Eh, I, I also, I still many, many! Selfie addiction
At first, selfies were treated with a grin, as a frivolous, albeit smack of self-admiration, entertainment for young people. And what's wrong with young people taking pictures of themselves and then posting "themselves" on the Internet? This is one of the ways of self-expression, the development of creative abilities …
I, again I and many more times I am. It is I in bed. And here I am in the bathroom. This is Me before and after sex. I'm on the roof of the train. I'm under the bridge. I'm with friends. I'm sad. I rejoice. I am in all my forms. I took a photo, pressed the phone button and now the whole world knows that I AM! The whole world knows that I am handsome, charming, courageous and fearless. Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte … How many likes did I get today? Who commented on my photos and how? They approve of me, so I exist. How else to attract attention?
At first, selfies were treated with a grin, as a frivolous, albeit smack of self-admiration, entertainment for young people. And what's wrong with young people taking pictures of themselves and then posting "themselves" on the Internet? This is one of the ways of self-expression, development of creative abilities. It is also fun, increases self-esteem and enhances communication. As for vanity, who is it foreign to? Especially at that age.
But recently, the selfie epidemic has spread at a fantastic rate, infecting millions of people, regardless of age, profession or social status. And after adolescents began to die in an attempt to take an extreme selfie, psychologists began to talk with alarm about the appearance of another addiction. A new term has appeared - selfie - one of the types of psychological disorder, in which a person either overestimates himself or, conversely, underestimates himself.
A way of expressing yourself, a question of vanity, or a diagnosis?
So what is a selfie - innocent entertainment or a dangerous symptom? And who are these people that moved their lives to the Internet and release hundreds of their images to the network? What motivates them, and what needs do they satisfy in this way?
Let's consider this issue from the point of view of the system-vector psychology of Yuri Burlan.
As the SVP says, all variations of the mental properties of people are based on eight groups of properties, which are called vectors. The presence of this or that vector, as well as the combination of vectors in a particular person, determines his needs, desires, character, behavior, actions.
According to system-vector psychology, the owners of the so-called sound and visual vectors are regulars of the Internet.
Night, silence, internet
A person with a sound vector is completely focused on himself. Nature laid in the depths of his unconscious desire to search for meaning, to know himself, to comprehend the laws of the world order. The thing that most people don't even think about is the audio engineer worries the most. He was born with this firmware. Who am I? Why was I born? What is the point of all this? And even if the sound engineer does not ask himself these questions directly, something from within, unclear and unsatisfied, like thirst, pushes him to search for answers.
Full self-focus makes such a person a closed egocentric who considers himself superior to others. A lone man, silent. He avoids noisy companies, conversations, live communication. He loves silence and solitude - so he thinks better. It is easier for him to write than to speak.
The Internet, with its social networks, seems to be created for sound people with their abstract intelligence to satisfy their sound needs. Our sound engineer sits all night long, hanging on various portals in search of meanings and satisfying the need to find a soul mate through communication in social networks.
But the soundman can hardly be blamed for self-addiction. He will not upload his photos in batches. He is not interested in this. The opinion of other people is not important for him in principle. Rather, the sound engineer will seriously hang on games, creating his own parallel reality.
The vast world of my tiny universe
Another permanent inhabitant of the Internet, a person with a visual vector, can be caught in selfomania.
A person with a visual vector, like no one else, feels all shades of beauty of the surrounding world and reproduces it in all possible ways: painting pictures, modeling clothes and interiors, creating exciting photographs, etc.
Nature has provided the visitor with the ability to form emotions in the widest range, from the primitive fear of death to all-embracing love. The visual person is insatiable both in receiving emotions and in their manifestation. He lives by them. No one like him is capable of creating emotional connections with other people, of empathy. And no one as badly as he needs them. In this, the spectator is the complete opposite of a person with a sound vector.
It is not surprising that it was he, the spectator, who was the first to use the technological capabilities of the Internet and modern means of communication as a window not only for finding information and communication, but also for demonstrating himself to people - both direct - through uploading his photos, and indirectly - through posting in networks of the results of their creativity.
If there is no one to love me, I will love myself
Can we say that one of the reasons for posting your numerous photos on the network is narcissism? Probably you can. But who among us will swear that he does not like to look at our photos and does not find himself in group photographs first of all? The fact is that there is a fine line between the narcissism inherent in many of us and narcissism, which Yuri Burlan's system-vector psychology makes out in detail.
What can motivate a visual person to constantly take new selfies? Only a lack of fulfillment of their innate desires. After all, the point of selfies is not only in uploading your photos for everyone to see, but also in receiving feedback in the form of approval or admiration. In other words, getting attention from other people. This means that in life this attention, recognition (and, if you look even deeper, love) is sorely lacking.
The fact is that a visual person receives a basic sense of security when he knows that he is being seen, he has not been forgotten, he is loved. Not getting enough of this, the viewer experiences unconscious fear and begins … by all means to knock out what he needs from those around him. And if in the family circle he can be hysterical, cry, shake loved ones to manifest feelings, then on a social network he does this by posting another portion of selfies.
Pill for happiness
Self-mania is especially common among teenagers. People of the new generation no longer see themselves without new ways of communication. Social media is everything. Blogs have become a way of self-expression. Visual boards on Pinterest with a selection of thematic photos, video feeds of what they ate for breakfast and how they get ready for school in the morning - streams of user-generated content have flooded the Internet. There are those who create this content, there are those who consume it, and, of course, those who ridicule, deny and hate. So, for example, Tumbler-girl is a characteristic that everyone understands for an undeveloped visual narcissist girl who lives for show, demonstrating and cultivating her uniqueness in every way.
At the same time, we see how such teenage accounts are becoming in demand among children like them. An audience appears, advertisers come. Highlighting your product in a new video from a popular teen video blogger is becoming an effective way to reach out to your target audience.
So blogging turns into a whole industry, mothers are involved in the process, who want their child to become popular by promoting it on social media. Here the skin vector, focused on making money in this way, takes its toll. The undeveloped skin approach - I want to do nothing and get paid for it. Shoot videos and be cool as a presenter +100500. I want to be cool, like Oksana Samoilova, who does not work, but has a million subscribers and lives a beautiful life. Before the eyes of adolescents living on the Internet, hundreds of examples of such a "sweet life". All you need is the first 100 thousand subscribers, and then they will notice you - when receiving such a message, teenagers try their best to promote "themselves". And they do it as best they can.
Demonstrating ourselves, we try to prove to others that we exist, that everything is "cool" with us. A child suffering from unrequited school love goes all over the place. And now we see a series of posts about what a bright and interesting life he has. Going to the zoo to take a selfie with a kangaroo, going to a concert to post a new post - life on display is not as easy as it might seem.
You are what you post. For the younger generation, such demonstrativeness is one of the ways to socialize. There are no pioneer camps, there is no value in honors, there are no organized events to massively attract teenagers to socially useful activities, but there is an Internet that lives according to the laws of a consumer society and the principles of individualism. It is no longer a shame to praise yourself and talk only about yourself. Active ranking among peers, coupled with distortions of upbringing, are pushing to take selfies in the most incredible places and extreme conditions, which turns into real injuries and deaths.
Selfmania vice versa
All-out self-mania fully reflects all the processes taking place in society. Inhabitants of the world of consumption, today we are not tuned in to give out - we want to receive, receive and again receive in ourselves. And in the case of visual people, it only works one way - give me attention.
Society rigidly dictates to us what is bad and what is good, builds our values in such a way that it is considered very cool to attract attention to ourselves. In the conditions of standardization and availability of technologies, doing this effectively and brightly is often equal to risking your life in search of a successful shot. And only after learning to express ourselves for the benefit of others, instead of a stream of selfies, useless blogs and tragic deaths, we will see a new reality and people who are beautiful not in form, but in content.
