Selfies

This might be called the age of the selfie (What's a selfie? Oh, you know. It's when you take a picture of yourself and post it on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever social network is popular). Face it, it’s the age in which we live. With all this technology run amok, we are each given the opportunity to offer others a glimpse into our lives, no matter how boring or exciting they are. And they are mostly boring lives. We used to be able to just take the photos. But now, with Face book, Twitter, Instagram, Myspace etc. it makes it that much easier to share these photos instantly. That sometimes hard for the technology addicted among us to pass up.  It’s harmless. But, it’s a reminder of just stupid we can be when displaying our ‘selfies’.

I suppose a person in search of an ego boost thinks that a selfie is a way to get positive attention, a second in the limelight of a mostly dark world. But most selfies are just trivial annoyances that define the person as being one without substance. That's why the infamous Kim Kardashian is publishing a book of her selfies. Yep!! Nothing but her selfies. Is that selfie or selfish?  Before I throw up and think about that too much, here's a few selfie categories I find extremely annoying. You might have also seen and regretted wasting your time looking at them too, because in this age of mush we don't have an option to avoid what is fired at us.

* I'm at the gym, selfie
* I'm on my way to work selfie
* Here's my dig selfie
* My baby selfie. Isn't he cuter than any other baby?
* I just woke or am sleepy selfie
* Here's what I ate at the restaurant selfie.
* I am drunk or high on drugs selfie
* My naked selfie

See a pattern? They are all pictures about nothing anyone should be interesting in seeing. But the selfie photography is fascinated by the photos and themselves.  Selfies may be the biggest time waster of all.  I hope the person who is going to find the cure for cancer isn't a selfie nut too. We might miss the cure if he or she is.  Why is it that I think people who post selfies so much probably have much shallower relationships with the people they meet in the flesh, off the internet? Maybe they take their selfies and their every day routine too seriously.

professors asked 508 Facebook users with an average age of 24 to rank how close they feel to their friends, coworkers and relatives who also use Face book. They then compared those answers to how many selfies those people posted. Overwhelmingly, the more someone posted selfies, the lower they ranked on the intimacy scales of the participants. - See more at: http://dailylounge.com/the-daily/entry/science-confirms-that-selfies-are-the-worst#sthash.nSgZ5IjT.dpuf

In the last 12 months more photographs have been taken than in all the other days of photography history. No doubt a high percentage of those photos were selfies. In a sense, the selfie is the new autograph. Want a eclebrity autography today? You simply hold your phone and snap a picture of you and the celeb.  After all, in our age of technology gone wild no event is assumed to have happened unless there is a video image of it.

There's already enough untalented, fame-hungry wannabes around without us creating legions more merely because they're able to point a smart phone in the right direction. The selfie craze is way too much about nothing. It's strange that all this selfie business is changing how we interact (or in the case of selfies, don't interact) with each other, how we veiw each other and how we conduct our day to day social interactions.  Makes me long for the days before we had cameras.