How do I Look?

Theology in the Age of the Selfie

White

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780334060031
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

We live in the age of the retouchable selfie. For those navigating the world of social media, the issue of how one presents oneself to the world has never been more critical. Psychological studies have shown the high impact of this selfie culture on the mental health of young people especially.How might the long tradition of the Christian gaze, found in scripture, art, theology and philosophy speak into this selfie generation? What, in this context, might be the significance of the doctrine of humankind's creation in God's image, or of the incarnation? On a more practical level, how might the monastic tradition of the 'chaste gaze' challenge or reinforce the selfie-culture?Putting such theological and ethical questions into dialogue with psychological studies and philosophical understandings, the book offers an important pastoral and scholarly resource for anyone seeking to understand theologically one of the most profound developments of the digital age.

1. How Do I Look? The Crisis of the Gaze

Does being Christian change how we look at others? How they experience our gaze? How we feel seen, how we feel about our image? It should do – according to Genesis 1.27, humankind, therefore each and every person, is made in the image and likeness of God. In seeing the other, I see God’s image. And Jesus taught that the other is my neighbour whom I am called to love (Mark 12.30–31).

But this question has become all the more urgent here and now when a major UK Government-sponsored study has revealed a crisis of social media-related body dissatisfaction among adolescents (Kelly et al. 2019). Can Christians – not just by their words, which are often unwelcome in a secular society, but by the bodily action of their gaze – give to others a positive experience of being seen?

How do I look, then? Of course, I am playing on two possible senses of look – the acting of looking at another and how I look to another. Looking is about the gaze, about seeing and being seen. It is seldom about one person seeing, alone, unseen. The look is about my appearance and one would be hard pressed to claim that there is never a note of anxiety, no desire for approval, for acceptance, for love.

Of course, it has always been there. People have always compared and judged and criticized, with words, with a gaze, or with silence.

And beauty has always been ideal and impossible. Few if any real people have looked exactly like the ancient Greek statues that still occupy dominant places in museums and with the process of ageing, time always wins. Perhaps, at least implicitly, these statues have been understood to represent a Platonic idea of beauty in which we ‘particulars’ can participate to a greater or lesser degree. It starts from our awareness of other people, who are different from me. I perceive them as being fatter/thinner, shorter/taller, fairer/darker etc. than me and, depending on the ideals of the culture(s) I inhabit, these differences may make me feel better or worse about myself. So my looking at others, my gaze, is culturally programmed to be critical (how I look at others) and self-critical of my own image (how I look to others).

But the ideal, varying across cultures and epochs, can frequently be oppressive: for example, nineteenth-century upper-class European women were commonly expected to wear corsets, tight-laced to narrow their waists, which recent medical experiments have demonstrated caused reduction to lung capacity (Steele 2001, p. 71). Today, we have a female thinness culture and male muscularity culture that many women and men simply don’t fit. The gym, the swimming pool and the beach, which should be places of recreation and pleasure, can become a nightmare. Especially as there is always the fear of someone taking a furtive snap on their phone while we are changing and posting it on social media. Cruel and insulting comments can follow, in a realm which has the potential to enable such good conversations, but more often is devoid of courtesy and used as an outlet for rage.

As human beings have always compared themselves and others, the current crisis of social media-related body dissatisfaction among adolescents (and others) cannot be blamed wholly on digital manipulation or social media, and with fundamental physical changes to the body during adolescence, at least some awkwardness about self and others is perhaps inevitable. Nevertheless, the proliferation of digital media (self) images on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. have massively raised the impact of the image of ideal beauty. Photographs are supposed to record what is really there, not just an ‘artist’s impression’. Yes, we know that lighting and focus can flatter: they are the photographer’s equivalent of make-up. Physical airbrushing of photographs, to remove ‘blemishes’ and enhance features deemed attractive, existed long before Photoshop, but Photoshop is much easier to employ. Indeed, such digital manipulation can make fundamental changes to appearances in a photograph such that the images of celebrities on the covers of magazines are not real. They have been retouched to look like an ideal of beauty which corresponds to no real person, but looks as if it does because it is a photograph. The critical/self-critical gaze now has the measure of an impossible reality, an unreality. As far back as 1996, Julian Stallabrass commented that with the then rising phenomenon of digital photography, the editing of a messy world into digital perfection ‘threatens to proliferate an ideological sameness … a new wave of blandness … the conventional beautiful’ (Stallabrass 1996, p. 34; see Jurgenson 2019, p. 98).

And indeed, physical make-up has gone beyond what you see in real life. Rather, ‘real life’ is now the camera’s view, the social media view on your phone. We want to really look like what social media and photo-altering technology permits. ‘Instagram Face’, part of the ‘quest for hyper-perfection’, which has dominated social media since 2015, is defined as ‘Photo-perfect skin and sculpted, contoured cheekbones, wide almond-shaped eyes which taper up into a feline point, and that full, inescapable mouth’ – inspired partly by the models Twiggy in the 1960s and Kate Moss in the 1990s (Jones 2018). As this is what gets the most likes on Instagram, therefore there’s an urge to look like this in real life, which with the amount of make-up involved (and time applying it) is not sustainable – and all to try and look like someone who doesn’t exist, an ideal like the Greek statue.

But while we can edit to our heart’s (dis)content, the question of digital editing starts with a technical problem. The smartphone, which brings together for the first time the camera and social networks in one device, also has a physical problem: the selfie-camera on these phones can only be held as far away from my face as the arm will stretch. That is not far enough to prevent me from looking like a fish. So in most phones, unless we switch it off or use a selfie stick, a filter uses an algorithm to make our face look ‘normal’.1

Normal: a word with so many implications. To make my face look normal, does that mean to restore the image to what the eye naturally sees? For example, to remove ‘red eye’? To edit out the glare from a spotlight? Or does it mean to remove ‘blemishes’ and offer ‘the best possible me’? If it is ‘the best possible me’, then just what is that? Whose idea of best?

As we’ve seen, the question of ‘whose idea of best’ has always been there in the ideal(s) of beauty. It’s not just my idea, it’s society’s, ‘theirs’. And the selfie is, as Nathan Jurgenson says, a social photo. It’s bad enough for someone to snap me in the changing room. It’s far worse that they can spread it all over social media, where I can appear before the merciless tribunal of beauty. However, things are more complex than that. We like social media because it connects us, stops us feeling lonely. As Jurgenson says, we should not ‘conceptually preclude or discount’ all the ways intimacy, emotions, even evil, can pass through a screen (Jurgenson 2019, p. 82). And I, personally, am much better at remembering friends’ birthdays thanks to Facebook.

But, says Jurgenson, the shared selfie is both an outlet and an audience for self-documentation. We can get likes and followers. Of course, we can then get anxious if we don’t get as many as we want, as we feel we ‘should’ (or, even worse, get none at all). Yet sharing pictures can be a pictorial way of chatting (notice how predictive texting increasingly offers images instead of words). Jurgenson argues that, unlike the traditional processed and printed photograph, which documents what is already past, a nostalgia, an indicator of mortality,2 the social photo ‘instead emphasises an ongoing exchange, a springboard to future action and dialogue … By being quick, the temporary photograph is a tiny protest against time’ (pp. 49–50).

The trouble is that another physical fact about the selfie is that it is necessarily a photo of me taking a photo of myself. It is not even like a self-portrait: rather, it shows me looking at me, my gaze on myself. It attaches image-taking and sharing technology to ‘the traditional workings of identity’, which it makes more explicit. ‘Selfies make plain the ongoing process of identity construction’ – which is perhaps why they are often deplored (p. 55). Perhaps a photo with friends is different (an ‘ussie’? The word never seems to have caught on), though again, if I post it, it is a story of me and my relationships and tells others that I have friends, so I am successful.

But what I regard as my self is, according to Jurgenson, ‘what you think others see when they see you’ – what they think your inner truth is (p. 57). Christians might question this definition (we will explore this more later), but if Jurgenson is right – that this is what most people, however unconsciously, understand their self to be – then it is perhaps not surprising that the possibility of ‘enhancing’ my appearance in selfies, beyond removing ‘red eye’ or glare, is a very attractive option. And while more or less tyrannous ideals of beauty have always been with us, we see from Julian Stallabrass’s analysis that I can easily construct my self according to ‘an ideological sameness … a new wave of blandness … the conventional beautiful’, and ‘rate’ others accordingly. And this beautiful self is disembodied: ‘Because digital images can be altered and edited with the aid of computers, they are not the same sort of “witness” as analog photos that are made more literally of light bouncing off the world’ (Jurgenson, p. 98).

If I can add a personal observation, during my seven years as a university chaplain I was struck by the intense social and aesthetic conformism of the large majority of students I encountered. That’s not to say that rebellion and bohemian eccentricity should be compulsory (they too can be conformisms), but there seemed to be a real fear of departing from a certain unconscious but very visible norm. Yet is it really surprising in a society that might be characterized by ‘surveillant anxiety’ (Crawford 2014), ‘camera consciousness’ (McCosker 2015) and a general awareness that cameras are distributed everywhere, from phones to drones? Facial recognition technology is normal and so, sadly, is image-based bullying.

So take a phone where you can shuttle between camera, social media and the internet (infinite source of ‘ideal’ images) with a touch and you have enough material to trigger a mental health crisis. Even in 2004, before the universalization of smartphones, Marika Tiggemann and Brenda McGill conducted a study of 128 undergraduate women at a South Australian university, investigating the link between adverts and poor mental health (Tiggemann and McGill 2004). Existing studies indicated to them that current societal standards for beauty ‘inordinately emphasize the desirability of thinness, and thinness at a level impossible for many women to achieve by health means’ (p. 23) and that the gap between the average woman’s body and size and the ‘ideal’ size was bigger than ever before (think of the employment of peripubescent models who are often naturally thinner than adults). The results of Tiggemann and McGill’s study confirmed their hypothesis that when women were presented with adverts, ‘the amount they actually focus on appearance and compare their overall appearance and body parts with the image predicts negative mood and body dissatisfaction’ (p. 37). ‘Body-isms [photographs of just parts of a body, such as a leg or a stomach] … elicit just as much social comparison and produced as much negative affect and body dissatisfaction as full-body advertisements’ (p. 39). Actually, body parts had the highest mean score for body dissatisfaction, which Tiggemann and McGill suggested could contribute to larger social effects, such as objectification. And of course Photoshop has been available since 1990, which means that the adverts in the study may have shown not just teenagers, but people who actually didn’t exist.

The impact of media on body image is not confined to women. Daniel Agliata and Stacey Tantleff-Dunn (2004) examined the impact of TV advertisements on males’ body image. A group of 158 males with a broad height and ethnic distribution were selected for the study. One group was exposed to advertisements with ideal male body images, the other to advertisements with neutral images. It was found that exposure to images of the ideal male (lean and muscular) can significantly increase one’s dissatisfaction with one’s own musculature, whereas non-appearance adverts had no such effect. Viewing ideal males also led to a significant increase in depression, but exposure to neutral advertising had the opposite effect. Agliata and Tantleff-Dunn noted that, at the time, the average person was exposed daily to nearly 25 appearance-related adverts, based on an average of 2.4 hours per day of watching TV – 150 per cent more adverts than in the experiment (p. 19). ‘Television and magazines exacerbate this problem by presenting airbrushed, artificial images as real’ (p. 9).

It is noteworthy that a journal entitled Body Image was founded in 2004, the same year as Agliata and Tantleff-Dunn and Tiggemann and McGill published their articles. And since then, with Photoshop and other applications enabling us to retouch our own images on social media, the whole issue has risen to a new level. Jennifer S. Mills, Sarah Musto, Lindsay Williams and Marika Tiggemann carried out an experiment on the ‘effects of selfie taking on body image and mood in women’ (Mills et al. 2018, p. 87). Previous research that Mills and her colleagues drew on found that women aged 16–25 spend up to 5 hours per week taking and uploading selfies on their personal profiles on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, which suggests that this activity constitutes a significant part of young women’s lives. Mills and her colleagues investigated an ethnically diverse group of 113 female psychology students at York University, Toronto. They were divided into three groups: those who could upload a photo and not retouch it, those who could upload a photo but were allowed to retouch it, and a control sub-group who read an article from social media on an unrelated topic (travel) and then answered questions on it. It was found that, post-experiment, anxiety went up the most with the untouched selfie sub-group and still went up significantly with the retouched selfie group, but actually dropped a little in the control group (perhaps because of relief that the questions were over!). Confidence dropped in all cases. Feelings of physical attractiveness decreased by similar amounts for both untouched and retouched (slightly more for retouched) but actually increased a little for Control. Perhaps we feel more attractive when we feel clever? There were ‘null effects on stated feelings of fatness, satisfaction with one’s body, and depression’ (p. 90), but Mills and her colleagues noted that a selfie shows only the face, not the whole body (clothed or unclothed). (This suggests an area for future research.) Being allowed to retouch multiple times did improve self-image compared with untouched, but that sub-group were actually less confident than those posting no selfies at all. Mills and her colleagues suggest by way of explanation that

it could be that scrutinizing and modifying images of themselves makes women think more about their flaws or imperfections. Retouching could activate feelings of self-objectification. Even though self-presentation strategies like photo-editing provide a sense of control over physical appearance […] they do not actually appear to improve mood or self-image. (pp. 90–1)

Of course this does not make social media bad in itself: Mills and her colleagues acknowledge how it can aid well-being through a greater sense of interconnectedness. But clearly technology that enables one to retouch one’s own image to an unreal and...