Captured imaginations
We have the pleasure of living in Midtown Manhattan.
This also means we have the misfortune of living a few blocks from Times Square.
Normally, we try and avoid Times Square at all costs – even if it means walking a few blocks extra to circumambulate the tourist magnet.
But last week, we could not avoid it.
Walking through Times Square as quickly as possible, dodging the Captain Americas, the Spidermans, the Iron Mans and the Naked Cowboy, I was astonished to see about 1,000 people all clustered and staring up at something.
Normally, as a hardened New Yorker, I try and ignore this kind of stuff. But you don’t often seen 1,000 people all staring at a single spot. Something big must be happening. (Maybe someone was jumping off a roof?)
I turned to look.
What they were all staring at, what had grabbed their attention, was… themselves.
There, on the corner of 43rd Street and Broadway, Revlon had created a gigantic video screen that, instead of projecting ads for Revlon products was, instead, merely showing a live video of the crowd that was staring at the screen.
The ultimate ‘Selfie’.
And it worked!
(Bravo, Revlon)
Well, like they say in show business, give the people what they want.
And clearly what they want to see is… themselves.
Not only were they both mesmerized and delighted at seeing themselves, they took out their phones and took pictures and videos of themselves looking at themselves looking at themselves.
It was a fascinating moment.
Real, true street art (though I don’t think Revlon intended it as such).
The ‘selfie’ culture, brought to its ultimate conclusion.
There is a psychiatric term called Narcissim, which is defined as:
self-centeredness arising from failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder.
As we are no longer young babies, perhaps our whole culture is suffering from some kind of mental disorder?
The term Narcissim is derived from the story of Narcissus and Echo- taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As they no longer teach Latin, or Ovid or even the Classics (Trigger Alert!) in school, most students probably don’t know who Narcissus is (or was). In brief, Narcissus, a great hunter, catches a reflection of himself in a pond and falls so deeply in love with it that he cannot stop staring at himself. Echo, who is in love with Narcissus, was cursed by the Goddess Aphrodite and now is only able to repeat what she hears. Frustration follows.
This would make a great movie. Certainly better than Tomorrowland, apparently.
We are all clearly first class Narcissist, mesmermized by our own image.
If we are all Narcissus now, is the media Echo, simply repeating what it hears?
If someone were to go back to 1965 and someone asked them about what the future was like, they would say, “we all carry around these little devices not much bigger than a pack of cards. They have the power to connect us with the totality of all human knowledge. And we use them to take pictures of ourselves all day long, which we then share with people we don’t really know.”
That’s us.
Best new product: Selfie Stick?
Narcissim also infects our politics. What, after all, is #Bringbackourgirls. Remember that? Mali? Boko Haram? Michelle Obama and millions of others tweeted it. Well, that certainly helped. I think as soon as @Bokoharam saw it they said, “Oh oh!” or was it “Ho ho?” In any event, all the people who tweeted it felt much better about themselves anyway, even if no kidnapped girls were released. Hey, #ISISoutofPalmyra!
As the sage Maimonides wrote: “If I am not for me, who will be?” But he also followed with “If I am only for me, what am I?”
We sure have the first part down.
Maybe it’s time to focus on the second?
copyright 2015 Michael Rosenblum
