To Selfie or Not to Selfie

There’s a Reddit sub, Am I Ugly, where people (female, as far as I could tell) post selfies to solicit commentary. I happened to stumble across it while I was looking for something else, probably related to airplane ear cats or another completely inane topic. The young women who posted in this sub were certainly not ugly. The few I saw were really beautiful and I suspect they knew that. They’re young so they can do silly things, I thought, though it did not seem particularly psychologically healthy.

What increases my inner cringe are the horrific selfies I often see on Substack. Women my age bald due to chemo, for example. When I was in hospital last year Sridhar took a photo of me right before I went into surgery. We joked about hospital selfies because I have seen those across social media. Snapping this photo was out-of-character for him. Though he would never admit it I suspect that he was worried it might be his last image of me. In case you’re wondering, no, it was never posted.

The bald chemo woman says she gets SO MUCH engagement from her selfies (her emphasis). She maintains that her use of the selfies is flippant and humorous but I am not sure that comes through. Since she has a terrible cancer diagnosis I’m going to argue that for most people the selfie reads as a pathos appeal. It did for me and I am a generally sophisticated person. If I knew this woman personally I might get the irony but in fact I do not know her. And irony is notoriously difficult to convey on social media. When I was on Facebook I witnessed it going horribly wrong! I’m going to assume that most people see that kind of selfie as a pathos appeal. Pathos appeals are problematic for many audiences; they notoriously target the unsophisticated audience to elicit an immediate response. For example, when I am in the gym, one of the televisions is sometimes tuned to a channel that does infomercials for the ASPCA. I can barely tolerate looking at the sad images of the animals. The folks who produce these ads are completely aware of audience emotions and hope those will translate to donations. If the chemo selfie raises ovarian cancer awareness, the author’s goal may be achieved. Come for the selfie, stay for the writing. If that is her goal, or one of them. But not everyone will keep coming back. I personally prefer not to use heavy-handed methods to attract readers. Like other forms of social media Substack encourages creators to employ those manipulative tools to provoke engagement. The selfie is perhaps the sledge hammer of those tools.

Let’s also talk about dopamine. We all know, or should know by now, that the hit feels good. However, I wonder if it matters what gave you the hit. Do you feel better if people affected by your appearance or by your writing? The more people who comment or heart your selfie, the bigger the hit of dopamine, I suppose. Are we all just enslaved to neurotransmitters? As long as the people are there it doesn’t matter? Should I try posting photos of my 65 year-old unbotoxed, sun-damaged face? There’s another woman my age who posts a lot of selfies with saggy jowls and I always recoil when I see them. Does that make me a bad person, the fact that I recoil, that the selfies give me “the ick”? I don’t stay for the writing, partly because she does the common Substack thing of making each sentence its own paragraph and I don’t like that.

Unfortunately the fact is that we’re operating in this highly complicated technological environment with what is essentially a Stone Age brain. We behave the way our biology demands and we probably underestimate our ability to control our responses.

When I was on YouTube looking for travelogues of Guatemala, I came upon a channel created by a gringa woman my age who had moved there. Her content didn’t interest me much but I noted the way she used the comments of trolls to boost her videos. People said horrible things about her aging face. Maybe those comments really didn’t bother her or maybe they did but she decided she was just going to highlight them to get more viewers. I would never, ever do what she did. No amount of monetizing would be worth subjecting myself to the insults of random people on the internet. That would do more than ruin my day. Reading my anonymous student evaluations was harrowing. The human negativity bias ensures that the one or two bad reviews will completely overshadow the many good ones. It’s the way we’re wired, though perhaps I am more sensitive than many people.

The selfie issue is an aspect of the larger topic around attracting readership. Recently a Substacker wrote an astute piece about how a very small group of Silicon Valley billionaires are manipulating those of us who share our work on the internet. He is taking his writing to a Finnish platform called Tuhat that has none of the bells and whistles of social media and each essay has to be minimum 1000 words. I am considering a move over there as well. Of course I wonder, will anyone read what I write? Does it, in fact, matter? I think I crave recognition less than many, if not most people. Possibly because I’ve never had it! A compounding problem with my use of social media and leaving it is my art. I create visual art as well as writing. So I enjoy sharing images of my work and getting my dopamine boost when people hit the heart and/or comment. And then, of course, there are the cat pictures. That’s what I miss most about Facebook. I don’t miss the Karensplainers who took me to task for giving my cats an Amazon box to play in! (Yes, that actually happened.)

In any case I am pretty much allergic to posting selfies and no amount of reader traffic is worth doing that, in my opinion.