December 1, 2015

"Gorgeous. Pretty. Stunning."/"Stunning? Yeah."/"You kill it. You're so pretty. So beautiful."

The extremely repetitious, endlessly affirming things teenagers comment on each others selfies on Instagram... analyzed in a segment of "This American Life" (transcript, as well as audio, at the link). Ira Glass is talking to 2 girls who are 13 and 14 and trying to figure out what he calls "dissecting and calibrating the minutiae of the social diagram."

The girls have "this thing they do all the time" and Ira has the thing that he does all the time, which is find what is surprising and profound inside whatever people are doing in this life.
This is super-affirming language that is applied equally to every girl, universally. You've heard of bullying online? This is the opposite.... So what's it about? Well, the answer to that question is complicated, and it involves going deep into an intricate language that's going on in the comments.... Then, of course, when you do post a comment about a picture, there's the whole politics of whether your friend is going to comment back to your comment. And subtle differences in the wording when they comment back could mean something, even though, to an outsider, the words basically look the same....

17 comments:

David Begley said...

That's what Ira does: profoundness.

rhhardin said...

One of the benefits of having many tables at Burger King is that you can always move away from any teenaged girls at an adjacent table.

Guildofcannonballs said...

If Ira is correct and we can witness universal equality by watching all these compliments then we ought do it as a paradigm of universal equality in action, a useful concept unseen in the history of human interaction.

David said...

Feminism rules.

hiawatha biscayne said...

they're teenage girls, for pete's sake.

Etienne said...

Social media today, accomplishes in 30 seconds, what it used to take a lifetime to bore the hell out of your friends.

Ann Althouse said...

I like Ira Glass, but ever since hearing about his dog, I do not accept his perspective or judgment on anything. I listen because the show is interesting and entertaining, but I wouldn't believe anything without independent verification.

If you keep listening to that episode, you'll get to something about race and debt enforcement that is woefully lacking in perspective.

Ann Althouse said...

that episode = the selfie episode, not the dog episode.

Titus said...

I didn't know that about his dog-can I still listen to his show every week?

Not sure.

He lives in NYC now? That kind of makes me sad too-always liked that he lived in Chicago-not sure why-but it wasn't the coast.

Chris N said...

If you're going to have a dog like that, you must be ready to be hard-hearted, and potentially end its life, and you must have knowledge and be prepared to act on it.

People who work with dogs have tools they can use, including their own general experience, aggression, docility tests etc to help them make informed judgments regarding the viability of ownership and danger to people, other dogs etc.

At some point, an owner must commit to a dog with as much of this knowledge and risk evaluation as possible, continuing to monitor its behavior...

Those are high-bars and pretty big responsibilities, and from reading that piece, he is nowhere ready to handle them.

If true, this reflects neither well on the dog, the breed, nor himself.

eric said...

Everyone gets a ribbon. Everyone gets an award. No one wins. Everyone is equal.

Future generations might realize if everyone is pretty, then no one is pretty.

n.n said...

In the wake of the self-esteem movement, the marketing of selfies became a self-realizing dream of the selfish. If it is a progressive condition, then narcissism will mark the next step in social development.

MayBee said...

I thought these were the comments under the Amy Schumer almost-naked Facebook pictures.

John Scott said...

It's not just teenage girls. Someone shared a link to Amy Schumer's Facebook post about her picture in the tire calendar. Every other comment read like Ann's headline. Also, apparently you have to be a little chubby to be considered a REAL woman.

ken in tx said...

Many sporadic, casual, listeners to 'This American Life' would be surprised to learn that Ira Glass has a female wife. He is the quintasential Metro-sexual.

Freeman Hunt said...

It's not just teenagers who do that.

Etienne said...

Schumer looks like she got kicked-out of a lot of Gym's with that body.