I was having lunch with my flatmates when my friend Morgan took a picture of this scene. Then she sat down again and began to do something strange: tilted her head to the side, crossed her eyes and pointed the phone at herself. Click. Whenever I see someone taking a selfie, I get the awkward feeling of seeing something I shouldn't have seen, like peering through the unlocked door of a busy toilet. It's like spying on a person's preparation for public speaking.
In his film The Phantom of Freedom (1974), director Luis Buñuel presents a world in which what should and should not be turned upside down. At a dinner party, you defecate publicly at a table surrounded by your friends, but eat in splendid isolation in a small room. This is a hint that the difference between public and private may not lie in what you do, but in where you do it and for what purpose. What we do in private is getting ready for what we're going to do in public, so the former happens behind the scenes, while the latter we act out on stage.
Why do we so often feel compelled to “present” something in front of an audience? The philosopher Alasdair McIntyre suggests that storytelling is a basic human need; but we need to not only talk about our life, but actually live it. Situation: a person is about to get acquainted with the news. If he is a millennial, then he learns about current events from Facebook, and if he is a banker, then he buys the Financial Times. But if a millennial buys the Financial Times, and a banker is content with Facebook, then it seems that the roles are not played out properly. We understand ourselves and others in terms of the characters we play and the stories we are in.
"The unity of human life is the unity of the narrative canvas," writes McIntyre in After Virtue (1981). We live by placing ourselves in a coherent story that others can understand. We are characters who project ourselves by living stories that are always read by others. Seen in this light, Morgan's selfie is a narrative proposal that shapes her life.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about the same in Nausea (1938):
Capture it - or it wasn't. But then he has to ask himself, sitting in the Café de Flore: Am I really going to tell someone about the coffee I am drinking now? Is it really worth retelling everything I do? And do everything just to retell it? Sartre ends his thought as follows:
Either enjoy your coffee or post a photo of it on Instagram.
The philosopher Bernard Williams has the same concerns about the idea of a life being told. While McIntyre believes that the oneness of real life is modeled after the creation of a fictional life, Williams argues that the main difference between fictional characters from literature and the "real characters" that we really are that fictional lives are completed with the very beginning, while ours are not. In other words, fictional characters don't need to determine their future. So, Williams says, McIntyre forgets that while we look at life in retrospect, we must "live it forward." Faced with a choice, we don't stop to discuss which outcome would best fit the narratives of our stories. Truth: sometimes we can think about which decision to make.
In fact, Williams says, living a life in accordance with the guidelines for your role leads to a loss of authenticity, a distance from what was inherent in you in the first place. Likewise, if you were to methodically do what you have always done naturally, it would be difficult for you in the end. If you think about how to walk when you walk, there is nothing left of the light gait.
When Williams wrote about this over 10 years ago, there were less than half of the world's selfies today. If he's right, does that mean we're trying to find out more about ourselves now? In a sense, yes, but this is because a sense of the meaning of a life lived is important for caring for its future. As philosopher David Wellman says, human beings built a social body to give meaning to their lives - not as a narrative, but as a readable image that they themselves can interpret as subjects who have a public face. Even Robinson Crusoe, isolated from any audience, needed to form an image of himself in order to follow his life. From this need for comprehensibility comes the distinction between the private and public spheres: in order to be comprehensible, we must make self-presentations, and in order to do them, we must choose from our lives what we can present to the public and what is best to keep to ourselves. Thus, the private sphere consists of what we hide - not because we consider it shameful, but because we have decided that something does not correspond to our self-presentation, and therefore to our public representation. So Morgan's selfie is simply a manifestation of the basic human need for self-presentation.
The selfie epidemic is a consequence of the increase in the number of self-presentation tools - Facebook, Twitter and similar networks. Together, this shrinks the private sphere. And if our deepest desire is to control what we can show, then social media has turned out to be an explosion of those means that could satisfy it. At first glance, we could have been more restrained, Wellman thought. But he wrote about it 14 years ago. Today I imagine how he rants with hashtags, how a person can decorate his self-presentation (#wokeuplikethis, #instamood, #life, #me). But regardless of the fact: he himself says that everyone has the right to exhibit and hide what he considers necessary.
Whether or not life is a story is our choice. In the same way, we can make choices about what to present to others and what to keep to ourselves. We are forced to balance between these extremes. And if what counts as public or private varies by culture or age group, it can also vary from person to person. So whenever I catch my flatmates taking selfies, I will continue to feel as uncomfortable as if I accidentally caught them while changing their underwear.
