The same night that I had watched in fright and definite sadness about “Selfie addicts”, and how one, who had been afflicted with what must be a mental disorder, had undergone 160 operations to create “the perfect Selfie”, a friend was telling me how she and a friend had gone up to the Peak in Hong Kong and had a “Selfie” taken using a Selfie stick.
I have either been Rip Van Winkle, or I have missed something along the way to nowhere as I simply don’t understand this new Selfiemania- a weird narcissistic phobia where many seem prepared to do anything to be seen and have their 15 minutes or 15 seconds of fleeting fame on social media.
How and where did taking a photograph of one’s self become such a full-time job?
What am I missing here?
Why are those whom I think to be reasonably sane people photoshopping their photographs to get rid of wrinkles, to whiten their teeth, widen their eyes, lose the turkey necks etc before uploading these onto Facebook or on instagram?
Isn’t this false advertising, especially in what is increasingly becoming an online dating world? Where will all this phoniness end?
In music, call them what you want- apps, auto-tuners, masking, beats, beatz, beatzroots etc- but what you hear by many artists are seldom actually anything from the “artists”.
Milli Vanilli were condemned to musical purgatory way too soon and, sadly, we have learnt to live with singers who can’t sing and musicians who can’t create music and who are, in fact, illusionists.
Today, however, there is the fakeness of scripted reality shows, fake marriages, publicist-created “romances”, meeting strangers from the online world who should remain there, and what’s really worrying is who, what and where are actually real.
A few years ago, one dealt with phonies in various guises, but, these days, along with these fakirs and shuck and jive people, there are also the Selfies and the self-obsessed.
We must all be partying with the fucking fairies where nothing is real and there’s bloody everything to get hung up about as the simple act of going out and meeting new people is fraught with danger and an impending sense of gloom, doom and inertia.
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