Hacker News Reader

Comment by spoondan | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny. I know the front-facing camera followed demand and was at least partially meant for things like FaceTime and taking photos with friends. But it also fed back into and catalyzed the normalization and popularization of selfies and vanity.

Throughout most of my life, we would break out physical photo albums or an occasional VHS to reminisce. They’d be group photos, vacation pictures, captured moments from a birthday or wedding. I can’t imagine how we would react to a friend pulling out a photo album that contained the stuff many popular Instagram accounts post. They would seem psychotically narcissistic.

Yet, we aren’t that far removed in time from selfie sticks being a joke. And it feels like we are an eternity apart in how our attitudes have adjusted.

View on HN

I distinctively remember a picture of a Chinese lady using a contraption to use a camera to take pictures of herself in some touristic site. This was captioned "the loneliest tourist in the world". This picture was quite famous a few years ago. Nowadays that kind of contraption is so common place that no one thinks twice upon seeing it.

I totally forgot about this. How quickly norms change.

I remember that too. She was at Angkor Wat.

This is silly. Before selfies you just had to ask someone else to photograph you, either a friend or a stranger, or carry a tripod, or have n-1 people in the photo. Stealing a camera that someone asked to be photographed with is an old trope of travel literature. Vanity was not invented 10 years ago

If somebody had a hundred pictures of themselves before the cellphone camera, you would have thought they were insane - especially if they thought you were interested in looking at them. I'm not sure my parents took more than a few hundred pictures of me the entire time I was growing up.

You've been Overton'd, and you think that something that was sold to you is something that is spontaneous or natural.

It's because photos cost virtually nothing these days, compared to the film photography of your childhood.

People also have hundreds of photos of lattes, food, cats, their friends, and all kinds of other stuff that makes them happy.

Taking photos of things you are interested in is, for me, fine. It's easy to take photos and we can all snap those flowers, beers, sights etc. that we like.

Taking photos of yourself, on the other hand, just seems to me to be grossly narcissistic. Like, why have thousands of photos of yourself in your phone? Super weird IMO

This assumes the photos of yourself are for you.

Sometimes other people do genuinely want to see you in a photo. I like seeing my friends and family in pictures, and they like seeing me in pictures. You can take it to an extreme, but a lot of the, frankly, bordering on self-righteous conversation around selfies on HN tends to imply, intentionally or no, that any selfies == gross narcissism instead of, you know, a genuine way to connect to people in the present and to connect in with the past once you're a few years out.

It certainly wasn't, but it also was not normalised to the extent it is today.

People laughed at selfies only 5 years ago, thinking it was a bit self-interested, now it's a normal part of the culture.

I took a college course about photographic culture in ~2008, wherin we read 150 years of essays complaining about how vain everyone was having their picture taken all the time, how they all took the same uncreative tourist photos, how sitting through people’s slideshows from their trips was a bore, how smiling at cameras is contrived and artificial, how photography wasn’t real art and didn’t require any skill, how the availability of cheap photographs was degrading the concept of a portrait, etc. etc.

This is not even close to a new phenomenon or a new complaint. The main difference is that almost everyone carries a camera all the time now, the marginal cost of taking additional photos is basically 0, and sharing pictures is easier than ever.

IIRC, someone built a "camera" that searched for photos that had been taken from that location & direction already, returning the best existing approximation instead of actually taking yet another picture.

I'm not saying its new. I'm saying its more normalised than it was.

Vanity has always existed, and as much as it's a dirty word in many's eyes, it does have a purpose.

However, for whatever reason (there are tons of reasons and probably all of them play a part), it's more normalised and common than it ever has been before, for better or worse.

People still laugh at selfies. Narcissism and attention-seeking has never been normal behavior.

Your timeline is definitely off. Selfies were absolutely part of the cultural norm 5 years ago. I don't know when they normalized, but it was definitely between 2009 and 2011, as smartphones proliferated to become something most people had.

I suspected it might be, the years are becoming a bit muddled together in my mind when it comes to culture.

I can say with confidence that only rarely were people taking photos of only themselves 15 years ago. Today its a regular occurence.

Whether that is the vanity that has increased, the ability and proliferation of photos that has increased, or just the normalisation of the expression I don't know, because as other have said, vanity has always existed, but certainly selfies themselves are way more regular and a self-interested culture appears more normalised.

Perhaps through all of time people would be stepping on an anonymous soapbox had it existed, but it's only available today?

> Stealing a camera that someone asked to be photographed with is an old trope of travel literature.

Me and my gf are generally against selfies and as such we distinctly remember the people that we ask for a photo at various tourist destinations (well, most of them, anyway). Yeah, that means that we don't have an endless stream of photos of the two of us taken together but that only means that the ones that we do have are even more special. Plus, like I said, we can reminisce about the actual people that took those photos of us and with whom we interacted (our favorite is a chic French lady in her 50s who offered to take a photos of us while we were on top of the Basilica San Pietro dome in Rome).

Yeah, nowadays it’s incredibly common to see someone post something with a caption like “My friends are cooler than yours.”. I’m not sure what part of that is funny, friendly, or mildly appropriate for a social website. It is off-putting and makes me dislike the person who says it.

Portraits have always been one of the most common subjects in art. In the Renaissance, many were commissioned by the subject(s). Technology has simply made it easier.

Selfies are not art, but self-portraits are also not one of the most common subjects in art. Specializing in self-portraits made you strange and interesting, like a Cindy Sherman, and definitely made you look self-obsessed, which played into the interpretation.

Do you distinguish paying an artist to paint your portrait from a self-portrait? Both are selfies in my mind.

They're about as different as taking a horse-drawn wagon to the next town over versus riding there yourself on a racing motorbike.

Sure. Either way it's the same motivation. Technology didn't give us the desire to have a picture of ourselves.

> Selfies are not art ... clearly you've never seen my selfies.

> They’d be group photos, vacation pictures, captured moments from a birthday or wedding. I can’t imagine how we would react to a friend pulling out a photo album that contained the stuff many popular Instagram accounts post. They would seem psychotically narcissistic.

Well, the sad truth is that the world is lot lonelier than it used to be before. As someone who doesn't care much about being social, I personally like the fact that I no longer need to depend on others to take pictures that I find to be interesting.

Why is the world lonelier than before when we have so many more means to connect with one another nowadays?

Because of the New York effect. The personal information density is so high that we tune it out automatically as not to be overwhelmed. Outside privacy cannot be maintained so we strengthen the inner one, by not paying attention to other humans. Go to New York and you'll bump into people every 5 steps you'll take, but you'll just ignore them and they will ignore you. There will be no meaningful relationship there, others may be furniture, just as well. So we get more lonely as we get more connected.

Personally I think our jungle - evoluted monkey brains are not capable of dealing with so many social connections, as we used to live in smaller groups, of 30 or so. So we just tune out the overwhelming information.

My completely unscientific take is that its an unholy combination of deteriorating worker protections + social media addictions. So even though there are more avenues to connect with each other most people:

* rely on social media to try and satisfy their need for bonding with others * just don't have as much free time as they did before, because they have to work harder/more jobs to stay afloat

> Yet, we aren’t that far removed in time from selfie sticks being a joke.

I totally agree with your post, just wanted to say that it is my feeling that selfie sticks are on a "downward trajectory", so to speak, as I haven't recently seen as many people using them as 3-4 years ago. The same goes for the GoPro-like photos/videos.

I was recently at a place with baby elephants, and it was staggering to watch hordes of young white women turn their backs on the elephants to take selfies.

I've been in Africa so long I have not seen a person do that for well over a year, and it struck me as seriously odd.

It seems like that type of photo is a requirement on some dating apps.

I find it odd too. I was in a crowded art gallery recently and grew increasingly angry at the number of people who were either taking selfies next to the paintings or standing as close as possible to get pictures of the paintings... without actually looking at the paintings directly at all.

The occasional "I was here" picture is fine, but why even go to a gallery to just to prove that you were there? It's way beyond simple vanity.

Part of that is volume. The value of a given recording of your life to you drops with the quantity of recordings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com