Name: Selfie
Rating: 4.1 (27 reviews)
Author: Will Storr

What’s in it for me? A scintillating study of the selfie-shaped society.

Wearing your heart on your sleeve, as Shakespeare’s Iago says, isn’t recommended. Before long, the birds will be pecking away at it.

That’s a bit of advice our selfie-addicted age seems to have internalized. Social-media feeds are where our “best selves” live. Slim, beautiful and fuelled by a diet of endless nutritious and photogenic brunches, it’s here that we present ourselves to the world as we’d like to be seen.

Narcissism plays its part in this. That’s hardly surprising given that we shoot an astonishing 100 billion selfies a year! But there’s more to it than just that.

Our ideal self has its own unique history. From the ancient Greeks’ image of the perfectly chiseled torso to the nineteenth-century obsession with self-improvement and our own competitive society, culture has molded our ideas of the self.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

how Californian politicians helped launch self-esteem as a solution in the 1980s;
why a banker’s shiny Ferrari probably impresses you even if you don’t think it does; and
why being fat is actually a sign of success in some cultures.

The way we think about our bodies is heavily influenced by the cultures we live in.

What’s the quickest way to feel bad about yourself?

For the author, it’s a look in the mirror. Every time he catches sight of his own reflection, he starts judging his appearance. Why, he wonders, is his stomach so much bigger than it should be? But then again, why shouldn’t it be the size it is – where does the pressure to be slim and toned come from?

Well, our bodily ideals are shaped by the culture we’ve grown up in.

Take weight: A sleek physique is highly prized in the Western world, but that’s not the case everywhere. In Tanzania, for example, the opposite is true. Fat is valued as a symbol of high status.

The Western ideal of the perfect body has a unique history, with roots that stretch all the way back to the earliest European culture: ancient Greece.

Think of the appearance of mythical figures like Hercules or Adonis: they wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of Men’s Health with their chiseled muscles and perfect pelvic v-lines.

That means our ideas about what our perfect selves should look like are still being shaped by the thoughts and beliefs of people who lived more than two-and-a-half-thousand years ago!

But it’s not just body image that’s shaped by culture. The very way we think – our cognition – is also determined by the environment around us.

Most people in the West receive a formal education where they’re taught to analyze and measure information, meaning that they see the world a certain way. As a result, we think that everyone sees things this way, but that’s not the case.

Consider the Himba people of Namibia: They live a semi-nomadic lifestyle completely isolated from the modern world. As they don’t receive a Western education, the Himba consider information differently. When the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott asked the Himba to analyze the emotional connection to certain sounds, for example, they couldn’t, as Himba culture doesn’t teach that form of thinking.

In short, the way we think about the world is heavily influenced by the culture and society in which we live.

We pay attention to and model ourselves on popular and successful individuals.

What do Jesus, Confucius and Kim Kardashian have in common? They all exerted a powerful influence on the people around them. Whether it was disciples, countrymen or Instagram followers, they were surrounded by people who looked up to them.

That’s because influential individuals don’t just mold the culture they live in, they also shape our ideas of what kind of people we want to be.

High self-esteem might not make us better citizens, but it definitely makes us narcissistic.

It’s par for the course today for parents to tell their children how special they are. If you just believe in yourself, they say, you can achieve anything. After all, what parent wouldn’t want to boost their child’s self-esteem?

But the idea that high self-esteem is socially beneficial is a fairly recent idea, with the notion only really gaining wider currency in the 1980s. And while it might sound inherently plausible, it has no basis in fact.

The internet pile-on and shaming culture teach kids that they can’t make mistakes.

Scroll through any millennial’s Instagram feed and it quickly becomes apparent which characteristics are most highly prized today. The ideal self is slim, beautiful and has a pronounced taste for nutritious and photogenic brunches.

But there’s another, less obvious trait that the internet has taught us belongs to the perfect self: we shouldn’t make mistakes.

Key ideas in Selfie

What is Selfie about?

Selfie (2017) takes a hard look at today’s internet-driven age of self-obsession. Asking where our ideal of the perfect person came from, acclaimed British journalist Will Storr traces the history of the self from ancient Greece to the social-media-heavy world of selfies and Instagram brunch pics. Along the way, he picks out a multitude of fascinating facts about the political, cultural and economic factors that have shaped the Western world’s notion of who we should be and what we should look like.