Darwin's selfies

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, if you give Generation X-box a hand-held device capable of taking and instantly transmitting photographs of what is in front of them, they will use it the wrong way round.

All over the world, in places where our forebears would stand and gaze in awe, visitors now turn their backs on the monument or landmark and grin inanely for the benefit of a phone held at arm's length in front of them.

Some have gone further; on a recent trip, I noticed that many of the younger Far Eastern tourists carried small extending poles which enabled them to snap their own faces from a greater distance. How many selfies do you have to take for it to be worth investing in a gadget like that?

Meanwhile, such is the ubiquity of the genre and its more dubious spin-offs that schools are now devoting entire lessons to explaining to children why it is inadvisable to photograph one's genitalia and send the results to other people, a practice which I don't recall being mentioned back in the days of the Kodak instamatic.

Since the idea of taking endless photographs of oneself is likely to appeal most to the immature and the terminally narcissistic and the process is far from foolproof, the internet abounds with examples which mine a rich vein of idiocy.

'Is this the most dangerous selfie fail?' asks the Telegraph, reporting on the man who tried to take a selfie in front of half a ton of angry pot-roast at the bull-running in Bayonne last week. Well, no, actually; a sad little collection of Google entries testifies to the foolhardiness of photographing oneself on the edge of a cliff or at the wheel of a car.

And at the weekend, in what should be a shoo-in for a Darwin award, a Mexican managed to shoot himself in the head while posing with a loaded gun; his intention, apparently, was to load 'cool' pictures of himself with the weapon onto facebook.

When ET and his chums show up a few millennia hence and study what remains, it's quite likely that they will date the decline of what was once human civilization to the invention of the phone camera and social media.

Why is Facebook like the back end of a bus?

Do you or don’t you?

The nation, it seems, is divided into ardent social networkers and those who wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I fall into the latter category, so I admit I'm slightly biased.

While not necessarily subscribing to the view that Facebook is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse and we’re all going to hell in a handcart designed by American college kids, I have to admit it makes me distinctly uneasy.

And I’m not alone – this week’s Telegraph carries a piece by headmaster John Newton outlining his concerns about the effects of Facebook on the young: ‘Children believe that the imprimatur of the internet gives a statement an authority and a value that are unquestioned’.

I dare say that, when William Caxton and Johannes Gutenberg demonstrated their cutting edge technology, there were dark mutterings about it giving equal validity to sacred and profane content – “Nothing good will ever come of this printing – you mark my words!” – but nevertheless the printed word inexorably acquired precedence over handwriting.

Now we are seeing the same phenomenon at work, as children attach more significance to what they read on the internet than to what they are told in class. They are bombarded with so much information – and misinformation – that they no longer recognize their own limitations.

The authority of teachers and respect for their superior knowledge have been undermined to the extent that a twelve-year-old, looking at the word ‘whom’ on the board, can point out with utter conviction and a distinctly triumphal air: “You’ve made a mistake – there’s no such word as ‘womm’.”

He knows there’s no such word – he’s never seen it before, ergo it does not exist. As Newton puts it,
‘By unleashing a monster which encourages young people to learn from each other armed by their inevitably limited perspective...we will raise a generation who do not love learning but simply see the screen as a source of opinion – any opinion – or nuggets of information, poorly digested, that will suit their point of view.’

He also highlights the problems of teachers using facebook to communicate with their pupils – a favoured strategy among some progressives: ‘An instruction to do the questions on page 17 sitting next to a photo of a drunken moment in Ibiza can have dire consequences’.

Personally, I feel there’s a trade-off here – teachers need the respect of their pupils and to keep their home life entirely out of the school domain and that means exercising extreme caution over Facebook and its ilk. Any teacher who posts personal details on the internet where pupils – and parents – can see them is taking a grave risk.

Despite its many evils – the proliferation of Facebook-linked divorces, the risk of meeting unsavoury characters online, the potential for lynch mobs and the devastation of ruined reputations or careers – social networking is here to stay and schools will have to take a stand.

The first step should be to remove all implicit endorsements in schools – unbelievably, there are school websites containing direct links to Facebook and similar sites. There is much to be said, too, for a ban on internet-enabled mobile phones in schools.

And, above all, schools need to get across the message that anything published on the internet is immediately beyond your control. The best advice I’ve heard is ‘Don't put anything online today unless you’d be happy to see it on the side of a bus tomorrow’.

It’s a rule I try to follow – although tomorrow, at least, it would have to be a bloody big bus.

Lord of the Flies caught on camera

We're all going to Hell in a handcart, and the sign on the front says 'Facebook'.

The indications have been out there for a while - Jordan posting pictures of her infant daughter tricked out in lipstick and mascara, for instance, or the jaw-dropping awfulness of  'social networking bingo - and it's set to get worse with the advent of a new system allowing users to find the exact locations of anyone currently online.

And today, there's a horrifying indication of the effect this is having on the young. A group of schoolchildren this week found a dead body floating in a stream near their school - a traumatic experience by anyone's standards, you might think.

But not, it seems, for the children of the media-obsessed 21st century. According to one 16-year-old witness:

'Everyone started crowding around and people had their phones out. We were telling everyone else to shut up because everyone else was trying to take pictures and laughing.’

And as soon as they got home, apparently, they published the pictures on the internet. Photo ergo sum; the ubiquitous phone camera has turned the juvenile population into a pack of amateur paparazzi with a ready-made market for their wares.

The Head Teacher is trying to play this down, saying that one boy took a picture, but deleted it from his phone before teachers spoke to him - an effect somewhat marred by the words of the Detective Chief Inspector:

"I am especially keen to speak to anyone including any school pupils who were at the scene and who may have taken photographs or video footage before the police arrived."

This reassurance may be a necessary one. It's a cliche to say children today have no respect for anyone, but that is surely taking it to new extremes - the schoolboy witness went on to add ‘Some kids were throwing stones at the body'.


Or worse. The man was lying on his back with his head out of the water; the children had no way of knowing for certain that he was dead. In fact, the first teacher on the scene actually went into the river to check for signs of life.

The idea of a generation so inured to death and violence that they not only view a dead or dying man with equanimity but even treat him as a target is a disturbing one; this sort of behaviour is more usually associated with child soldiers or victims of bloody civil war.

But what I find truly frightening is the narcissism of using such a traumatic event to enhance their personal online status.

Update: JuliaM sums it up perfectly in an update to her post on the subject.

A mass cultural imperative? Pass the popcorn

A Facebook group has been set up (don’t you hate that phrase?) in a midlands town; so far, 150 people have signed up. The founder justifies her campaign thus:

“The Council advertises that one of its priorities is to be cleaner and greener; how can that be true when we have to travel so far by car, adding to the carbon footprint?”

So what is it that forces residents to drive unreasonable distances? Medical care? Education? Grocery shopping? No, all of these are in plentiful supply locally and well served by public transport.

What this town lacks is a multiplex cinema. The unfortunate inhabitants only have access to a two-screen town centre Odeon – 385 and 190 seats respectively – which is, apparently, not enough for some people; the campaign’s founder is ‘fed up having to travel to Northampton or Milton Keynes to view films in a modern big cinema’.

Now I’m not averse to the occasional night out at the pictures, but I’m intrigued by this wish for a multi-screen venue, since the main screen may be large but the other eight or so range in size down to something smaller than some of the televisions on sale in Curry’s. In any case, since you can only watch one film at a time, I’d have thought the number of screens is largely irrelevant.

But more interesting than that is the phrasing – that imperative ‘have to’. A cinema already exists, centrally located and near several car parks, big enough to hold 1% of the town’s entire population. It shows the same films as the big venues, it even sells the same over-priced sweets and buckets of popcorn.

And yet, when the 150 Facebook petitioners pass it by on their 40 mile drive to a multiplex, their increased carbon footprint is someone else’s fault.