The night when the selfie ceases to be a harmless personal game and becomes a powerful tool of mass communication (and harassment, as we’ll explain in this article) is March 3, 2014, when the host at the Oscars was Ellen DeGeneres Gather Hollywood stars for a selfie and turn that photo into the dawn of a new world. Since that day, the most shared selfie in history opens the door to a new social habit: the photo with the star. It’s not the only use of the self-timer, selfies have become a moment that immortalizes every phase, repetition or encounter in our lives, but it’s certainly the most toxic, invasive and corrosive. Raise your hand if you haven’t asked a famous person to take a picture together at least once in your life. A seemingly harmless and above all overdue gesture. The few “famous” who refuse to take the shot are branded rude, conceited and ungrateful.
The writer had the opportunity one morning at the airport to see a glimpse of Francesco Totti’s life. While waiting to board a flight, a line of over 100 people, all armed with a cell phone, formed and the example patient went through the entire check-in process, smiling with strangers; The queue started again after takeoff on the plane and it was the same on arrival. This scene allowed me to visualize a concept as trivial as it is unclear for selfie maniacs: it is not “just a photo”, it is a severe, repeated and invasive form of harassment in the lives of famous people who submit to this daily pillory just to avoid being overwhelmed by accusations of “pulling on” too much. A perversion as annoying as it is useless, what do you do with a photo you’re reluctantly blackmailing someone you don’t know? – who knows no rest even in the face of death, as we have discovered in recent days when some careless selfie freaks asked Maria De Filippi to take a photo at Maurizio Costanzo’s funeral home.
From Sassoli to Pele, collective harassment
A scene that has elicited choruses of criticism, both compact and forgetful: we’ve already forgotten what happened when poor David Sassoli disappeared, when politicians were busy taking selfies at the funeral home, or the sad scene in where world football leaders were busy taking a picture with Pele’s coffin. And above all, these criticisms have not hit the mark because they have limited themselves to criticizing not so much the nuisance of the selfie as – more simply – the choice of the moment when the shot was requested. Forgetting that it’s less scandalous but just as annoying to harass a footballer with photos at 7am by forcing him to take hundreds of self-portraits, photographing the great director washing his hands in the bathroom or that Handkerchief hunts of the moment under an umbrella and so on. In short, we should take a cue from this story to validate a concept: selfies with VIPs are always a form of mass harassment, there are no such things as good selfies and bad selfies, and you must start an opinion campaign to end this toxic habit. It may seem like a small thing, but any form of collective rudeness generates negative phenomena, as evidenced by the photos taken at funeral homes, lowering a community’s average level of civilization.
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