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The Selfie Culture and the Google Arts & Culture App
You’ve seen these pictures on Facebook and Instagram, right? Your friends have downloaded an app on their phone called “Google Arts & Culture” in order to match their faces with famous paintings. Without this feature, it’s likely a few hundred people would have downloaded the app; now millions likely have.
What else does the app showcase? Like almost all of its users: I have no idea. The entire allure is one feature: playing into our narcissism.
Over at the Federalist, my colleague Bre Payton reviews the findings of a new study on selfies:
Your friend who cannot seem to control the impulse to post a lot of selfies might actually have a psychological disorder according to a new study published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction…
Griffiths and Balakrishnan suggest “selfitis” should possibly be considered another category of “technological addiction.” The term “selfitis” and the three levels of addiction were first laid out in a 2014 spoof article, which they used as a jumping off point…
They found that students who exhibited chronic selfie behavior were less confident and admitted to posting selfies because they felt they had to compete with others to get attention online.
Few of the posts you’ve seen highlight how your friends look like anyone well-known or are doppelgangers for those in famous paintings. They’re all pretty obscure, and only somewhat accurate. But it doesn’t matter; the only thing that does is that this is an app that feeds into our narcissism. We are the creators of the selfie stick and Instagram and Snapchat filters and have not only perfected taking photos of ourselves but have developed ways to enhance them as well.
Did you really need that many photos of you making the duck face? Well, no, but hey now that you’ve added a tiara it’s a completely different shot than the one you took five minutes ago. And now you can have a photo of yourself making a duck face next to a picture from 1876 that looks nothing like you: Congratulations!
Published in Technology
Nope.
I did see this, and I wasn’t sure what it was in reference to. Now I know! Thanks!
Darn, I tried it out and it turned out that I resembled Von Perrichon’s engraving of Quasimodo.
Kent
For the sake of credibility, does that International Journal of “Mental Health” have any studies on Men Who think They’re Women and Women Who think They’re Men?
Kent! We’re twins!
This is me.
Or wait. Maybe this one…
What can I say. I’m moody.
“For the sake of credibility, does that International Journal of “Mental Health” have any studies on Men Who think They’re Women and Women Who think They’re Men?”
Now Jimmy, better go back to that farm in Georgia and grow some more peanuts. Such a study would challenge the political orthodoxy that there is absolutely no difference at all between men and women ( It is just some cultural construct imposed on us) and would raise difficult questions about current policy. Can’t have that, so I believe you will find no peer reviewed study on “Men Who think They’re Women and Women Who think They’re Men?”Besides, such “International Journals” feel they don’t need credibility with us commoners – we simply don’t matter to them.
Re: comment # 7
A Vermont farmer once said that Nude Descending the Stairs looked like an explosion in a shingle factory.
Re: post
But when you can see a similarity, the effect is a spooky feeling of connection to, and curiosity about, people living at the time, and in the place the painting was done; also a sudden interest in the artist and in seeing more of his work.
I see the resemblance to shingles. I find it amazing that Duchamps created the sense of motion down the stairs, like a wooden slinky.
I do wonder his rationale for the color choices, though those colors do support the shingle theory.
I also think I see bell bottom pants…
Sort of flesh-tones, maybe, especially given the title?
Haha. Duh. You got me thinking shingles.
Don’t blame me, it was @ansonia.
Delirious. I. Am.
I hastily don my hat — and then tip it to you, sir.
A variation of this should be a stock query to pretty much everyone who offers an unwanted opinion about someone else’s mental health.
What’s lamentable about the selfie-gen is their lack of interest in preserving this digital record of their youth. Backup, schmackup – it’s in the Cloud! Somewhere. I have fewer than 10 photographs of myself from 12 – 18; almost nothing from 18-30. It’s not that I want lots of pictures of myself; I’d love to see the context, the places, the people.
They have everything, a richly detailed visual biography, and have no idea how fragile it is. Or they discount the old pictures because they were 12 then, and now they’re all grown up. Like, 15. That’s not me. I am me, now! But you were you then, too.
When my daughter went off to summer camp I gave her a Flip camera, once those early cheap video-capture devices that were ground into powdered irrelevance by the iPhone. She doesn’t know it, but there are hours of her all-but-forgotten childhood stored away with all of her childhood friends, waiting to come back to life.
Their visual biography is too easy, that is part of why it is less valuable. It is more common than a post-it.
It is so devalued, they draw puppy faces and whiskers on it.
And they have so much trust in electricity…what’s a photo album? Look, here’s my cloud.
I just saw an old picture from 1990…someone was holding a Polaroid film. Talk about a pre-cursor to the selfie!
I’m pretty sure even one selfie is enough to earn one the title of narcissist.
Oh, I don’t know. I take selfies because I like to look at the person I’m talking to.
https://goo.gl/images/5pcbQM
I tried to fake them out, submitted this.
They sent back a picture of me. :(