Selfie-serving way of modern narcissist

Consumers gorge themselves on images, driven by a need to fill an emptiness within themselves.

Social media provides the most addictive of all forms of imagery.

Consumers today gorge themselves on images, driven by an insatiable appetite for stimulation and a longing to fill the emptiness they feel within themselves. Media industries feed this bulimia with products of all kinds, from ­celebrity gossip to fashion, pornography, computer games and reality television.

But the most addictive of all forms of imagery in the contemporary world is found in social media, and is generated by consumers themselves, who thus engage in a kind of cultural cannibalism, feeding on pictures of each other, of their friends, of acquaintances and of strangers.

Faces in the street

In my work as an art critic, I have seen the change over the past few years. Visitors to galleries used to have the annoying habit of taking pictures of works in an exhibition, usually instead of looking at them. It was a way of demonstrating that they had been at the show while evading any risk of intimacy with the work.

Now they turn their backs to the work and use their phones to photograph themselves with it in the background. The message is even clearer: it’s not about the art, it’s about me. And the smartphone is the secret of the success of social media, for it allows the user to post the selfie online at once: they can demonstrate their presence at a cultural event in real time, and their micro-audiences can ­respond with some platitude even before they have moved into the next room.

From left, Olivia Cottrell, Poppy Savage and Pia Brynteson grab a selfie, a phenomenon likened to ‘cultural cannibalism’. Ms Cottrell says selfies are just a bit of fun. “I don’t take them as much as other girls I know. If you go through the camera roll on some of their phones, it’s almost all selfies.” Picture: Ryan Osland

Photography, with its promise of a literal imprint of our features and the presumed stamp of authenticity, has always served both the ego and our curiosity about the lives of others. The street photographers on show at Museum of Sydney, which I discuss in today’s Review section, were alert to an opportunity to profit from the vanity or sentimentality of their customers. But the number of photographs was minuscule compared to today’s overload, and that makes those that survive precious and interesting.

My grandmother lived to be 100, so there are countless photographs of her from the later decades of her life. The very early ones, on the other hand, are rare glimpses into a time in her life before any of us knew her, and into a less familiar historical period. This casual picture, at right, taken about 84 years ago, is spontaneous and full of life, not posed and primping for an audience; it is a tiny but living sample taken from the flow of real existence.