http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/selfies-with-the-homeless-a-new-shareable-low
Selfies With the Homeless, a New Unshareable Low
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By Brian Merchant
We live in unequal times, and it's never been more obvious. The gulf between rich and poorAmericans is wider than it has been since 1928, right before the crash that brought on the Great Depression. But back then, at least the kids of railroad barons and newspaper tycoons didn't use smartphones to create a permanent record of their efforts to humiliate the destitute.
For today's haves, the comforts are multiplying like a swarm of self-replicating nanobots. New life-improving technologies keep rolling out—roboticized networked appliances, smarter homes, an ever-evolving ecosystem of apps and services that grant new conveniences to iPhone owners. And popular culture absorbs the tastes of the tech-forward haves, so we spend news cycles debating new games in the App Store or the etiquette of selfies.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of urban and rural poor who don't even know what a selfie is. There are, as the writer and Coppin State University professor D. Watkins points out, an entire class of people who are "too poor for pop culture."
Bridging the divide in the most repulsive way possible are the privileged, mostly white kids who are blithely taking selfies with the homeless and posting them to Instagram. Social media has documented a lot of dubious social media behavior indulged by the young and rich—but this is a new nadir. This trend isn't quite viral yet, but it's pervasive enough for Jason Feifer, the creator and curator of a series of blogs that document selfie habits, to take note. The result is "Selfies With Homeless People," and it's disturbing.
"It's common, but it's not, like, an epidemic," Feifer told me. Feifer's last project, Selfies at Funerals, was widely discussed. But this is another arena altogether. The images on the new blog represent a sampling Feifer gathered after doing a few simple searches on Instagram. People are actually tagging and labeling these photos with the pertinent keywords when they share them. "There are still plenty more out there, and I'm sure many more that didn't use keywords like 'selfie and 'homeless' that allowed me to easily find them."
I asked Feifer what struck him most about the images.
"Two things," he said, "the amount of people sticking out their tongues, the amount of them giving a thumbs up. Why is this a thing that multiple people, almost certainly unaware of each other, all decided to do? It's just baffling."
To see such stark insensitivity might be baffling, but the general trend is less so. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have developed in us an emphasis to craft share-worthy personal narratives. Shocking, funny, or compelling photos are rewarded with likes and micro-plaudits, so it's not hard to see why objects, cities, even people, start to be perceived as props in user timelines. It might be easier than ever for some dumb rich kids to mock the destitute, and not only feel no remorse, but comfortable sharing the images with their social circles. Combine that with the pervasive cultural insistence that the poor are lazy, inferior, or somehow deserve their circumstances, and you've got a recipe for an ugly turn in DIY media.
Selfies, of course are the celebrated pop culture phenom du jour; the word is now in the Oxford dictionary, the President takes them, and they're the subject of countless trend pieces from the commentariat. But the poor and the homeless are excluded from all that, as D. Watkins illustrates in a recent essay about life in East Baltimore.
"Miss Sheryl doesn’t have a computer and definitely wouldn’t know what a selfie is," he writes, describing a friend. "Her cell runs on minutes and doesn’t have a camera. Like many of us, she’s too poor to participate in pop culture. She’s on public assistance living in public housing and scrambles for odd jobs to survive." The people Watkins describes are too broke, working too long, and too overwhelmed to follow along with frivolous cultural commentary.
Now some of them are becoming participants in that pop culture after all; but unwittingly, used as props to win a few Facebook likes. Made a target for open mockery, not just at that moment, but permanently, on dozens of social media walls and circles.It all carries some uniquely dystopian overtones—the techless poor treated as primitive animals in a zoo exhibit.
As such, it's a special brand of humiliation we're bearing witness to, Feifer says. When I asked him why he considered selfies taken with the homeless uniquely offensive, he was unequivocal.
"It's because of the intent," he says, "these photos strike me as full of malice. I don't see any other reason to take them."
By Brian Merchant 8 hours agoTags: Social Media, culture, Internet, instagram, facebook, Dystopia Now
Selfies With the Homeless, a New Unshareable Low
Tweet
By Brian Merchant
We live in unequal times, and it's never been more obvious. The gulf between rich and poorAmericans is wider than it has been since 1928, right before the crash that brought on the Great Depression. But back then, at least the kids of railroad barons and newspaper tycoons didn't use smartphones to create a permanent record of their efforts to humiliate the destitute.
For today's haves, the comforts are multiplying like a swarm of self-replicating nanobots. New life-improving technologies keep rolling out—roboticized networked appliances, smarter homes, an ever-evolving ecosystem of apps and services that grant new conveniences to iPhone owners. And popular culture absorbs the tastes of the tech-forward haves, so we spend news cycles debating new games in the App Store or the etiquette of selfies.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of urban and rural poor who don't even know what a selfie is. There are, as the writer and Coppin State University professor D. Watkins points out, an entire class of people who are "too poor for pop culture."
Bridging the divide in the most repulsive way possible are the privileged, mostly white kids who are blithely taking selfies with the homeless and posting them to Instagram. Social media has documented a lot of dubious social media behavior indulged by the young and rich—but this is a new nadir. This trend isn't quite viral yet, but it's pervasive enough for Jason Feifer, the creator and curator of a series of blogs that document selfie habits, to take note. The result is "Selfies With Homeless People," and it's disturbing.
"It's common, but it's not, like, an epidemic," Feifer told me. Feifer's last project, Selfies at Funerals, was widely discussed. But this is another arena altogether. The images on the new blog represent a sampling Feifer gathered after doing a few simple searches on Instagram. People are actually tagging and labeling these photos with the pertinent keywords when they share them. "There are still plenty more out there, and I'm sure many more that didn't use keywords like 'selfie and 'homeless' that allowed me to easily find them."
I asked Feifer what struck him most about the images.
"Two things," he said, "the amount of people sticking out their tongues, the amount of them giving a thumbs up. Why is this a thing that multiple people, almost certainly unaware of each other, all decided to do? It's just baffling."
To see such stark insensitivity might be baffling, but the general trend is less so. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram have developed in us an emphasis to craft share-worthy personal narratives. Shocking, funny, or compelling photos are rewarded with likes and micro-plaudits, so it's not hard to see why objects, cities, even people, start to be perceived as props in user timelines. It might be easier than ever for some dumb rich kids to mock the destitute, and not only feel no remorse, but comfortable sharing the images with their social circles. Combine that with the pervasive cultural insistence that the poor are lazy, inferior, or somehow deserve their circumstances, and you've got a recipe for an ugly turn in DIY media.
Selfies, of course are the celebrated pop culture phenom du jour; the word is now in the Oxford dictionary, the President takes them, and they're the subject of countless trend pieces from the commentariat. But the poor and the homeless are excluded from all that, as D. Watkins illustrates in a recent essay about life in East Baltimore.
"Miss Sheryl doesn’t have a computer and definitely wouldn’t know what a selfie is," he writes, describing a friend. "Her cell runs on minutes and doesn’t have a camera. Like many of us, she’s too poor to participate in pop culture. She’s on public assistance living in public housing and scrambles for odd jobs to survive." The people Watkins describes are too broke, working too long, and too overwhelmed to follow along with frivolous cultural commentary.
Now some of them are becoming participants in that pop culture after all; but unwittingly, used as props to win a few Facebook likes. Made a target for open mockery, not just at that moment, but permanently, on dozens of social media walls and circles.It all carries some uniquely dystopian overtones—the techless poor treated as primitive animals in a zoo exhibit.
As such, it's a special brand of humiliation we're bearing witness to, Feifer says. When I asked him why he considered selfies taken with the homeless uniquely offensive, he was unequivocal.
"It's because of the intent," he says, "these photos strike me as full of malice. I don't see any other reason to take them."
By Brian Merchant 8 hours agoTags: Social Media, culture, Internet, instagram, facebook, Dystopia Now
