Turning your back

Many years ago, when my son was young, I bought a video camera.  It was a heavy thing, using shrunken VHS tapes, but I toted it around on family outings to record our exploits for posterity.

One day, when my son was in his teens, we went to some sort of military display where people were offered a chance to try a simulated parachute jump -- basically what we'd now call a zipline ride from a moderately high tower. My son stepped up for the thrill and I stood back and aimed the camera.  It was only once he was back on the ground that I realized that I hadn't actually seen him do the jump. I'd just seen a tiny image of it through the viewfinder. If memory serves, I never used that camera again.

What brings this to mind is the selfie craze, which is now starting to attract caustic comment from people like Timothy Egan at the New York Times. The latest aid to digital narcissism is the so-called "selfie stick", a gizmo that allows you to avoid the fisheye look that you get if you can only hold the camera at arm's length. I understand these are particularly popular with Koreans, so given the number of buses that bring tourists from that country to visit the Falls and the wineries, I'm sure it won't be long before I'm poked in the eye with one of these devices.

Selfies, particularly when taken in front of attractions like Niagara Falls (or St Peter's or Tower Bridge or whatever) actually strike me as being even more ridiculous than my long-ago video camera.  At least, when I shot that film of my son, I was actually facing the parachute wire, and could have watched if I'd just had the brains to lift my head from the camera.  But when you're taking a selfie, you literally have your back to whatever it is you supposedly came to see.  The camera sees it: you can't.

Your friends know what you like, so when you post your selfie on Facebook or Instagram, they don't learn anything new about how you look.  And they probably don't learn anything about the Falls or the Grand Canyon or wherever you happen to be, because you're standing in front of it and blocking out the view.

It's pathetic.  Or at least, that's what grumpy old coots like Timothy Egan and I think.