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Health & Fitness

On Selfies, Society and Walt Whitman

                           I celebrate myself, and sing myself...

                         .... The smoke of my own breath, Echoes,

                         ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, 

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                         crotch and vine...

                         You shall listen to all sides and filter them from

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                         your self.  

                                        ~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 

     What I love about Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is that he is not afraid to dive right into the body of his own humanness. He’s undaunted by its fluids, its bony structure, the slippery realms of his organs and the heat of his own flesh. For Whitman, the “celebration of self” is merely the understanding that he is interconnected with the “root” and “vine” of Nature itself, thus the juxtaposition in the aforementioned quote between his own body and the body of nature, or to put it simply, Mother Earth.  For, you see, he IS Earth and vice versa. It is the last line in particular that I bring attention to: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”   Whitman’s calling for us to listen as opposed to see what our experiences tell us is at the heart of an unfortunate contemporary shift in the cultural perspective of how we understand ourselves and what we make of our Self in the world we live in. In other words, we no longer listen, for listening involves silence and introspection. Rather, we turn to seeing our experience because seeing it is so much easier and is instantly gratifying. If we can see it, then we did, indeed, experience it. 

        In the January 19, 2014 issue of the Providence Journal, in the article “Snapping the Picture, but Missing the Moment,”  staff writer G. Wayne Miller quotes University of Rhode Island philosophy professor Cheryl Foster as stating, ‘[We] are susceptible to visual power in part because it is our dominant sense for navigating the world’ (A15). Furthermore, Foster uses the term “ocular centrism” to describe “an emphasis on the visual at the expense of the other senses,” and admits that, in her opinion, we are a culture that has become “strongly ocular centric” (A15).  

     The main form of exercising this ocular centrism is, of course, in the form of Selfies. We feel compelled to snap a picture of ourselves doing everything from showing off a new outfit, to having a romantic dinner with our significant other, to watching a Broadway show, to (gasp!) giving birth. The problem is not the actual picture itself nor is the act of producing a Selfie inherently problematic. Let’s face it, we have all done a Selfie of ourselves at some point, right? The problem with Selfies is twofold: (1) It signifies a nation obsessed with capturing the moment in a frame that “locks it in” when we post it to visually live forever in the cyber-world of Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. The ubiquity of Selfies belies our neediness to prove that an experience existed. On a deeper, more Whitman level, we have unlearned how to listen and have begun to rely solely on seeing. We exist because we have the picture to prove it. (2) Sadly, if we are so reliant on ocular gratification, as Foster asserts, this dependency ends up lessening our ability to recognize other, more visceral, components of self-worth, like our ability to empathize or be intuitive.  

     Miller states in his article that, “in actual life, camera obsession distances us from nature and from full sensory experiences -- and from each other” (A15). It is no longer enough to store an experience  in the deepest part of ourselves; rather, it needs to be ensconced in a visual replica to be stored in the memory banks of cyberspace.  The problem with celebrating oneself today is it no longer rings true to Whitman’s 19th century philosophy involving personal growth and one’s connection to Nature; rather, we see reflected in the barrage of Selfies people feel compelled to do, a blurring between identity and image, Self and Selfie, root and pixel....  

 

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