Why a selfie is more than just a picture

In a digital universe where 300 million Instagram photos are tagged with the word “selfie,” the practice of snapping our own photos has its cheerleaders and critics both. Selfies are either harmless or they’re apocalyptically ghastly. Selfie-taking is a symptom of millennial self-absorption or precisely how an older generation would have behaved if they, too, had been armed day and night with a lightweight portable camera.

What’s less apparent to most digital commentators is the damage our global selfie-taking habits has done to how we remember the signature emotions of our lives. Most of the time aimed and shot during an emotional “high,” selfies not only freeze the moment, they also compromise how we remember – or believe we remember – the past.

I spend 300 days a year traveling from country to country, interviewing consumers for their insights on brands ranging from beer to detergent to cereal. In the course of my home visits, and with the owners’ permission, I open drawers, peer inside refrigerators and analyze everything from music to television shows to photo libraries. Everywhere I look, of course, selfies flourish. But when I ask interviewees of all ages to go into further detail, or fill in missing context – what were you feeling? Why did you take that cheeseburger photo? Who is the boy in the green sweater? – I am always slightly shocked by how they remember almost nothing.

How did human memory work in the days before selfies? Well, there are two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term. The former, like a firefly’s light, lasts anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds. Long-term memory creation requires the brain to create new linkages and synapses. In turn, lasting memory is either implicit, which refers to those things we know instinctively how to do – drive a car, brush our teeth – or explicit, which refers to things we are actively trying to recall. Explicit memory is broken down further into semantic memory (e.g., we know the capital of Maine is Augusta) or episodic (we remember the moment we saw that moose outside Augusta). In turn, the brain’s storage area for new memories, the hippocampus, encodes whatever memories have a strong emotional content in ways that generally involve several of our senses, at which point these memories migrate further into the cortex where, whenever ignited, they gain in strength.

In contrast to everyday photos, which are about capturing memories, we take selfies to capture emotions – primarily our own – with the crucial side consideration of how alluring we looked at the time. The problem is, by starting and stopping there, selfies suggest and inspire no more than the peak “high” of that moment itself. In a climate of instant gratification, there is no room for wider complexities of desire, or anticipation. Outside of the selfies we took, when we try to retrieve the details of our vacation, or the last two weeks of high school, we hit a wall. All those funny, random details and sensory impressions, that is to say, the natural emotional feedback created by a multi-sensory experience and by time itself passing, are no longer there. Why? Because our emotional “highs” never made their way into our brains in the first place. They were uploaded instead onto a phone, a cloud or a hard drive where a program filed them automatically under “moments.”

Many people have observed that we no longer have the need to remember information. If the name of the second president, the third Teletubby, the fourth Supreme or the fifth Temptation escapes us, a cursory Google search resolves all. The problem is that more than the political and pop culture information we now outsource to our devices, we are now outsourcing the core emotions of our lives.

Along the way, our imaginations take a beating, too. A good analogy to this is what happens when a book – say, Gone Girl, or The Hunger Games – turns into a movie. If we ever find ourselves rereading the book, what happens? From that point on, we envisage the characters with the heads and gestures of Ben Affleck, or Jennifer Lawrence. The more we tell someone a story, after all, the more fantastical, and bizarrely real, it becomes. Real-life events suggest, whereas selfies freeze-dry experience. It’s no wonder the people I asked about their selfies, from Brazil to Indonesia, looked back at me mostly blankly.

How does this affect how we recall the past? A middle-aged friend of mine who had a difficult, complicated relationship with her father has taken, since his death, to recalling the “good times,” the same process by which our memories allow us to recall our childhoods in a mostly flattering light. What happens if, thanks to selfies, those good times are pushed out of reach forever, frozen in the image of a fallen Christmas tree, or a father’s eternally disapproving frown?

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