LOS ANGELES — This week, a new selfie trend pissed people off. Jason Feiffer, the same guy who dug around on Instagram and discovered funeral selfies, discovered the creepy “selfies with homeless people” trend.
These “selfies with homeless people” are more like Bieber’s performative selfies, which are meant only for getting attention, and suggest a lack of compassion or understanding abouthomelessness today.
In the world of online dating, Shayan Zadeh, the CEO and founder of Zoosk, says that guys should avoid taking selfies for their profile pictures. But ladies? “Women, yes. Selfies work for them.” This is a very gendered oversimplification of dynamics in the world of online dating. Where is his data on this, anyway?
The Selfie Olympics rocked the interwebs before the Sochi Olympics. Now Olympians in Sochi are taking selfies, which are basically just part of celebrity social media personas. But it’s still totally exciting to see a selfie of, say, American Jamie Anderson, who took home gold in the US women’s snowboard slopestyle event. This is a moment to remember, and then retweet.
Elsewhere in the world, French reporters are shooting selfies at the Oval Office, and a Swedish gym tells its members that they need to knock off the locker room selfies. That’s a private space, and it should stay that way. But members are quite welcome to shoot selfies of themselves working out in the public gym space.
This week’s selfie submitters share their purposely public-facing selfies with us. No one gets gold, silver or bronze, but everyone does get a little taste of 15 minutes of internet celebrity.
See this week’s selfie submissions: http://hyperallergic.com/109262/whats-your-selfie-pleasure/