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Selfie Art Drives Digital Reality 👩‍🎨

By December 31, 2017 May 2nd, 2019 No Comments

Selfie Art Drives Digital Reality

Do you know what selfie art is? How do you define reality?

Are selfies a “real” reflection of who we are or are they an extravagant, contrived version of the digital self?

Is the selfie art? Is art what drives our sense of desire and therefore we shape selfies to reflect a digital persona that mimics something we believe to be more profound than ordinary?

After years of studying the psychology, historical trends and technology drivers of selfies, we still have many questions about selfies and how they’re forming a keystone part of our human hierarchy of needs.

Many, many questions… And we have answers!

Selfie Art Digital Reality SelfieYo 2018

One of our earliest SelfieYo posts, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Selfies, can serve as a psychological framework for how we analyze and seek to understand today’s selfie behavior and what happens next.

Several things are clear in the digital realm of selfie art:

First, whether your claim to love or hate selfies, it’s hard to deny the natural appreciation of seeing flaw-free representations of yourself. Self-awareness is one of the elements of humanity that separates us from other creatures on this planet — and perhaps elsewhere.

Thoughtfulness, kindness and forgiveness are not exclusive traits of humans. In fact, plenty of humans are barely capable of such acts, yet they still posses a keen sense of self-awareness.

We all know a few dogs and cats more capable of kindness and forgiveness than some humans. Yet, the dogs and cats cannot make art and is not, accordingly to generally accepted scientific studies, self-aware. As upsetting as it may seem, if you show a photo of your dog and many other dogs to your dog, he cannot discern the difference between himself and his canine friends. It has nothing to do with eyesight, sadly.

To deny human curiosity and desire to acknowledge reflections of the self is to deny that there are unique, special behaviors that only humans have displayed throughout the course of history as we currently know it.

We are leaving some room for future possibilities here…

Secondly, as selfie behavior scales to the point of global ubiquity, more and more sub-genres or selfie specialities emerge as trendy in any given year. But, like all art forms, there still exists a fundamental base truth — the artist creates art that reflects her interpretation of the universe as she sees it.

Sometimes selfie art is a micro shot into a moment in time; sometimes selfie art is a macro commentary on society at large. It really depends.

Thirdly, while questions abound, we are indeed certain that the aggregate amount of time spent on and in the digital realm of reality is consuming the amount of time spent in base reality.

Selfie art is the physical manifestation of the time we spend outside base reality and inside of our minds, our phones, our computers, our VR, our technologically enhanced versions of life as we know it…

Base reality is the time we biologically require as humans to eat, sleep and perform bodily functions that keep us alive. However, it is the digital reality that increasingly shapes our belief in who we are, who we want to be and how we want to be perceived.

The digital — the selfie art —  is what makes us feel ALIVE vs. actually being alive. Although, who really knows the difference anymore…

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Better take a selfie.

Religion and governments ruled the world outside of base reality for thousands of years. Now, could the selfie, the digital art we create, be taking a seat at the head of the table of decentralized human existence?

Base reality may not be all that sexy. The banal might not make for such great selfies, although there are plenty of digital artists that capture the brilliance of everyday moments in selfies and non-selfie art.

Toilet selfies, anyone? This could actually be the blending of base reality with selfie art. Interesting stuff, that open to us in XXI century.

2019 will be a pivotal year where digital reality, in particular, time spent on selfie art moments, editing and sharing will surpass base reality in a dizzying way. This is our future. We all know this is coming.

And, as a natural connection, the integration of selfie art and other emerging technologies will accelerate and flourish while disrupting the historical clingers that cannot adapt fast enough. There is nowhere to escape. Although escaping it is not needed, anyway.

More specifically, we are suggesting there are age correlations between those that fundamentally embrace selfie art and those that do not.

This is not an exclusive truth, nor is age the sole indicator of digital art reality adaptation, but it does seem that Gen-Z and Millennials understand this to a wider degree than those who have spent a greater portion of their lives, to-date, outside of digital saturation. One need only observe carefully and consistently to see this.

Darwin’s truth remains. So do selfies.

Blockchain selfies, something SelfieYo is working to become a part of, will be the subject of our next post.

SelfieYo would like to credit Mikko Alasaarela for his coining of the phrase “base reality” which helped inspire this post.

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