Earlier this month, a woman was attacked by a jaguar at a zoo in Arizona. The jaguar lacerated her arm after she climbed over the concrete barrier to try and take a selfie with it. Last year, a global study found that the quest for extreme selfies killed 259 people between 2011 and 2017. We cannot stop taking our own picture, even when it puts our lives in danger.
And yet the word ‘selfie’, now so embedded in our day-to-day language, only entered the Oxford English Dictionary in late 2013. In just a handful of years, the term has become as quotidian as the act it describes: taking a photo of oneself, invariably with a smartphone, usually to be posted on social media.
There is much cynicism about so-called narcissistic millennials who can’t get enough of their own image; the pouting, the filters that turn one’s face into a puppy, the 27 ‘takes’ to get the perfect shot. But as artist Ryan Gander points out in new documentary Me, My Selfie and I, this 21st-century phenomenon doesn’t signify a boom in narcissism so much as modern technology powering us to radically rethink who is looking back at us.
“It’s a revolution like the Industrial Revolution,” says Gander, drinking strong tea in his Haggerston studio. “But we are at this point in history where we haven’t worked out what this social acceleration does to us. The world has never changed as fast as it does now, but the speed means you don’t have time to address the morals, ethics and values of what’s happening.”
We know social media encourages us to present an idealised version of ourselves – particularly Instagram, where most selfies end up. We can filter ourselves to be shiny, exciting or covetable, creating digital holograms of the person we want to be. A fascination with “the modern idea that there is always something better for us to do or be” took Gander on a journey to meet a selection of ‘modern selves’, including: a woman living tech-free in rural Wales who believes the energy released through self-broadcast is harming the world, a YouTube star with an audience of millions, a transhumanist and a man who cryogenically freezes dead people who believe they will one day be thawed and live again. “This is not about science,” says Gander. “It’s about ego; the inability to let go of the idea that the world might not remember us when we’re gone.”
Each person has their own existential plight and there are fascinating insights into the different ways we try to make an impact on this world, whether that’s the overwhelming sense of responsibility a YouTube star feels to entertain his audience, or a transhumanist’s desire to draw out their life by replacing flesh and bone with robotics and circuit boards.
Gander’s lines of questioning make for compelling viewing. It would have been easy to be cynical, particularly when addressing the relationship young people have with social media, but as Gander points out when interviewing a twentysomething Instagram ‘influencer’, these people have barely been without it in their lives. How are they deserving of our judgment when they’ve never known anything else?
Gander is acutely self-aware (“It was a weird mirror for myself, because here’s me going on about everyone wanting to be noticed and here I am on bloody telly”) and talks a lot about perspective. “The problem we’re facing now is that people often only see things from their own singular perspective. I kept saying during filming that the world has gone mad, and that’s why.” He feels we’re in a “craze of individualisation”, that we have forgotten “our thoughts don’t just stop at the edge of our heads.”
One of the most striking scenes in the documentary is when the transhumanist with a chip imbedded in his palm to open doors implies that Gander might be “improved” with bionic limbs modelled on cheetah legs. It angers him. “Being in a wheelchair doesn’t affect my view on the world. In an age where everyone identifies with being different, I am someone who actually can’t walk and don’t associate with being disabled. I don’t tick the Arts Council funding box that says ‘disabled’ because I don’t identify.” As he says on screen, “I don’t want cheetah legs. I don’t know any cheetahs.”
The assumption that Gander would want to be superhuman when he says he is “happy being exactly the way I am” is a metaphor for what the social media monoliths compel us to do: keep reappraising who we are and, based on the positive feedback loops of likes, comments and retweets, keep reappraising some more. You end the documentary aware that Silicon Valley may actively be trying to hinder self-actualisation, because then why would you need them? Better to be stuck in self-questioning perpetuity. But Gander questions the mark we are trying to make with all these images of ourselves. “No one will be looking at all the selfies we take now because there’s too many. We’ve almost become drowned in self-imagery.”
There is hope, though. By examining our modern compulsions, Gander makes room for the idea that there is, in fact, real peace to be found in acknowledging the “perpetual present tense” we create on social media, putting our phones down and listening to other people’s stories. We all want to be seen. We all want to be liked. But in this Age of the Self, there may be a freedom in accepting that trying to be special and unique all the time can be bloody tiring.
Me, My Selfie and I with Ryan Gander is on BBC Four tonight at 9pm.
