FAKE | REAL
OF SELVES AND SELFIES
Natalie Stypa
There is something I call the ‘Facebook effect’: the discrepancy between what someone looks like in their profile picture, and what they look like out in the real world. While the profile picture may show a very attractive face, chances are that meeting said face IRL[1] would be a rather, well, deflating experience. Does this mean profile pictures lie? No. It means that profile pictures are images of individuals’ just as they would like to be seen by the world. Facebook, Instagram and the like give us a platform for constructing a better version of us. Our virtual self is the one we want to be.
Facebook is a prominent example for the flood of images that surrounds us today. Images – as opposed to text – do not have to follow the rules of grammar and the demand for coherence[2] but appeal more directly to our emotions. Looking at an image demands less intellectual effort from us than reading a text. This might very well account for their attraction. We send images per mobile phone and use emoticons to communicate. We flick through countless pictures of friends and strangers on Instagram. We upload photos to Facebook. What we are after is more fundamental than merely expressing our self: it is with the help of these images that we constitute our self today. Taking a closer look at the kind of pictures posted on Facebook, we can encounter an array of wild party photos with heavy binge drinking, but when it comes to profile pictures, we tend to go for harmless. Obviously posed, maybe a selfie that’s characterised by a strange yet flattering angle from diagonally above. Or maybe a photo together with the current significant other, embracing bodies performing unity. Or maybe a picture of the more artistic kind, revealing only legs, hands, eyes, or lips. While our profile picture may be the one that we choose most carefully, it doesn’t stop here. We upload albumfuls of photographs of birthday parties or holidays, presenting our selves amidst a crowd of friends, on picturesque beaches, or posing with Nigerian children, Indian street vendors or Chinese old ladies. We show how attractive/interesting/exciting our selves and our lives are – how “socially desirable”[3]. Generating and affirming social desirability seems to be one of the main motivators in our use of social media. The other side of my control is the others’ power. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms allow us to participate in the lives of both friends and strangers – to become their judges, their jury who approves or dismisses. The participatory power of social media means we can possess the image in a completely new way. Before the rise of digital photography, Susan Sontag noted that photographing people “turns [them] into objects that can be symbolically possessed”[4] – we can touch them, carry them around. While photographs that exist only digitally may lack this haptic quality, the new way of owning the image goes way beyond the simple putting it into a frame. Thanks to Facebook’s interactive structure of tagging and commenting on images can we make them our own even if they are not. We can help to narrate their stories, boost their allure or destroy it, become part of their stories or impress our own narratives onto them – an act of both creativity and annexation. And there is another difference between digital and analogue: while the analogue image, printed on paper, fades just like the people and places fade, the digital image shared online is trying to preserve for good, trying to snatch a little piece of eternity. The Facebook timeline aims to do the same, to document a life from birth to death. Once, the portrait was an ostensible sign for the powerful and rich to showcase their importance, a way to sneak a bit of immortality into their mortal existence. Today, Facebook and the like allow everyone to create their own virtual immortality. In this sense, social media is highly democratic. Digital photography fosters this development. It is cheap; we can take hundreds of photos that are easily and instantly accessible. Smart phones make it possible to take photographs without a separate camera and to share them at once online, preserving the moment, documenting everything – what we eat, what we like, what party we go to. Roland Barthes writes: in its beginning, photography photographs what is notable. Later, this is reversed: notable is that what is photographed.[5] Our use of social media affirms this diagnosis. It is not only to construct our self that we use Facebook for. We use it to give importance to our lives. Every mundane situation has the potential to become significant. Every object we come across – beans on toast, puddles, rusty old bikes – is worth of being shared. What is generated here is an explosion of meaning, a glossified, perfectified version of everyday life. Instagram, the social media platform that is all about the image, is the most extreme example of this trend. A trend that goes as far as creating images to distribute on social media has become akin to creating a piece of art. Both share a common goal: to make objects of aesthetic qualities that construct subjectivity, preserve that which has been and fill it with meaning. A goal that in its deepest longing is a fight against death’s annihilating power. Today, art in its popularised shape is no longer limited to studios and galleries but happens everywhere, on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Twitter. In our contemporary culture of images and social media, we are all artists. [1] http://www.internetslang.com/IRL-meaning-definition.asp [2] Dadaist literature ducked under this demand by focusing on the sound of words. The way human language works as a medium to convey, express, and communicate, however, is based on syntax and semantics; these need to follow the rules of grammar and reason in order to function. [3] Noelle J. Hum et al., “A picture is worth a thousand words: A content analysis of Facebook profile photographs”, Computers in Human Behavior, 27 (2011), 1828-1833: 1828. [4] Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1978), 14. [5] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980; repr. London: Vintage, 2000), 34. |