There was a time when, as a young man traveling to different countries for the first

time, I took photos of every building, statue, or landscape that caught my eye, hoping
to share these with family and friends when I got home. I realized many years later
that this habit was keeping me from enjoying and remembering the places I visited.
The experience is akin to filing away memos in neat folders for later retrieval so your
mind is freed for the next task. You end up unable to recall much of what you filed
away unless you have the actual document at hand. Busying yourself with picturetaking while on a trip to a new place creates a gap between you and the moment. It
can strip traveling of the quality that uniquely belongs to it as an experiencethe
slow immersion in something new, and the oscillation between awe and recognition it
brings about.
I think it is even more so when one likes to take selfiesthe new obsession that has
accompanied the advent of camera-equipped mobile phones, and social networking
portals like Facebook and Instagram. Declaring it as the new word of the year, the
venerable Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus: Selfie: noun, informal. A
photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or
web cam and uploaded to a social media website. Also: selfy. Plural: selfies.
To me, selfies are not the same as looking at oneself in the mirror, and the silent selfcontemplation this connotes. On the contrary, they seem to epitomize the vast distance
that separates narcissism from self-knowledge.
While almost every painter of worth in every era has done a self-portrait, taking a
selfie for sharing and liking cannot possibly compare with the experience of an artist
pondering the moods, desires, and emotions evoked by the lines and contours of his
own face. The selfie is pure self-absorption where the self-portrait could be selfanalysis. What distinguishes one from the other is the superficiality to which much
digital communication technology has lent itself.
The writer Rebecca Solnit captures this difference eloquently in a recent London
Review of Books essay titled In the Day of the Postman. She writes: I think of that
lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two
poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between,
assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between
two deep zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with
others.
We are not just talking here of the occasional photos we take of ourselves, usually
against the background of a place we are visiting, when theres no one around to do it
for us. Rather, we are talking of the almost compulsive manner in which many of
todays young people try to capture what they look like at any moment of the day. By
taking countless pictures of themselves in different poses, and posting these in social
networking websites for others to like (or deride, as the case may be), they presume
that the world is interested in thema way, as Solnit puts it, of assuaging fears of
being alone. At the same time, their obsession with the number of likes and

comments they get on these poses could be a way of evading the real challenge of
deeply knowing and connecting with their own selves.
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann once defined maturity as a systems capacity to
observe itself. The term he uses for self-observation is reflexivity, the defining quality
of the modern person. But, for all the cutting-edge modernity of the technology that
serves as its platform, the selfie seems to me to be a throwback to the premodern era
when men and women relied primarily on others to define who they were.
Rather than being a prelude to changing ones life, the selfie has become no more than
a cheap vehicle for instant self-affirmation. Like the ubiquitous mobile phone with
which almost all of them are taken, doing selfies has taken the place reserved for
reflection. We can no longer be alone with ourselves without yielding to the
temptation of documenting the moment for social media. Solnit observes: The fine
art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection,
or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here
to there alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new
technologies have flooded those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely
regarded as a void, and filled up with sounds and distraction. And selfies.
Perhaps, its a generation thing, which is why Im conscious that I should not impose
my idea of well-spent solitude on others. I like bird-watching, reading, taking solitary
walks, and barreling down on an empty expressway, alone, on a motorcycle. Some
will likely say these are precisely the pursuits of loners.
But, even in the company of others, I hardly take pictures, and I dont have a
Facebook or Instagram account. On a trip to Japan a few months ago, however, I
decided to get myself a Nikon Coolpix P-520 with a built-in 42x optical zoom,
thinking it might enhance and prolong my enjoyment of birds. I was wrong. I spent
more time looking for birds through the viewfinder and focusing the lens to get a clear
shot, than if I had been content to watch these winged creatures through binoculars.
I am convinced that many great moments of pleasure and happiness are not meant to
be preserved, but merely lived. It was to this end that Nietzsche once said that we
need human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and
constant in invisible activities