Express Your Selfie

It’s something that Kim Kardashian and Pope Francis have in common. And it’s something most young people have done. It became a real word 2013, and it’s come to characterize a generation: the selfie.

Selfies have experts transfixed. Its popularization started a cultural conversation among experts and teens alike revolving around what it means for young people to take a selfie and post it online. That conversation is split between whether this generation is self-involved or self-confident, between whether selfies are a negative or positive trend. Yet for better or worse those born since 1995 have earned the nickname the Selfie Generation.

“I think [being called the Selfie Generation] is pretty true,” senior Madison Porter said. “It makes you proud of how you look, and you should be able to flaunt that the way you want.”

A Harbinger Survey of 58 students found that 98 percent of East students have taken a selfie and shared it over social media. Of these, 99 percent have shared selfies over Snapchat or through texting, and 25 percent have posted selfies to Instagram or Facebook.

Dubbing it the Selfie Generation, the U.S. Census reports that those under 21 make up 26 percent of the U.S. population, the largest age group in the country. Pew Research Center found in a survey of 800 tenagers that 91 percent havep posted selfies online, a statistic that rose from 79 percent in 2006.

As a researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Losh, Director of the Culture, Art and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego, is drawn to the selfie because of what she calls their universal nature.

“[Selfies are] practiced all across the world,” Losh said. “People in Thailand take selfies, people in South Africa take selfies, and so it’s interesting to see how a particular practice both has gone global and become varied.”

Varied in the sense that people take selfies for a variety of purposes. Senior Claire Ridgway has __ selfies on her Instagram, documenting moments where she feels good about something in her appearance. Junior Hallie Hayes uses them mostly for private communication through Snapchat or texting.

According to Grace Choi, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri studying selfies, one way to look at selfies is as a form of narcissism or self-obsession.

“They could be seen as narcissistic, that people just want to show positive traits of themselves so they might edit their photos, use different angles,” Choi said.

Fifty-seven percent of East students said that they had edited a selfie to make themselves look better according to a Harbinger poll. But both Porter and Ridgway disagree that this manipulation is self-obsession.

“When someone posts a picture of themselves that they like, I don’t think that’s narcissistic,” Porter said. “I think it’s fine to be confident and comfortable in your own so you can say ‘hey, I think I look pretty today.”

Dr. Negar Mottahedeh, associate professor of Cultural Studies at Duke University, studies the negative effects that seeing edited selfies online can have on a person’s self-esteem. This negative effect, she says, comes from the ways that a person can manipulate a selfie before it’s posted.

“[Selfies] make people see themselves better but at the same time worse,” Hayes said. “Because now you see so many people in the best possible way since they can edit the photos.”

She says tools like cropping and filtering could hurt the self-esteem of someone comparing themselves to an edited image.

However Ridgway chooses to look at taking selfies as a way to feel self confident, regardless of whether or not it’s seen as narcissistic. Her selfies are designed to show off something she feels good about, whether it’s her eyebrows or her lipstick.

“You hear people all the same saying ‘Oh my God. All she does is take selfies and she thinks she looks so good,’” Ridgway said. “It’s more an avenue to liking yourself and actually being proud of who you are.”

According to Losh, this is a common argument in defense of selfies’ positive cultural power. Mottahedeh says that this idea of people taking control of the way they are represented online is a significant change from the past. So while mainstream media used to be more dominated by things like newspapers and celebrities, she says selfies have contributed to the general population’s ability to control what they see online.

“[With selfies] we have this enormous amount of user-generated content where we get to see a much broader amount of users and content creators contributing to a culture of self-representation,” Losh said.

This culture of self-representation refers to the idea that people are taking command of the media that they view online, producing it and commenting on it. Choi says that this idea of control also applies to the media that’s viewed online. The rise of the selfie, she says, has increased the diversity of the faces that people are exposed to online. This results in images of everyday, diverse people competing with the airbrushed celebrities that can dominate the mainstream media.

“History is usually written around people who are in power, very important figures like presidents and kings,” Mottahedeh said. “But the selfie really captures that kind of history, people’s history.”

When Ridgway scrolls through her Tumblr and Instagram feed, she says that selfies allow her experience more diversity. In this way, Losh argues that selfies can serve to open up a person’s world.

“It’s important for people to see people who aren’t just these famous crazy-pretty people who can afford to make themselves look the ideal way,” Ridgway said. “Because they can build their confidence and people can realize that people don’t always look like that.”

In a survey done by AOL and the TODAY Show, 65 percent of teenage girls said seeing their selfies on social media boosts their self-confidence. Forty percent said that social media helps them present their best face to the world.

“I think people finding a way that they can look at themselves through a camera that makes them happy and makes them feel like they want to share it with the world is a great thing,” Ridgway said.

Whether the ‘Selfie Generation’ is the most self-centered or empowered yet is still a debate among experts, but Losh cautions against judging too harshly. She says that society has had anxieties about young people for thousands of years.

“But what I do think is different is this ability to document yourself,” Losh said. “This ability to do this everyday self-documentation is creating a new group of social practices.”

Social practices that involve self-documentation for the purpose of sharing the image online. The discussion about what these social practices mean for young people is varied, but experts can agree that it’s a significant cultural shift.

“I think the selfies I take me me feel more comfortable with myself and more confident and so I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Porter said. “It’s just a way of self-expression.”