IS THIS THE NEW GEN B SELFIE?

The future of your selfie

The selfie is not only a medium and personal response to life but also a snapshot of our evolving norms and advancing technologies. If personality is culture writ small, then society is culture writ large. I wonder where our selfie’s headed on social. It is an interesting think piece to pose (as a question) in a post to social media. Will future netizens even show their real faces in selfies?

Or will the selfie go on a bit further to affect the headshot of an avatar whose image and likeness are identical in specie with our own? You don’t have to noodle around with the thought long to imagine something like a future model for the selfie taker coming out of Apple’s Memoji, enabling the current iPhone user to present cartoonish versions of their self-picture.

Even still, would that really be so different from what we already do? Query how future protocol for taking selfies, using face altering, nonnatural media across the span-length of cyberspace can be considered revolutionary compared with the capsule history of our current real-life procedure in the meatspace of plastic surgery, the feature add-on benefit of Photoshop, or the special effect of cosmetic makeup. We already do all that to prettify our selfie. Does the characterization of an enhancement make a distinction without a difference in the abstract of selfies? Is all this just semantics?

Left: no makeup TikTok camera. Right: Dittos filter Bold Glamour

Or alternatively, do you see future selfies taking on a sleeker skin from the vantage of Apple Visor, iOS version 999.061, including the feature ability to parse biometrics and cybernetics into data integration, available free to download from the App Store. Aside from beta testers imbued with 20/20 hindsight vision or the birds-eye view of legal eagles, how would a beta tester eye’s view through the Visor lens of cyborg filters otherwise differ from an outsider’s eye view through the iPhone lens of AI filters? Where do we draw the line, if at all? Do any of various future challenges and solutions of technology help social media along the cutting edge toward an ideal self-image?

No one person could judge the next based on physical attractiveness in a World Wide Web of perfectly rendered selfies. Then again, who’s to say a lack of beauty contests online won’t see the toxicity shift off-grid or onto another problem. Not to be judgy, but your selfie is very remiss. I mean, you used AI but got unintelligent design.

Becky said that you said that guy ghosted you after he saw your selfie and said you made him smile and gave him “goosebumps.” (I imagine “goosebumps” means “not hot” vibes in Gen Beta slang.)

All this buzz begs the question: will Gen B see the next Facebook or Friendster-style fizzle? If not beauty, then what will our selfie represent? A technocratic standard of netiquette? A social media meritocracy? Both?

I don’t know but I will go see my crystal ball for all the answers. In the meanwhile, I wonder 💭 what are your thoughts?

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