Death of the selfie

It is a commonplace that tourists have photographs taken of themselves in front of famous landmarks to 'prove' that they were there.  The Japanese and the Chinese have clichés about their families not believing them otherwise but it is true of the West as well, even with the rise of Photoshopping.  Now, of course, one doesn't have to run the risk of having a stranger you have asked for a favour running off with the camera (and all your other snaps), work out how to set the timer (if there is one) or ungainly handle a camera that might cut off the top of your head and/or key background item (unning through a few old photo albums of my grandmother's collection, there is a standard disaster shot of a giraffe with upper neck and head missing, only revealed after processing).  The quality of mobile phone (mini-digital camera) photography and the ability to delete and re-take means such gaffes are not only a thing of the past but you can take shots of yourself without awkwardly positioning yourself in front of a mirror to avoid the flash.  The age of the selfie was 2013 as the word entered the Oxford English Dictionary and it continues in 2014.  Even Pope Francis has indulged in it with and for pilgrims.
So far, so obvious.  This increased portability has not though increased people's sensitivity.  When visiting the Louvre and despite numerous visual signs that camera flashes are banned, in front of the crowd of the Mona Lisa a dozen flashes go off in the space of a second and then another dozen in the next second, with all this artificial light bouncing off the bulletproof glass back into our eyes and making it impossible for me to properly appreciate Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece.  If I want a picture of the Mona Lisa, I'll buy a reproduction or a calendar from the gift shop.  It was so vexing that I turned around and admired the vast canvas of The Wedding at Cana (by Paolo Caliari AKA Veronese) on the wall opposite.  Virtually no-one paid attention to it.  Selfies made a bad situation worse.  It wasn't appreciation of art, it was about being in proximity to fame.
This vacuous narcissism reached its logical conclusion when a South Korean official took a selfie of himself alongside the names of the memorial victims of the recent ferry disaster.  This official has now lost his 'job title', partly through his crassness, partly through a clamour to find someone/anyone to blame for a catastrophe of such devastating magnitude (the only comparable calamity involving the deaths of so many children that I can bring to mind is the Welsh mining village of Aberfan 48 years ago, when slag from the coal mines placed on the heights collapsed and slid down the hill, engulfing the local school).  Whether this means he was demoted or summarily dismissed is unclear but not only did the official have the lack of empathy to take the picture but compounded this by uploading it, because the nature of the selfie is that it is 'shared', not especially to enlighten as to have a form of one-upmanship on everyone else.  Even the pilgrims who got Pope Francis to take a selfie with them would now boast of how close their got to the Pontifex Maximus - Francis wasn't taking it for himself.  Even the term 'selfie' has connotations of self-absorption.  The hapless South Korean official may have made himself a scapegoat through his cold foolishness yet sadly, in terms of how much of western society now sees itself, he was 'on trend'.  It is not the fault of technology (Justin Bieber wrote in something as old-fashioned as a visitor's book that he hoped Anne Frank would have been a 'belieber') but technology has enabled it to go further than ever before.