Your self…ie?

10/5/2022

At an HBCU something that is a very prominent aspect of the culture is your brand. Your personal brand is everything, or at least it can feel like it is. But a big part of your personal brand is your face, facial recognition, people being able to not only look at you and know what your about, but know what your about and think of you when they see something that aligns with it. It is hard. The shift between what social media, specifically the selfie, means to people as they get older is drastic. However, the context of the selfie has always been so casual, but personal, and the juxtaposition of those two traits add a certain vexing quality to the selfie as well.

In a second, you can share a piece of yourself with. the world. In a literal sense. But the psychological aspect of it is also deeper than it seems. A popular saying is “no one’s harder on you than you are on yourself”. But the selfie takes it to an entirely new level. Best case, you are the worlds most confident individual, and taking a selfie is nothing but taking a selfie. But, for the a lot of people, selfies are an actual source of stress and anxiety. The represent how you see yourself, but they also represent how other people see you.

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The intensity around the selfie may seem dramatic, and it is, but in the age of social media the heightened need for validation by others has made things… dramatic. Recently, Gen Z has been really trying to push against the societal norms and standards that have been set up by social media. Specifically, the pressure that social media has put on us as young people, and that we have put on ourselves. What the selfie represents at this point is both the beginning and the end of the age of self absorption and perfection. And as a generation, we are adjusting to the feelings of discomfort we feel around the normalcy of imperfection.

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