A religious reflection on selfies? I braced myself for a screed. And sure enough, Detweiler begins by acknowledging the popular revulsion to this new technology. He cites a survey of college students, themselves practitioners, who condemn selfies as “arrogant, self-absorbed, disgusting, degrading, ridiculous, vapid, useless, shameless, vain and hedonistic” (8). Posting selfies is a form of “performative self-promotion.” They distract from healthy, face-to-face relationships. They disembed us from our physical surroundings, as epitomized in the infamous selfie posted by a teen at Auschwitz. They feed a narcissistic hunger for affirmation. Because they require an always happy appearance, selfies are facades that hide our struggles, leaving the depressing impression that all our friends are having much more fun and success in life than we are.
But Detweiler is ambivalent. These criticisms sound so eerily familiar to previous critiques of new technologies: to artistic critiques of art nouveau and art deco as crass commercialism; to critical theory's critique of jazz as superficial and self-indulgent; even to the novel as an escapist substitute for real life. Might not selfies, too, deserve a second look, a more discerning religious assessment?
Detweiler proposes to “look back in order to forge a way forward.” The bulk of his book is a fascinating social history of portraiture, and especially self-portraiture across an array of earlier media. He surveys the practices of classical Greek sculpture, Orthodox iconography, renaissance portrait painting, early photographic portraits, and even romantic autobiographies, as well as Goffman's psychological studies of performances of the self in everyday life. Such “selfies” were also often idealized. They could be promotional, but they could also be aspirational. They could be superficial, but they could also be revelatory, a mode of access into the life of another. Indeed, in the case of icons, they could even be hierophanies. The important question, Detweiler argues, is not whether, but how the taking, posting, and viewing of selfies could be an authentic, even a religious practice.
He takes his cue in part from the original myth of Narcissus, the youth of Greek mythology who drowned himself through his absorption in his own image in a pond. Detweiler notes that there is another, less often remembered character in the story, Echo. Narcissus and Echo were lovers. But through his self-absorption, Narcissus became deaf to the sound of Echo's voice, leading to her own diminishment and ultimate disappearance into mere aural mimicry. In Narcissus’ transfixion upon his own image, not only was he lost, but so was his lover. The problem was not self-image, but self-isolation.
In the Gospels we have another story of transfixion—the apostles at Jesus’ transfiguration. Detweiler plays with this pericope to explore a positive religious retrieval of the selfie. For, he argues, we could take the transfiguration as Jesus’ own ultimate selfie: a visual revelation to his disciples of his true divine self. What if we were to treat our selfies as potential icons of our true self? What if we were to school our eyes to see beyond the literal image to the personality, the character, the life of the person posting?
In the final chapters, Detweiler brainstorms possibilities. Could selfies be contemplations, rather than mere documentations, of our experience? Could they become images composed not with an eye to what “pops,” but with what draws viewers into the heart of an experience, something that captures what made that experience meaningful to you? As an example of posting as a religious practice, he cites Ann Voskamp's #1000gifts hashtag campaign. How powerful would it be to post on Instagram a thousand days of grateful screenshots? Would that not be a powerful testament (and awakening) to the presence of God in and around us? What if we were to approach the composition of a selfie the way we approach the painting of an icon? What if we were to see and practice the “selfie” as a sacred craft, one available to all—a digital devotional, so to speak?
Like any other new technology, there is an initial “yuck” factor. But selfies could become a “godly discipline” if we think before we snap and pray before we post. Detweiler closes with a blessing for himself and his readers: may our framing, posting, and viewing help transfigure us, like Jesus, into our best selfies!
