How the selfie will change us
A little more than a decade ago, mobile phones stopped being just mobile phones and began having cameras in them. The first camera phones delivered grainy images, but regardless of low resolution, for cellular phone technology it was a revolution. Yuppies were so innocent then, they asked questions like "Does your phone have a camera?" Today, the instrument is a brahmastra in the arena of social media. It has displaced at least one item from the vanity case and transformed into a portable mirror. And camera phones, like sartorial choices, have always had a status factor attached to them. While it shouldn't only be equipped with the skill of capturing images, including your own, it also must be handsome in itself: A good-looking object to capture good-looking subjects (like yourself.)
If Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been paragons in the mission of self-love (and self-lovemaking) they have been aided by another watershed in cellular phone evolution: the front-facing camera. If narcissism is a prominent feature of our age then the front-facing camera is its font. When we attempt to make any sense of our recent contemporary phenomena, like say the Kiss of Love movement, we mustn't underestimate the social media paraphernalia that relay and filter these occurrences to us. Kiss of Love perhaps took off, as many of its young participants found the cause worthy of collective selfies. The image influences the value of the act.
Facebook, Instagram and the front-facing cameras are the facilitators for middle class Young India's unrelenting navel gazing. But none of this technological onslaught can strip away some inherent paucity of collective grey matter. It is in such a situation that the movement Kiss of Love represents a type of triumph for Young India (who we can call the Selfie Generation). Consider the set of associations that mark title of the movement, 'Kiss of Love'. It presupposes different kinds of kissing. Perhaps the next such movement will be called 'Kiss of Hate' with the express intention of reuniting exes, and another, the 'Kiss of Death' movement.
We love celebrating the gravid potential of the demographic dividend we call Young India. A Young India whose intellectual pin-up could be the author of books with telling titles like Half Girlfriend. I have not read the book, but marvel at its title, as it offers a window into the mindset of its readers. I suppose it means one aspires for half-love, half-commitment, half-fidelity but full-time lust. For a semiotician, it could symbolise the halving of our long-held bourgeois values of romance, courtship, fidelity.
This Young India represents a departure from our previous generations in its level of unceasing exposure to the outside and online world. And that range of contact with depictions and experiences of the world could hasten the process of growing up. We live now in the age of accelerated aging. We also live in an age where the idea of the 'generation gap' is quite different from what existed earlier. Test this. Put the booze on the table, and get a 35-year-old, a 30-year-old, a 25-year-old and a 20-year-old to converse and you'll know what I am saying. There used to be a gap between generations. These days it is inside one generation. In a context of gradual, generational and developing interpersonal miscommunication, social media perhaps provides the grammar and idiom for some clarity of communication - across one generation.
The age of the selfie and social media communication perhaps signals the superior, even emotive status, we have granted technology. Every few years, mainstream cinema from Hollywood presents with outstanding creative power and emotional accuracy a send-up on the condition of love, romance and relationships in middle-class North America. Hollywood has a trademark over the romantic comedy genre but that gets its check and balance through regular, emotionally coruscating storytelling. American Beauty (1999), Closer (2003), Sideways (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), Silver Linings Playbook (2012) present more contemporary signposts in the graph of the emotion of love (or lack of it) in popular American culture. These maybe random picks but they have clearly left a mark on American popular cinema. (The worst of the lot, though no less significant, is Revolutionary Road.) The latest addition to these narrations is a remarkable story called Her.
Her, stars Joaquin Phoenix who is the Johnny Depp of this era (although Johnny Depp is alive and healthy but in terminal hipster decline). On the verge of a separation from his wife, Phoenix's character finds solace and friendship with his computer's Operating System, a character that is only a voice-over assayed with skillful aural emoting by Scarlett Johansson. In an age where we worship images, comes along a movie where a man and a voice establish a relationship, thus upstaging the status we give unto visuals. The film's eclat lies in the establishment of a bond between a suffering Phoenix and understanding Johansson. Its depiction of loneliness and heartache and the tragic methods of resolving them are so poignant that they make the film a testament of the times. In many respects Her is far ahead of its times and perhaps its social setting. Even emotions and experiences like alienation, heartburn and loneliness have a local imprint. Her is deeply North American. But such is the magic of living in the Age of the Internet and the Selfie it appears what Phoenix feels isn't far away from our shores. The Age of the Selfie is a post-modern, global one, where boundaries (even of love and pain) vanish. Bollywood awaits a desi version of Her.