Social media and narcissism

Last year, as per the tradition of doing random things right before exams, I helped out with an art project weeks before Prelims. The gist of it is about social media affecting our beauty standards and I thought I might write something of my own about that topic. All of the pictures, special effects and insane makeup are done by my friend Carmine (@carmineofmidgard) who also did a good majority of the other photoshoots.

There was one particular scene where we had to step out into a park to shoot it (the picture below) and along the way people were giving me weird stares because of all the crazy makeup I have on my face. In my head I pretended that I had no makeup on as a way to stop feeling so self conscious about it. A little boy got scared off by me though, and his mom tried to be polite about it while maintaining intense self-control over her own expression. The interesting thing here is that I literally feel zero shame showing these crazy pictures on social media where arguably more people will see it and silently judge in their heads — out of my sight. At least for Instagram, the fact that we are exempt from people’s reaction during the process of taking photos and can wait in the safety of the other side of the screen makes it much easier to do embarrassing stuff.

I feel like I have done too many GP stuff on the benefits and drawbacks of social media and I don’t feel like recycling the same points that most of us probably know. The obvious thing is that image based platform like Instagram potentially damages the way we view ourselves when we compare to the perfect pictures of other people, or the reverse could also be true where we enter an age of narcissism that the older generation tends to frown upon. Yadah yadah and so on. What I am more interested in doing here is to reflect about my own use of social media because of course I have to talk about myself amidst more photos of myself. Truly typical of this self-absorbed generation of youths.

For myself and maybe those born plus minus 2 years from me, we had a childhood partially untouched by social media, and then learnt to grow up with it during our teenage years. I had no social media until Sec 1, and even then for the first year or so it made no real difference. My brother is even better — he literally just made an Instagram account a few months back. The learning curve of handling social media was visually plotted if I scrolled down my own account. Initially I stuck purely to posting pictures of my art (which was pretty cringey with all those over the top filters) or at best group photos with generic captions. It was more of a tool for me to follow my friends and keep in touch, sort of like a contacts list but way more comprehensive and let’s me know what is going on in their lives.

Back then I was still really apprehensive about doing anything crazy with my social media because everybody thought it was narcissistic to post solo pics (maybe that judgement still stuck around till today) and more importantly I had developed 0% of my personality so I stuck to posting and captioning just like how I saw everybody else did.

Over time though, what I used social media for began to change. Sure it still is a way for me to keep up with my friend’s lives and stay in contact, but it also became a form of entertainment to follow accounts of cute animal or amazing artists or dope photography. It then became something like an extended business card I pass to people along with a collection of whatever I have done in the past. My friends ask me why I put my account on public or why I let everybody look at my blog — it’s precisely because whatever I put on my social media is a piece of information for people to get to know me better and honestly it does a much better job than I can do in a brief span of time face to face (IRL I’ll probably spend half the time being awkward and quiet anyways). Most importantly, social media became a visual diary of my own growth and my own playground. I create weird photos and write random stuff because I want to. One day I will scroll down my posts and get the same kind of feeling you get when you are doing room de-cluttering and find old letters or belongings and think “wow how did I think like that” and be amazed by how far you have come.

Or maybe my use of social media started becoming bolder simply because my grip on normalcy and sanity slips with each passing year. It goes either ways.

Can social media be harmful in the xyz ways that you would write for a GP essay? Yes, but it depends on how we view the purpose of it. I do also think that at some point later down the road, in a more nuanced and different social context, some things are going to come back and bite me (maybe like Trudeau?). Should I have listened to my mother’s advice to always keep a low profile and not leave traces of myself on the permanent world of internet? Maybe future me will answer differently, but currently I am not about to close shop and call quits. If there’s something I learnt from my cringey posts a few years back, it’s that nothing really ages well on social media regardless.

That said, there’s really not much I could say to defend gratuitously posting my own face most of the time. My art teacher in secondary school said that she has a friend who took a selfie everyday because that way she captures and documents her youth somewhere for her to look back on when she is old and wrinkly. Maybe my photos on social media serve that purpose for me because I don’t want to be 80 and realise that I forgot how I looked as a teenager.

Or maybe I’m just a narcissist, as my brother would frequently accuse me of being. It goes either ways.

Hence, quite fittingly, I’ll end off this post with a whole slideshow dedicated to even more photos of myself enjoying whatever freedom I have over social media.