This morning, while staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, I had a thought about narcissism. I wanted to take a selfie to capture the moment but was concerned about what people (in this instance, my wife) would think of me. The last thing I want is for people to think I’m narcissistic. It’s important, you know, to, like, manage your public image. I’d hate for the media to get hold of a photo of me taking a photo of me in my skivvies staring at myself in the mirror, or, like, yukking it up at the funeral of a head of state.
Narcissism—or our growing blindness to it—is fast becoming one of the imponderables of our age. Last year, the APA (American Psychiatric Association) eliminated Narcissistic Personality Disorder from the latest iteration of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). This gave fresh energy to the debate about the extent to which mental health issues are contingent upon passing social norms. If everybody is on Facebook posting pics of what they’re doing, where and with whom, and if the media are touting the importance of promoting your personal brand, then the fact that most people exhibit the symptoms of a long-standing mental health disorder seems to be beside the point.
Even so, old farts shake their heads and worry that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Social norms are being eroded. Young people are losing their grounding. Yes, we’ve heard it all before … yawn …
So what was the thought I had this morning while staring at myself in the mirror? While I have no doubt that many people posting selfies on Facebook are motivated by a deep and intractable narcissism, I wonder if maybe, for most people who engage in these behaviours, something else is going on:
In the modern world, the generic reigns supreme. I guess there are good rationales for this. Generic products are easier to mass produce. Economies of scale are more efficient, which means products are cheaper. The same goes for media. Why reinvent the wheel, so to speak, when you want to introduce a new TV morning talk show? Why not use a successful template from an affiliated station in another city? Package your local news in a format that’s recognizable anywhere in the world!
My wife and I recently moved and decided, now that we’re real adults and all, that it’s time to have a dining room table with chairs that match the table. So we went to a mall—Toronto’s Yorkdale, in case you’re wondering, which once had the distinction of being the largest mall in the world, though not anymore. There, we found a store that sells dining room tables and we bought one that we thought would go well in the new place. It’s the first piece of real furniture we’ve bought in 20 years, and we were feeling pleased with ourselves.
A week later, we drove down to Orlando and, as a matter of curiosity, went to the Mall at Millenia. There was not a single shop that one could describe as local to Orlando. It was the same shops, the same ethos, the same design accents that you’d find at Yorkdale. There was a branch or franchise or whatever of the store where we had bought our table. We went inside and found many of the tableaus—is that what you call them?—arranged in precisely the same way they had been arranged at home. In fact, we found our table and chairs decorated with the same runner, the same everything, that we had bought from the Yorkdale store.
I felt an odd sense of deflation. I don’t think it was a deflation that had to do with possessions. More to do with personal identity. Although we’re not naïve, we had a secret yearning to create for ourselves in our new home a unique space that would give expression to the uniqueness of our personalities, the particularity of our marriage, the granular messiness of our family life. Instead, what we’ve got can be had anywhere, 10,000 units sold, 10,000 generic tables in 10,000 generic dining rooms throughout North America.
I wonder if something similar happens on Facebook. Users are attracted by the promise of a fresh experience. It’s a way to connect with others, a way to inscribe wider circles of community, a way to redefine what it means to be a social creature. But, let’s face it, when you strip it down, Facebook is just another microblogging site. It provides a template, and a pretty limited one at that, for making blog posts and reacting to them. Users want to express the uniqueness of their lived experience, but Facebook mediates that expression in a way that makes one person’s experience look like any other’s.
Underneath the generic face of global production, whether it’s the production of goods or media, lies an anxiety that calls to mind words that T.S. Eliot wrote nearly a century ago:
We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
…
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion
Only now, he might write that, while we continue to be hollow, we’re form without shape, colour without shade, still paralysed force, but motion without gesture. And the world will end, not with a bang, but with a PIN as we buy one last generic article before we vanish into the non-being of global conformity.
Or maybe T.S. Eliot wouldn’t write anything at all. Maybe he’d take selfies and post them on Facebook. Think: selfie as expression of particularity that resists the flattening weight of media whose effect is to render all human experience generic. The people who run around taking selfies and posting them to their Facebook timeline are probably not narcissistic. More likely they’re confused, or afraid and angry at the social forces that conspire to bring about their disappearance.
Maybe the selfie is an act of resistance against those forces: Look at me! I am me! I am real! Here! Right here! In this place. In all its particularity.