Just when you thought the world news of 2015 had already proved the human race to be absolute trash, we appear to have reached a nadir with the arrival of BRAG Selfie, an app designed purely as an orgy of narcissism.
BRAG Selfie (that all caps branding is also not endearing), created by Brag Ventures Inc. (again, not helping) has been designed to allow selfie obsessives and not-so-humble braggers a 24/7 outlet.
App designers Amanda Nieto and Derek Witte say they have designed the app because we’re all terrified of being “that person”.
One might argue that the best response to “those people” – the over-sharers, the front-facing camera aficionados, the like addicts – wouldn’t be to create a whole app to encourage their behaviour, but rather to distribute free copies of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and organise support meetings in town halls where members would retell the cautionary tale of Ovid’s Narcissus.
However, the idea of consigning all of social media’s worst offending braggers to one space is tempting indeed.
A pointillist nightmare of thousands of selfies, and a cacophony of cries from video clips of newborn babies uploaded by proud mothers, the BRAG app should leave more mainstream social media cleaner and sparser, allowing the rest of us to post at acceptably spaced out interludes about the poor lighting situation in the BBC’s Wolf Hall.
Here are the type of people we’ll be glad to see the back of:
Selfie saturater
The “selfie” as a concept isn’t new; people have been staring at themselves and taking pics in reflective surfaces since for ever, and self-portraits came into existence in the early 15th century, way before photography was invented.
We’ve always been massive egotists. It’s just that, back in those days, nobody would have developed repetitive strain injury from scrolling past a million snaps of Rembrandt pulling duck-face on Instagram.
The humble bragger
Humblebrag, a word added to the Oxford English Dictionary:
An ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud:
There’s even a Twitter account for some of the best ones.
Perfect parent
Every parent thinks their child is the most amazing child to have ever walked the earth; even children who can’t actually walk yet. A child is born; immediately Facebook feeds are filled with statutes the equivalent of Rafiki holding Simba aloft on Pride Rock.
Do we really need to be kept abreast of a kid’s every milestone? Think about it, do you actually need to change your profile picture to a baby scan?
The globe-trotters
The proud owners of Instagram accounts filled with snaps from every corner of the globe, including a high prevalence of pics that could feature on the Hot Dogs or Legs Tumblr. There is truly nothing more depressing than flipping through the feed of a person who doesn’t even need to use the Amara filter, like ever, because the light is already perfect. Of course it is, because St Lucia.
Right-on broadcasters
Donating money to charity or giving to the homeless and not tweeting about it is the modern day version of a tree falling in the woods and nobody hearing it. Truly good people just do good; the rest of us have to broadcast to the world the fact that we just let a woman skip ahead in the Pret queue because otherwise she would have missed her train. Eat your heart out, Gandhi.
Fitness fanatics
Posts a picture of a set of abs, ribbed like a radiator, with the following caption: “BETTER GO FOR A RUN GETTING A BIT TUBBY HAHAHA!!!!! lololol.” Also has a Twitter feed consisting only of automated updates from a Garmin GPS watch, and a countdown of personal bests up to whenever the next half-marathon is.
The praise retweeter
I’m not saying we haven’t all wanted to at one time or another, because let’s face it; we have, but know that every time a bit of praise is retweeted, sniggering smogs the atmosphere and, somewhere, a kitten dies.
How did all of this bragging become socially acceptable? What happened to good old-fashioned self-deprecation and quiet humility? We have become a global society of ravenous self-promoters and swaggering boasters. And that, my friends, is nothing to brag about.
