Are Selfies the New Way to Do Storytelling?

Selfies: Modern Day Storytelling?

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

Before articulated language evolved into written characters, they were mere pictographic imprints in walls of caves and other natural surfaces. But we are long ways away from that.

In many of traditional human societies, the role of storytelling was vital for their survival, and you may be asking why. The spoken languages, telling the stories and myths from the old days served to preserve their history, their cultural identities, and also serve to connect two different sections of their social order: the young and the elderly.

Numerous spiritual traditions, such as the Kabbalah, literally translated as “Word of Mouth to Ear,” relied on the verbal account to pass down to history and knowledge from their elders and masters. Oral tradition was the guarantee that their past would not be forgotten.

Our world is now more connected than ever. The Internet is not only to blame, but also the advent of mobile phones. These days, texting is even more popular than phone calls. We have an entire generation that knows nothing more than taking photos, texting, and the advantages of brief-blogging with 140 characters or less.

But spoken and written languages are more than just verbal and printed representations of our reality, they are a means to an end. Language opens new dimensions inside the human brain and activates faculties such as imagination and the ability to think out of the box, and to think creatively/artistically. When you reserve yourself the possibility to imagine a scene of a book or to build a villain character with your own mental resources, you are exercising a powerful aptitude, which is the one of thinking independently.

A human mind should be able to not only contemplate realities outside the box, but independent structure is a means to practice critical thinking. Only through the cultivation of these built-in tools, can generations actually evolve and adapt, as our societies and world are unceasingly developing and changing.

Storytelling today seems to have changed into a self-referential perspective with selfies, which in my opinion can be very limiting and with hues of control negligence. The speed of the internet appears to be the parameters to determine the attention span of readers. Irrelevance is given priority over serious human crisis transformations.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the ‘net, a web that would virtually connect all the sentient beings of this blue planet, came from an old Egyptian archetype, also honored by the Native Americans: The Grand Mother Spider. She is the one that weaves the web of life in which all the creatures are related; the old Idea of ALL is ONE, and We are ONE. Her web of interconnection and interdependence is the reinforcement of our ability to live with each other, to pursue understanding, and explore the wealth that resides in diversity. Instead, we are plagued with food pictures and pictorial journaling of individual daily activities.

Don’t get me wrong; I am one who believes in the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language. ~Lisa Kristine

And they do. Some photographs can explain much more than words, but they are usually representing facts, events, and circumstances that carry on them with some human depth. In other words, they describe emotions and sentiments and passion. Those are not easy to describe in words, anyway.

The million-dollar question that we should ask ourselves would be: Are we building up an archetypal representation of an entire generation that knows the world only through selfies taken with their cell phones? Is technology limiting their ability to explore complex thoughts, to develop abstract concepts (such as empathy), leaving them vastly apathetic and non-responsive to world’s problems?

There are some that disagree with my statements, they believe that texting came to add a new dimension to human contact, not to subtract. But even these social analysts recognize that there will be a “negligible” long-term impact on our popular culture.

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It is puzzling how technology allowed us to be more connected with each other; literally transforming the world around us, eliminating the dimension of space-time between all of us. We live in the Now moment. We can accompany and witness live a revolution, even a war thousand miles across the globe, but we may not know the neighbor across the street where we have lived for ten years.

We have social media friends from various countries, we befriend them, share selfies, photos, ideas, and birthdays; but we also have serious difficulties expressing feelings, and dealing with life challenges as they present themselves to all of us, in the real world.

Nowadays, to have a public persona is part of the job description of being a functional human being, to the point that when someone kills their public profile inside of a social network, that action is taken as a bad sign; and in many cases, can also symbolize a future attempt at suicide.

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