At the height of the siege in the Lindt Chocolate Café in Sydney earlier today, some bystanders emerged to take selfies of themselves against the grim backdrop of the unfolding drama. Grinning and smiling faces were super-imposed upon a scene whose frightened victims within the café were hopefully oblivious to the disaster tourists taking selfie snaps at their expense outside.
'so my plane just crashed'
It is almost fitting that this selfie-taking in Sydney became a news story in itself, because, as 2014 draws to a close, this has definitely been the year of the selfie. From the Elen DeGeneres selfie at the Oscars, which became the most retweeted picture on Twitter, to the 'so my plane just crashed' selfie of an unsmiling passenger chronicling the wreckage of an airliner(left).Technology Advances
The selfie only really came of age in the past few years as the technology advanced in smart phone cameras to enable the user to physically hold the device in front of them and take a passable and focussed photo. Attempting to hold, point, and shoot with a digital SLR or Polaroid camera of old would have required a superhuman effort and a great deal of luck. Many smartphones now allow you to point, focus and click, from the reverse side of the phone and this year's must-have Christmas present is also a selfie stick that allows you to catch even more of the action!
"And this is me in Stratford ..."
The reality, however, is that the concept of the selfie is nothing new, or, at least, the desire to record ourselves as being present at momentous events in history or our personal lives. Having been raised in a tourist town, Stratford-upon-Avon, I became used to the frequent requests to take a picture for some grinning group of holidaymakers as they stood outside Shakespeare's Birthplace or the theatre. If the tourists had been able to record the moment without the need to involve a stranger, then they probably would have done so.
No longer the unseen observer
The difference now is that we can tell the world almost instantaneously that we both witnessed the events via social media and that we were there. Our superimposed visage also seems to involve us in the centre of the action and implicate us into the unfolding scene. Before, the photographer was an unknown observer, who lived behind the camera lens and out of shot. Now the selfie-taker is both the photographer and the subject of the shot and also the publicist who sends the resulting picture out to the world - instead of just framing a shot from behind the lens, we are in the centre of it!
To my mind, this obsessive desire to show the world that 'I was there', such as during events like the Sydney siege, is dismal and ranks alongside 'rubber necking' at car crashes, as a callous and uncaring disregard for the feelings and safety of those actually caught up in the events. It's dismal, but it is not new. The bystander has always been a feature of dramatic events, whether it is the crowds gathered to watch the person threatening to jump from a bridge, or the rubber-neckers passing the pile up. You could even go back to the crowds assembled at the foot of the scaffold to witness a hanging or a hapless aristocrat facing death by guillotine.
What has changed is the ability to take the pictures so easily in the first place, but then to disseminate and distribute almost instantaneously. Social media has allowed us to take centre stage as celebrities in the unfolding drama of our own lives - and when those lives cross paths with events of truly historic proportions, then the temptation is too much to resist muscling in on the action. And this is when the line is blurred between a harmless social record of a worthy event and the unacceptable selfie of the 'disaster voyeur'.
Is the selfie a symbol of our selfish age?
Whilst the selfie is the perfect iconography for selfishness, it is not new and if the crowds at the scaffold or the guillotine could have taken selfies, then they would. But these are different times and just because we can do it, doesn't mean to say that we should. Those selfie-takers did themselves no credit for the fifteen seconds of fame that their impromptu selfies brought them. And what is heartening is that the reaction to those selfies has been almost universally condemnatory and that is how we develop social mores that guide us when the technology races ahead of what is, and what is not, socially acceptable behaviour.
Is the selfie the perfect symbol of a selfish age? No. But what we should learn from this is that our desire and ability to record ourselves with a selfie, doesn't give us the selfish right to disregard the predicament and the feelings of others.
Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter andFacebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net
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