By Jacob Parsons
I have a confession to make: I am a millennial that has never shared a selfie on social media. I feel very much in the minority here. Posting a selfie is a display of self-consciousness I have never felt comfortable with. I do, however, share my writing at any opportunity. A friend recently noted the discrepancy between my desire to get my writing in front of the eyes of readers and my tame social media presence. This got me thinking. Why will I share a poem, but not a selfie?
An old friend of mine, Jarrod, is quite the selfie connoisseur. A cursory look through his Facebook timeline and you will find well over a hundred images of his beaming face. Jarrod travels frequently and, before every flight, he posts a photo paired with his catchphrase, ‘But first, let me take a selfie’. Though I would have denied it if ever asked, I always felt a pang of envy whenever I saw these. In part, the envy came because I wanted that life; I want to travel like he does. Of course, his life consists of more than just vacations, but he doesn’t commemorate the more mundane moments with selfies.
Bo Burnham, an American comedian and performer, gives a monologue in his Netflix special ‘Make Happy’ in which he talks about social media. He says that, as a millennial, he was raised in a ‘cult of self-expression’. Calling the way we interact with social media a performance, he states that social media itself exists to fill the market demand of a generation that is conditioned to perform.
‘It’s horrific… It is performer and audience melded together… what I do know is if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.’
I can’t deny that the way Jarrod (and everyone else) cultivates his social media image constitutes a sort of performance. Burnham views this as only a negative thing. However, even when interacting in-person, we all try to project an image of ourselves, show ourselves as we want to be perceived, not as we are. Social media enables us to extend this performance somewhat, but we can’t blame social media as the root cause of the problem, nor can we blame growing up as a millennial. The desire to be noticed, to be different, to be viewed as anything other than how we view ourselves, did not come about as recently as the millennials. The difference: as millennials we have the platforms that enable us to perform on a scale previous generations couldn’t. Is our desire to perform a negative thing, as Burnham believes? Is it something to be avoided?
When I first heard him speak on the topic I found myself agreeing with him, if only to justify the decision I had already made about this sort of behaviour.
Jarrod’s selfie habits are not strictly confined to a pre-boarding ritual. He takes a selfie whenever he feels like it, always with the same face-splitting smile. He then posts these photos to any and all social media platforms without a shred of shame. I find this act amazing because here is my real confession: until very recently I was proud that I had never shared a selfie.
There has always been something about sharing a photo I have taken of myself that seems distasteful. I am also reluctant to follow trends, and I like that I have resisted partaking in this cultural phenomenon. I’m a bit of a snob. That is a nice façade I’ve constructed for myself, the self-depreciation helps to sell it. But the truth is, selfies make me self-conscious. That’s the bigger reason for my envy of Jarrod. I want his confidence.
So it makes sense, I don’t do selfies because they make me self-conscious. But that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, because I write, and I actively seek to place my writing in spaces that will allow strangers to read it. Why doesn’t sharing something that came out of my mind, giving a glimpse of my hidden internal life, make me feel that way? Isn’t that more personal? And I write poetry, poetry that flirts with being confessional; I have published poems that explore very personal themes like loss, belonging and grief. Surely my willingness to share these intimate experiences would mean I’d have no problem sharing a photograph that I took of myself. This causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance within me. So what’s the difference?
The answer to this question comes in three parts, the first of which has to do with pronouns. In almost all my poetry the personal pronoun ‘I’ rears its self-important head. But the ‘I’ in my poetry is not me; the personas in my poems lead much more profound lives than I do, describing experiences I have never lived. I am never the subject of my poems, but one must be the subject of their selfie.
Poets use ‘I’ to invite the reader to inhabit the persona so they can experience the emotions occurring within the poem; the ‘I’ can transform, it can be anyone. Photographs don’t work in the same way. A selfie has no transformative properties.
The second part of the answer considers writing as an art; it is artifice, artificial. And, simply by virtue of its relative brevity, poetry is the most artificial of all the literary forms. There exists a perception that poetry is somehow ‘more true’ than fiction, though I’ve found in my attempts to write both that this is a fallacy. To share a poem or a story is to say, “Look what I can do! I did this, and I want you to read it.’.To share a selfie on the other hand, says, ‘This is me, and I want you to like it,’ and by like it I, of course, mean Likeit, click that blue thumb (or the red heart, red hearts are good too). To display a proficiency in a craft is surely less personal than a photograph taken of oneself.
The final part looks at that audience Burnham refers to. As someone still quite new to getting my work published, my writing doesn’t yet have a large audience of its own. My readership is still largely dependent on whichever magazine or journal it finds a home in. I don’t know who comprises that audience; at best I can gain some understanding of the aesthetics they gravitate toward.
Even if I become fortunate enough that my writing garners an audience independent of those that come with the publications that house examples of it, there will be no personal connection between me and most of my readers. Though I do publish under my legal name, that name will only carry the connotation of ‘that guy who wrote this stuff that I like’ to the readers. However, if I were to share a selfie, I know exactly who my audience would be, and they know who I am. I have a personal relationship with almost all my social media contacts, and so sharing something with them is a much more personal act.
Not only are selfies more personal, but they also come under more scrutiny than writing. The interaction between writer and reader is, for the most part, confined to the text itself. A selfie invites reactions and comments that are instantly visible to the person who posted it. Of course, social media is used to share more than selfies, but on these platforms we like selfies more than anything else, certainly more than poetry, and by like I of course mean Like.
When I share news of a published piece of writing on social media only about half as many of my contacts engage with it than when I share a photograph featuring (but not taken by) yours truly. Due to this higher level of interest, just the idea of posting a selfie has the self-critical monster in my gut getting all worked up.
For a while I resented the fact that my friends cared more about a photo of me than about my writing; that they were less interested in something I worked hard on and made from nothing than they did about my face (the aesthetics of which I have a very limited control over). Because we who write and seek to distribute our work don’t do it just to show off. We write because we feel like it allows us to contribute to something; to converse with a tradition, to add something to our society that didn’t exist until we put it into words, to start or advance a cultural conversation.
We want our readers to be ever so slightly changed after they encounter our work and, the more ambitious among us, perhaps want the reader to change drastically. Furthermore, although I hesitate to admit it, I want to leave an enduring mark in some way. Talk of creating a literary legacy makes eyes roll (mine included), but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in doing so, regardless of how delusional that thought may be. And I would bet good money on most writers wanting the same thing, even if they wouldn’t admit it. Due to this I used to get upset by the discrepancy between the engagement with my photos and that of my posts about my publications on social media. Don’t they understand I’m trying to change the world? It seemed people had their priorities all wrong.
But then I thought of Jarrod and all his selfies, sometimes just of himself, sometimes including friends, sometimes even including me (his powers of persuasion border on coercion). Jarrod, still a young man now, will inevitably pass away one day, but his Facebook profile will not. Jarrod’s gap-toothed smile will forever be preserved in the digital amber, a legacy of grins, of the friends, happily and begrudgingly, he included in this accumulated shrine of his life. I can think of no better inheritance for those of us who love him than a long series of smiles given for no better reason than he felt like smiling at the time. Jarrod’s selfie addiction will never change the world in the same way some great writers have, but it has the potential to brighten the day of a friend or family member for as long as he lives in our memories.
Perhaps Bo Burnham is right and it’s all a performance and it’s not healthy, and maybe I am right too and it’s distasteful and too personal. But maybe that little button on Facebook labelled ‘share’ really does allow you to do just that: to share. Maybe a selfie can be viewed as a way of giving. Strange as it is to think about, maybe posting a selfie is, in a way, selfless. Any thought of misplaced priorities, performing or oversharing of the personal falls away next to that.
And what of me? I’ll be leaving behind strings of meticulously manicured words. I would never devalue the power of writing or reading but, perhaps, a smile every now and then would be a welcome complement.
So I have resolved myself to start posting selfies, and so I wrote this piece where the ‘I’ is actually me, Jacob (#nofilter). A personal essay is sort of like a selfie, just in a medium I feel more comfortable with. It’s a start, and who knows, maybe tomorrow I will find the fortitude to post a selfie on Instagram.