backseat to ‘I.’ Critics take a harsher view: the self-congratulating behavior is seen as obnoxious and egotistic.

Conjuring a neatly bundled set of psychological drives for selfies is not easy. As Psychology Today points out, there is a sense of exploration and identification embedded in the process: you are constantly editing, refining and understanding yourself through the photographic journey. Viewers’ mirror neurons are activated through your lens, creating either a sense of kinship or disgust (both of which are expressed on blogs like ‘The Rich Kids of Instagram.’)

One of the more popular trends that has been the subject of debate is the ‘yoga selfie,’ which received its own NY Times column last year. Bendable women (and a few men) have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for wearing little clothing while performing acrobatic positions. While the curvaceous lines are appreciated by oglers, some yogis see it in a different light: “If you don’t post a beautiful picture of your yoga, it didn’t happen.”

A particularly astute commenter mentioned the following after I posted criticism of the yoga selfie: looking at others in beautiful postures inspires me and gives me something to aspire to. Another mentioned that it had to do with checking form, that they could then see how their alignment looked after snapping the shot. I replied that if that was the case, why post the photo online? If it were all about ensuring that your lower back wasn’t overarching, why would the rest of the world need to know about it? I never heard back.

Science writer Jennifer Ouellette investigated the psychological (among other) mechanisms for creating one’s sense of self in her book, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. One day a friend noticed her keychain featured the astrological symbol for Taurus. While she has no deep affiliation with astrology, the friend questioned her beliefs in the stars.

She then wrote about how we position objects in our home or office. If someone points a photo outward so that visitors approaching their desk can see it, the picture serves as an ‘identity claim.’ The photo becomes a testament to who the person is and how they want to be represented. This was not the purpose of Ouellette’s keychain.

If the photo is turned inward, not intended for public display, it is a ‘feeling regulator.’ As it turned out, Ouellette’s close friend died at the heights of the AIDS epidemic in the late ‘80s. It was a keepsake from their time together. Feeling regulators are reminders, personal keepsakes. Public display is not the point, even if it’s a byproduct.

This would explain my commenter’s lack of response. If the photo truly served as personal inspiration or alignment tutorial, there would be no reason to post it publicly. It could be saved on the phone, posted on their desktop, or printed and displayed prominently where they practice. Selfie as feeling regulator.

That’s not what happens when selfies are thrown onto social media. They become identity claims: this is who I am. As the Psychology Today article points out, this process is fluid. Selfies shift as the human behind the camera changes, representing stages of development. Feeling regulation, however, will arise from the amount of comments and likes garnered. The pure satisfaction of posting a picture is ultimately a shallow endeavor—it no longer has any personal meaning and becomes all about public response.

In this sense, a 2013 study on happiness and meaning might offer some clues. While happiness is hard to define, researchers “found that happiness is associated with selfish ‘taking’ behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless ‘giving’ behavior.” It’s the difference between feeling personally satisfied and believing yourself to be dedicated to a cause larger than yourself.

Researchers found that people devoted purely to the pursuit of happiness exhibit the same gene expression patterns as humans struggling with chronic adversity. Their bodies activate a pro-inflammatory response as if a bacterial threat was about to strike. Their constant state of heightened inflammation leads to sickness. Those with a sense of meaning showed no such symptoms.

This makes sense as we often pursue happiness as a means of avoiding loneliness or other threats to our existence. This constant avoidance of darker emotions will be represented in our bodies, as such pursuers are constantly on edge. A lack of happiness implies its opposite, whereas those on a quest for meaning are more likely to accept and endure adversities.

It’s the difference, in yoga parlance, between needing external verification of one’s body rather than moving onto the deeper self-reflective stages where physical representation is nowhere near as important as the emotions and thoughts dealt with during meditation.

I would guess this applies to all selfie taking, although repetition is key. I know few people that haven’t posted a selfie on occasion. It’s a modern extension of the Polaroid: immediate gratification capturing a place in time. If you’re chasing that on a daily basis, however, it’s going to be challenging to know where you ever really are. The quest for public display has trumped the quietude of personal satisfaction.

Photo: Vladimir Gjorgiev/shutterstock.com

The Hard Data of Soft Emotions - All in the Mind

This week's podcast from All in the Mind (Australia) focused on how the internet and social media can be harnessed for everything from taking the emotional pulse of the nation to suicide prevention.

The hard data of soft emotions

Lynne Malcolm | Sunday 25 May 2014

• Listen now
• Download audio
• show transcript

 

Image: We are all connected by data and emotion (Chris Potter, Flickr CC BY)

With the rise of smart phones, GPS devices and social media we leave ‘digital breadcrumbs’ wherever we go. Many fear the power of big data and technology in the wrong hands but there's a growing movement to harness this wealth of information and use the power of the collective to better our society. We hear about what the new science of social physics tells us about human connection, how Twitter can check the emotional pulse of a nation, and how sharing personal stories through social media is an effective suicide prevention campaign.

Guests 

Ehon Chan: Social entrepreneur; Founder of Soften the Fck up
Professor Helen Christensen: Executive Director of the Black Dog Institute
Professor Alex Pentland: Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences; Director of Media Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Author

Publications

Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread, Lessons from a New Science by Alex Pentland

Further Information  

• Lifeline Support 131114
• Professor Alex Pentland
• Black Dog Institute
• We Feel twitter application
• Ehon Chan
• Soften the Fck up
• Happiness and its causes 2014

Susan Greenfield - Mind Change: New Technologies & The Future of the Brain

Cool video from Susan Greenfield - Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University, a neuroscientist, writer, and broadcaster - in which she talks about how new technologies are changing the ways our brains function. Greenfield is the author of The Private Life of the Brain (2001), ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century (2011), and many other books.

Mind Change & The Future of the Brain

Published on Mar 19, 2013

A vast range of new technologies are transforming our lives. Could it be that the human mind is also undergoing unprecedented changes? Susan Greenfield presents her provocative work on what she considers to be the crisis of our changing world.

Henrik Juel - Social Media and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

This intriguing article comes from Triple C (cognition, communication, co-operation), an open access journal for a global sustainable information society - Vol 10, No 2 (2012).

Social Media and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Henrik Juel 

Abstract 

My reflections in this paper concern revitalizing the critical potential of certain core concepts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1944) and bringing it to bear on the digital era in general and in particular on the phenomenon of modern social media. I find that the central philosophical critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment runs deeper than just a critique of contemporary (and perhaps now out-dated) media technique and cultural habits. It is a critical view of the process of civilization, economy and enlightenment as such, a critical view of the seemingly self-evident notion of pure reason, science and technology. What Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to capture and reflect is the very process of rationality backlashing into irrationality. We seem to have reached the era of mathematics and exact calculation, but this leaves us with no sense of control or meaningfulness, and in the face of crisis and systemic contradictions in the now global society we tend to regress and rely on older, more primitive forms of sense-making and coping: magic, mythology and metaphysics - even ritual behaviour. But these philosophical reflections, can they help us evaluate the role of today's social media?

Full Text: PDF

Here is a brief excerpt from the article:

For me as a young student of philosophy even that strange notion of dialectic began to make some sense, once I got well into the book and the worst of the Hegelian fog lifted. Thus while it was invigorating and enlightening, I also felt the dialectic of it and I found its account of history, civilization, and rationality to be both quite captivating and disturbing. And certainly it was a very, very critical philosophy. So what would happen if I tried to let the critical theory of that book meet with the phenomenon of modern social media?

On the face of it that did not seem likely to turn out as a peaceful encounter. It is well known that The Dialectic of Enlightenment features a very pessimistic and condemning section devoted to "The Culture Industry". Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the book during the Second World War while they were refugees in America (the first version appeared in 1944), and they seem to have been rather disappointed or even shocked in meeting there the pop-culture and mass media of the day. To them the magazines, the cinema, the radio shows, the emerging TV-shows, and even the jazz music, seemed to be in the poorest of taste; stupefying in its effect; a prolongation of the production rhythm of the industry; and certainly not enlightenment. Some have objected that on the other hand they were simply displaying their elitist taste, favouring high art, the avant-garde and the obscure notion of authenticity. But as I see it, simplifying this to be a question of taste or of different modes of reception within different consumer groups would be to seriously reduce the scope of the problems they were trying to address.

Talking Back: A New Theory of Individuality - Dr. Sarah Joan Moran at TEDxBern

Interesting TEDx talk. The introduction is in Swiss German (I think), but the talk itself is in English. Dr. Moran examines the way the media (print, visual, and so on), especially the perpetuation of stereotypes, shape our identities and inhibit social justice through their assertion of "power over."

The images, objects, and buildings crafted by human hands create ‘truth’, assert authority, and mediate our understandings of past and present, self and other, and even right and wrong.  Although most of the time we consider the stories we tell about ourselves in terms of words - words written in a book, typed on a screen, or spoken on the news - images and buildings play crucial roles in shaping our worldviews and, often, in both perpetuating and challenging inequality within dominant power structures. 

Talking Back: A New Theory of Individuality - Dr. Sarah Joan Moran

TEDxBern - Interactive news media is changing the global conversation. During this talk, Dr. Sarah Joan Moran (personal site) presents the potential of these platforms for breaking down stereotypes and fostering a sense of global social justice.

Dr. Moran is a historian of early modern visual culture at the University of Bern's Institute for Art History, She researches how power structures have worked to create and perpetuate inequality, and of the roles played by visual and textual communication within those beliefs and structures.

Living Consciously in a Connected World: Creating a Global Conversation About Being Connected

These two videos comes from UCtelevision, the YouTube channel for the University of California school system. Specifically, this lecture was given at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health by Tiffany Shlain and Mark Shulman on the topic of balancing our online lives with the world of meat-space.

My only clue on how to order these is the show ID number, so I hope they are in the correct sequence.

Part One:

Explore how to balance engagement with new/social media tools with an already-busy life by understanding the potential strategies for minimizing the stress that comes with managing multiple new media tools. Also, learn more about organizational culture and explore how your organization can honor a balanced use of technology. Series: "UC Berkeley Center for Health Leadership " [10/2011] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 21103]

Part Two:

Today, there is so much technology in every part of our lives, Explore how to say yes to a connected world and to an inner life. Series: "UC Berkeley Center for Health Leadership " [10/2011] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 22560]

RSA - Professor Sherry Turkle: Alone Together

MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle presents the results of a fifteen year exploration of the colossal impact technology has had on our lives and communities.

From the New York Times review of her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

As Sherry Turkle notes in her perceptive new book, “Alone Together,” these are examples of the ways technology is changing how people relate to one another and construct their own inner lives. She is concerned here not with the political uses of the Internet — as manifested in the current democratic uprisings in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East — but with its psychological side effects.

In two earlier books, Ms. Turkle — a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a clinical psychologist — put considerable emphasis on the plethora of opportunities for exploring identity that computers and networking offer people. In these pages, she takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies — including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots — have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings.

Ms. Turkle’s thesis here — some of which will sound overly familiar, but some of which turns out to be savvy and insightful — is that even as more and more people are projecting human qualities onto robots (i.e., digital toys like the Furby and computerized companions like the Paro, designed to provide entertainment and comfort to the elderly), we have come to expect less and less from human encounters as mediated by the Net.

Scroll down for the video of her talk, as well as the full audio download.

Download the video (mp4)

Watch Sherry Turkle on our YouTube Channel

Watch Sherry Turkle on our Vimeo Channel



Alone Together

1st Jun 2011

Listen to audio

Please right-click link and choose "Save Link As..." to download audio file onto your computer.

RSA Keynote

Facebook. Twitter. Second Life. "Smart" phones. Robot pets. Robot lovers.

Thirty years ago we asked what we would use computers for. Now the question is what we don't use them for. Now, through technology, we create, navigate and carry out our emotional lives. We shape our buildings, Winston Churchill argued, then they shape us. The same is true of our digital technologies. Technology has become the architect of our intimacies.

Online, we face a moment of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we conduct "risk free" affairs on Second Life and confuse the scattershot postings on a Facebook wall with authentic communication. And now, we are promised "sociable robots" that will marry companionship with convenience. Technology promises to let us do anything from anywhere with anyone. But it also drains us as we try to do everything everywhere.

We begin to feel overwhelmed and depleted by the lives technology makes possible. We may be free to work from anywhere, but we are also prone to being lonely everywhere. In a surprising twist, relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.

MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle has spent fifteen-years exploring our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, she visits the RSA to describe new, unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.

Chair: Aleks Krotoski, academic, journalist and host of the Guardian's Tech Weekly.

Tags: Alone Together, We Expect More From Technology, Less From Each Other, Sherry Turkle, RSA, Psychology, brain, technology, social interaction, social media, MIT, internet, isolation, interconnected, relationships, loneliness

ABC Radio - The McLuhan Project

As in Marshall McLuhan - the godfather of our media-saturated world. He saw it coming way before we became immersed in it. The Australian Broadcast Company has set up a site in his honor, a great collection of resources about him and his life.

Below are some cool parts of the site - and there's much more.

Welcome to the McLuhan Project

This July 21 marks the 100th birthday of the late Marshall McLuhan, Canadian thinker and media visionary who defined the mass media age of television and predicted much of the information revolution that followed.

He coined the phrase 'the global village', declared that 'the medium is the message', and he described what we now realise is the internet, 30 years before it existed.

Yet, McLuhan also warned of an 'age of anxiety' and the loss of privacy in the age of electronic media.

Now, at a time when our work, social and family lives are governed by media and interconnectivity, what can we learn from examining McLuhan's message? And where are we heading in the digital era?

The McLuhan Project is a major series of broadcasts on ABC Radio National and on ABC Digital Radio during the week of this significant centenary.

Beginning on 16 July on ABC Radio National and on the weekend of July 23 and 24 on ABC Digital Radio.

Video from the ABC Archives

Click on the image to view the video

In June 1977 Marshall McLuhan visited Australia and was a guest on Monday Conference, a live ABC television show hosted by the unflappable Robert Moore. The ABC has recently unearthed this footage, which remained in the archives for 34 years. As you’ll see, many of the ideas debated are just as relevant and contentious today.

Watch the whole interview and other exclusive footage

McKenzie Wark, ABC Radio National McLuhan thinker-in-residence

Associate Professor Ken Wark is an Australian-born culture and media academic now with the New School in New York.

McLuhan caused a sensation in the 60s with his provocative aphorisms on media and spawned a whole school of thought on the study of media forms. 'The medium is the message' as he famously put it.

While McLuhan himself has been consigned to the box marked 'those crazy 60s people', the questions he probed remain with us. How do media come together into a seamless environment? How does immersion in this environment affect the ways we perceive, think and feel? How does a given media form (radio, for example) shape the kind of social life we can lead? Our political institutions? Our relation to the past?

McLuhan's birthday is a great opportunity to think about these questions from a contemporary perspective, but also to revisit McLuhan himself. He turns out to be not quite the crazy 60s guy he remains in popular imagination. He turns out to be a whole lot more interesting.

ABC Pool Project

Proto media prophet, the late Marshall McLuhan, has been described as an 'alien entity hovering over planet Earth filing mission reports back to his own galaxy', and ABC Pool wants you to pick up his signals and amplify them through today's networks.

We invite you to share YOUR ideas that argue with, extend, prove, update, refresh, or debunk McLuhan’s thinking. Check out the links below for some great insights into McLuhan and his predictions (including his biggest prognostication of all -the internet.)

Add a comment of no more than 140-characters here in the comments, and we'll send the best into the Twittersphere via the Faux McLuhan Twitter account. Don't forget -it has to be 140 characters or less for Faux McLuhan to tweet it. Real McLuhan was a master of the pithy, provocative, seemingly simple and sensational statement so let's give this Faux McLuhan some outrageous ideas that the old guy would be proud of. He also thought that comedy one liners were a new form of humour resulting from the loss of attention span caused by media, so feel free to have fun with this.

Remember, These Days YOU are the Message- and we want you to Tweet Like McLuhan! (Now what's this Twittermajig thingie again?)

If 140 characters doesn't do it for you, upload your thoughts and responses to McLuhan's ideas as text, audio, video or images right here to this project.

You might want to re-purpose this rare Marshall McLuhan archive video we’ve snagged from the ABC vault! (It's pixelated here, proving once again that the 'Media is the Message', but you can download the full quality version.)

Whatever way that you want to contribute to this project, let's get Neuroconnected! Send your contributions down the pipes because we're cooking up some great ways to get your messages heard on ABC Radio during the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of McLuhan's birth. That's on ABC Radio’s special week of programming beginning July 16.

To start things off, we’ve shared this rare ABC archival video of an interview with Marshall McLuhan when he was in Australia during the 1970s.

If you want to find out a bit more about McLuhan, check out this website with a huge collection of videos of the man himself!

And we invite you to Tweet Like McLuhan by adding a 140 character length message here in the comments, and we'll make sure the best get published by Faux McLuhan on Twitter.

Tags: culture, society, media, social media, global village, Marshall McLuhan, media visionary, mass media, age of television, information revolution, ABC, Radio National, The McLuhan Project, age of anxiety, loss of privacy, medium is the message

Authors@Google: Sherry Turkle - "Alone Together"

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has been making the rounds speaking about her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other - here she is speaking at Google's Authors@Google series.

Authors@Google: Sherry Turkle - "Alone Together"

Consider Facebook—it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.

In "Alone Together", MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of today's self-described prophets of the future, it will be the next
generation who will chart the path between isolation and connectivity.

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She is frequently interviewed in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, on NBC News, and more. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Tags: Authors@Google, Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, technology, Psychology, social media, community, Facebook, social networking, internet, connection, interconnection, connectivity, isolation

Michah Allen - Zombies or Cyborgs: Is Facebook Eating Your Brain?

I found this at Intrepid Insights, who got it from Michah Allen's blog, Neuroconscience - she's a PhD student and this seems to have been the slide collection for what must have been a very cool presentation.

It's a less doom and gloom look at the impact of social media on our brains, using the concept of neurocognitive plasticity.

Zombies or Cyborgs: Is Facebook Eating Your Brain?

View more presentations from Micah Allen

Tags: Michah Allen, Zombies, Cyborgs, Is Facebook Eating Your Brain?, Neuroconscience, Slide Share, neurocognitive plasticity, brain plasticity, adult cortex, Psychology, brain, social media, neuroscience

MIT World - Participatory Culture: The Culture of Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society

Interesting conversation.

Participatory Culture: The Culture of Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society

Moderator: Henry Jenkins

Mitchel Resnick SM '88, PhD '92
Karen Schrier
Erin Reilly
Pilar Lacasa
Sangita Shresthova

April 23, 2010
Running Time: 1:19:35

About the Lecture

Even back in the early days of Comparative Media Studies (CMS), when Henry Jenkins and colleagues met in the basement of the Media Lab, there was much discussion of how new media might shape learning and spur novel forms of expression and community engagement. Over the years, as Jenkins and these panelists attest, CMS, with its extended family of collaborators and visiting scholars, has both refined and broadened its study of the impact of new technologies on education, culture and politics.

Mitchel Resnick of the Media Lab has frequently made common cause with partners at CMS, finding them “kindred spirits” in “thinking about technologies as ways of empowering people.” Resnick develops tech tools to unleash creative expression in children, and he argues for the central role of play in learning experiences. Exploration and experimentation, “the testing of boundaries,” should be integrated into school curricula, he believes, so children can “figure out what questions they want to ask.” Resnick praises CMS for taking ideas from the media world, like remixing and online sharing, to help people “rethink ideas about learning.”

Some CMS graduates are designing pathbreaking educational material for schools and other educational venues. Karen Schrier developed an interactive game around the Boston Massacre intended to create a “paradigm shift in teaching history.” The game assigns each player a unique perspective from which to interpret events of the time. The idea, she says, is to reconstruct history. Ultimately, Schrier hopes “new literacies” such as critical and ethical thinking, and reinterpretation, will be incorporated into school coursework.

In Spain, Pilar Lacasa applies the insights she has distilled from research at CMS to projects with software and game companies, hoping to transform her nation’s schools. At MIT, she learned the value of playing games, and using them in education to create learners who truly participate. She views electronic games as important tools for teachers, and she celebrates the rise of YouTube for its contribution to media production and participatory culture in young people.

“Teachers need to realize they are hunters and gatherers,” says Erin Reilly, a former CMS lecturer and current new media literacy researcher. Like media makers, teachers cook up lesson plans with peers, “coopting from others, and adapting for their own discipline and learning objectives.” She is working with teachers in large school systems on strategy guides, derived from collaborative brainstorming sessions. She envisions teachers from different communities using technology to share and build on each other’s stories and experiences, “pooling knowledge toward a common goal.

As a child of two cultures, CMS offered “a place where there were no borders” to Sangita Shresthova. A dancer-researcher, Shresthova realized at MIT that stories can be told across several media and that communities can come together and even ease mutual suspicions during live performances -- such as a Bollywood dance event she staged in Prague with remixed film and song. Spectators can become participants, she learned, and creating communities, whether through events like these, or through online fan websites, allows people to think differently and “take action on other issues.”

A growing emphasis at CMS, says Henry Jenkins has been the connection between participatory experiences, education and civic engagement. He notes that technology and new media do not bring about participatory culture so much as support deeply engrained participatory practices and enable new forms of engagement. “The urge to participate is greater than that,” he concludes.

More on the speakers.

Tags: MIT World, Participatory Culture, Culture of Democracy, Education, Hypermediated Society, culture, technology, social media, P2P, Henry Jenkins, Mitchel Resnick, Karen Schrier, Erin Reilly, Pilar Lacasa, Sangita Shresthova, Comparative Media Studies, Media Lab, new literacies