Critical Millenial — From the imitation of the millenial selfie to augmented reality passing through postPhotography and digital narcissism.
How? I have my base on the digital experience as a social media user, like the one all of us have. I am both a designer and developer, working in tech and advertising, having also studied philosophy and done a little bit of research combined with my hobby, photoghraphy.
The starting point is this: I feel really amazed by the influence some Apps have in the people. I don´t know if it is due to digital generations, or if we all have drunk from the fountain of youth and we are getting ALL together stupid in the blink of an eye.
All the sillyApps are on the mainstream. SillyApps are apss where you just make silly things and share them in social media sites. I don´t have anything against doing silly things, in fact, I like it! So this is not a hater post, I feel curious about this. This kind of Apps mean fun, spare time, laughing, enjoyment. The most important point is that the Apps are thought for teenagers but the rest of the people use them as well. It is the world of image, the now, vanity, ego, just now, fun, and over all, the Selfie. I will talk about Selfie later.
I don´t know if Simon Siznek was right about the Millenial Question, I really don´t know. Probably he is right about the parental protectionism. So, there is the gerneration gap, and now, the eldest are no more a reference, the reference now are the millenials. In Advertising, everyone wants to earn the millenial market. We imitate young people instead of old peeople. Imitation at last. Illusion also.
From the photography point of view, at the beginning we looked at smartphones with suspicious minds, later it got into a new way of self promotion for work. I have a semiprofessional Reflex Cam and a last generation Smartphone (S7), I can shoOt with my smartphone in RAW format, and I think that Reflex Cams will die in 10 to 15 years time. Or they will live together with smartphones but these ones can do many more things and have faster progress.
Nowadays, we are all photographers, we all retouch photos, we use hashtags, we do likes, followS, unfollowS, etc. This is the age of postPhotography as the Spanish photographer Fontcuberta says.
In the 90´s he was asked about putting a cam on a mobile device: — It is a stupid thing — he said.
Now he says — We drown in images — twenty years later. The photography as an everyday language from mass media, not worse or better than before, just another thing farther from reality than before, postphotography.
How was the smartphone boom like? As technology advanced, smartphones began to include cams and finally there appeared the quid of the question: The Selfie. Selfie was the word of the year in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. There are nearly 300,000,000 phtos with the #Selfie hashtag. There are painting selfies (Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso, Las Meninas), selfportraits, digital installations, Samsung selfie at the Oscars, Obama’s, the fifty people who died doing a selfie, the monkey selfie , The 21 different types of selfies you can do, etc. etc.
How to define a Selfie? A sum of three: An image of oneself, that is shared. Three aspects as background: Photography related to technology, cultural and/or generational fact, and social (sharing).
An example: I’m in Chefchaouen, the blue pearl, one of the most beautiful villages in Morocco. A very nice place, wherever you look there is something interesting: White and blue walls, Arab people coming and going, small details, etc. Turning round a corner I stumbled on ten Asian girls, all with their Selfie sticks, pretty, looking at each other and turning to their smartphones, showing their lips, looking for their best side of the face and their best expression. I watched them for ten minutes and there they were. They seemed to say: ‘Mirror mirror, who is the most beautiful in the world?’ This does not only happen in Asian culture, it is global, you will see it in Europe, America and even in Arab countries. Contradictory at least!
The Selfie taker is not the center of the photo, he or she, is the center of the universe, a representation of the best self, the best version of oneself. A masturbation of one’s own image, the virtual mini-self: Imitation, competition, comparison, trust, identity, expression, self-reference, self-representation, mimesis, exhibition, need for recognition, self-promotion, narcissism. Narcissism? Nemesis punished Narcissus so he got int love with his own image reflected in a fountain, where later, a flower grew.
Anyway, if we talk about Selfie we talk about identity: Look at me, look Mom! Look what I do! Look how I am! I am a kid! We are children! Let’s play! You can do a narcissism test here, if you take more than 20 take care my friend. It also works to see someone’s profile on Instagram, how many photos are from Selfie? Judge for yourself!
There is also the paradox of selfie, people like to take selfies but they hate the selfies of others. The data: more than a million selfies are take every day. And now also with selfie sticks. Look at all the haters that were with PokemonGo App, we could say that this is the same shit after all. People on the street taking pictures, some take pics of pets that are captured and collected, others take pics of themselves to receive Likes. All in all. Everything is about affection. How much Love do you need? How many pets? How many Likes?
Then came a thing called Augmented Reality, AR. We, the digital freaks, had seen the leap motion and we really liked it very much. Later or at the same time, there was the Wii, the kinect and a long etcetera, almost all AS A result of video games. Until the boom of the IOT with a lot of gadgets, and the VR glasses that Mr. Zukerberg has been campaigning for! Another cake that everyone wants to eat, especially after seeing what is possible with a single App, was PokémonGO did.
