In your head.
Digital narcissism and the threat of endless adolescence
– By Meredith Haaf
This essay on the work Showroom Girls was published in the catalogue Status - 24 Contemporary Documents, Fotomuseum Winterthur, june 2012.
I saw the mirror staring back at me,
And it told me I’m a self machine.
(I BLAME COCO)
And it told me I’m a self machine.
(I BLAME COCO)
I hardly know J, but it seems she got a love letter today. I know that because she posted the letter on Facebook and commented “J got the most beautiful love letter in the world today.” Ten people likes that. The letter was evidently written by her new boyfriend. I spent five minutes scrolling through J’s profile to see who it might be and whether I recognized the name, but before I’d found out I was already bored by the holiday snaps and party stories and regular status updates about how J is working longer today and drank too much yesterday and is going to get round to baking a cake tomorrow, so I closed the Facebook tab and stared at the girls that Willem Popelier found somewhere on some showroom computer - his representatives of the digital narcissism that seems to have caught more and more people in its worldwide web.
Anyone who spends a lot of time online knows what Popelier means, but as not everybody does, perhaps I should give a short summary of this very contemporary personality disorder: the digital narcissists’ favorite pastime is seeing themselves on the computer, creating pictures and other representations of themselves and posting them in various places (Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter) online. Digital Narcissists not only think they’re definitely interesting people, but also generous, because they spread their egos so widely throughout digital space, always assuming that people out there really want to know about them. And, indeed, most internet-users aren’t just digital dandies, they’re also information-hungry observation machines. Digital narcissism doesn’t work without digital voyeurism.
The showroom girls would surely never have left their pictures on the computer if they hadn’t assumed that somebody would look at them and form an opinion of them. Popelier’s work Showroom Girls is a kind of offshoot of his larger series “Showroom”, for which he started collecting the photographs that people had left on showroom computers. This really is a motley crew: a bespectacled forty-something pulling faces, a schoolboy staring intently, lots of wound-up teenage girls, a distinctly grown-up mother with her young daughter: the mother is wearing some gormless grin in all three pictures, while het daughter covers her face with her hands in two of them and only in the third looks reluctantly into the camera as though her mother had just ticked her off and told her not to be so silly. “Showroom” proves that digital narcissism is by no means the sole preserve of young, exhibitionist girls.
For me, Popelier’s work highlights two problems. One is the culture in which teenage girls are always the object of the gaze, perceive themselves primarily in that way, and are portrayed only in that way. Popelier takes up this cultural tradition when he reconstructs the classic sleazy relationship we know from so many television films and pornographic contexts: the dirty old man and the flirty young thing. I do understand that nothing is more eye-catching than a young girl - except, perhaps, two young girls. But all kinds of people surf the Internet today, drawing the attention of complete strangers, and all kinds of computer owners cyberstalk each other, so I’m just not sure whether this universal problem really needed to be addressed by the way of the example of girls.
Let’s take J, for example, and me. And here we already have another, much bigger problem: even grown-ups find it perfectly normal and acceptable today to reveal themselves online in one way or another and submit themselves to the gaze and judgement of others. In the end, what bothered me far more about the mysterious identity of J’s lover was wondering what kind of emotional coldness someone must be capable of to put such an intimate document online. That coldness has nothing to do with the youthful energy with which the girls put themselves on public view - but it is a point that both of them will very probably reach eventually. It has become the norm in an everyday life that technology urges every adult not to restrain his or her youthful narcissism, but to let it run wild: here’s a PhotoBooth program, go make a few fun pictures of yourself, it’s addictive; here’s video-telephony, watch yourself there in the left-hand corner speaking to somebody. With all the images and information we put up there, we create ourselves anew online all over again. For every internet-user there is also a digital body - an everlasting alter ego that can be manipulated and constantly perfected. This alter ego which we observe, and through which we observe other alter egos, may be constructed by us, but it is also structured by logarithms (Facebook feeds, Amazon recommendations, Google rankings) that someone else has devised and over which we have no rights or control.
More important still is the fact that the digital body has only one purpose - to create an existence in the minds of others. The alter ego sends itself out across the Internet and demands the recognition everywhere that the ego needs to be self-aware. Roughly as Hegel chalked it out - or perhaps, just as adolescents constantly demand of their environment: HELLO I’VE JUST BEEN DITCHED AND I’M DRINKING BEER ON THE TRAIN, CAN YOU ALL SEE ME? The digital alter ego, in order to have any point at all, has to be constantly clicked on and looked at and liked. The technologies of the digital self have created a mass of unbearable, annoying identities - all wound-up teens.