Selfie: new book explores how we became so self-obsessed
vox.com
vox.com
It's not just America
> If you want to be happy and find fulfillment, don’t try to be Beyoncé or Elon Musk; instead, find the thing you’re good at and become even better at it, and try to help the people around you as much as possible. It’s really that simple.
This really is the key takeaway of an excellent infomercial.
America is not even the worst offender. Check out China and SE Asia. Only places in the world where it's completely normal to center the marketing of every single phone around how good it is at taking selfies. China is single-handedly responsible for the introduction of the beautify non-sense in smartphone cameras.
Though to be fair "X is true in the US" isn't really saying it isn't true elsewhere. Just that the writer is familiar with the US, and isn't making a statement one way or another about places they aren't familiar with.
(Though in anycase, the article isn't really about selfies, despite the title)
It's not narcissism. It's reality being a reminder, constantly - the beating heart of the internet simply says - you are small.
And we are. All of us. But we also aren't. Because, we all do have impact. Reality is nothing more than what it is. You can be ignored, feel silenced, but, you always exist, on the internet.
Your point makes sense, and it reinforces both sentiments. See what you want to see in it. That's what we do. I see me, I see you.
It's probably different from person to person, but the internet doesn't make me feel small. It makes me feel almost limitless because there's an incredibly massive wealth of information and communication that's accessible to me, just like everyone else.
Even without the internet, just knowing our place in the universe is enough.
Neil deGrasse Tyson put it best: “I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.”
Have you ever tried to change something to see a wave of yourself wash over everything?
You can call that narcissism, or confidence.
Yes, we are all connected to a wealth of information. But you are also a part of what makes it what it is. Don't forget that.
That statement of acceptance makes perfect sense to me.
It's just the cultural prerogative, though, that a woman gleam every non-scalp hair from their body, masterfully paint her face at least once a day, to basically perform all the maintenance necessary to widen the sexual differences between male and female.
Largely done to fit into what a woman is supposed to look like -- color outside those lines and society will scorn, no doubt! Also, of course, to cater to male gaze. A woman who doesn't spend all that effort on herself is not even really a woman, they'd hear. Odd how femininity is tied to cultural practices of beauty in most peoples' minds.
So, yeah, it's safe to say women are more self-obsessed, and it's safe to say that the pressure to remain that way must be intense.
Or naturally programmed.
> Also, of course, to cater to male gaze.
So naturally programmed? Also, women "paint their face" not just for the male gaze but also to establish their place within the female hierarchy. Generally, the prettier and healthier females tend to have higher status within the female hierarchy.
> So, yeah, it's safe to say women are more self-obsessed, and it's safe to say that the pressure to remain that way must be intense.
Just as men are pressured into earning money, being strong and maintaining status. Or is it natural internal pressure rather than societal pressure?
Is it society that's pressuring women or is it that women naturally gravitate towards it? Not sure where you live but in the US, society and media are pressuring women not towards femininity but masculinity. I just saw an army ad and there was a lot of female representation in it when females make up a tiny portion of the army. Even in the army, where you don't wear much makeup, I bet women take more selfies and share them.
Could it be that females in general are just more naturally programmed into sharing and communicating with people?
Of course for most of human history (including now in some parts, and maybe again soon in Western nations) men painted their faces too. And wore high heels. The history of makeup and self adornments doesn’t in any way support your hypothesis. It’s like people who think that girls naturally gravitate to the color pink while remaining blissfully ignorant of how recent a marketing construction that really is, and how pink is perceived in other cultures.
Still, there's definitely a cultural aspect to it, and that's definitely increased worldwide in recent years. Social media sites and the modern internet as a whole definitely rewards being egotistical and those who succeed there are often those who are better at marketing themselves in general.
Heck, perhaps there's even an economic reason for it. With the job market going the way it is and things like AI getting more powerful, the route to success for many people now seems to be 'build a brand around yourself and market the hell out of it'. Eventually it may be difficult to get employed in general if you don't already have a brand and an existing audience.
By a 1000$ being 1000$ to many people regardless of how the person offering it came by it, money destroys information that way. Because many decisions are excused as making "business sense", as opposed to making sense.
> Offer a dud product or service and see how that goes down!
Usually, a dud is something that's not successful, not something that sucks. Because financial success determines the quality of something for many. If people want to drink Coca-Cola because they made a judgement to be influenced by short erotic films, then that's that, and Coca-Cola is objectively the best subjective choice for most people.
> The incentive then becomes that of giving up or meeting the customer's needs.
Yeah, because if you don't like Apple, you can use Microsoft, and that keeps both of them just so in line. Because we don't constantly jump through new hoops designed to game our attention and empty our wallets just a bit more by all sorts of companies. Computing, gaming, entertainment, it's all working out really well and just keeps getting better. Remember how YouTube made it easier to find and filter the content of channels you subscribed to, how they just flat out stopped fucking around with video makers and their viewers? Remember how Facebook stopped second-guessing what their users want to see because of that whole backlash about manipulating them? That emperor is rocking some mighty fine threads, pity the fools that can't see them.
You’d be surprised how oblivious layprogrammers are to the privacy implications of their work. They slurp up the kool-aid from management about “learning from data” and merrily implement whatever they’re told to.
And there are of course those who know exactly what they're doing and they're doing the best they can given their constraints. Isn't it better to assume everyone's doing their best here?
The thing is, you don't know either way so it's just projecting a bunch of mean assumptions upon them. It says more about your perspective on your fellow programmers than it does about the people who did GDPR this way, because your feeling of this being a shit implementation has turned into a judgment on those who did it.