Barry and Marlene Bogle run a farm in southern Ontario, and each summer they produce about 1.6 million shoulder-high sunflowers. It’s a gorgeous sight, so in 2018 the Bogles decided to open a side business, charging $7.50 per adult to visit the farm and take photographs among the blooms. Young women came in droves to pose for selfies in sundresses; bearded men in sunglasses would snap shots of their faces poking cheekily out of the crops.
It quickly spun out of control. Soon, thousands of visitors were arriving each day, trampling the crops as they sought the perfect selfie. Their cars clogged nearby roads, causing accidents; one car door was ripped off. It soon became clear to the Bogles that many of these smiling visitors were coming not to see the flowers, but to see themselves.
“I can only describe it as like a zombie apocalypse,” the Bogles’ son Brad, who works on the farm, told Canada’s Globe and Mail. The Bogles canceled the selfie-taking business after just eight days. Two years later, hopeful picture-seekers still visit, only to be turned away before they can ruin the flowers.
These days, selfies often get a bad rap. When you consider the fate of the Bogles, it’s not hard to see why: Pundits blame them for creating an upswell of self-regard, a culture where everyone is constantly primping for the camera and focusing on themselves while ignoring the world around them. Some academic research supports this dim view; one study published in October 2019 found that the highest levels of selfie-taking correlated with “grandiose narcissism”—an inflated sense of self. And famous models keep ratcheting up the pressure: Recently, Instagram superstars including Kylie Jenner and Emily Rataj-kowski began sharing “multi-selfies,” in which they post several snaps of themselves in nearly the exact same pose. The multi-selfie “expresses a first-world problem of the highest order: essentially, you cannot decide which of your marginally different, equally vain pictures to post so you post all of them,” the journalist Phoebe Luckhurst wrote in an article about the trend. Defenders, on the other hand, argue that selfies are a perfectly healthy way of exploring who we are.
Still, it shouldn’t be surprising that the selfie arouses such passions. Similar anxieties and enthusiasms stirred hundreds of years ago, when the original tool for self-scrutiny emerged in its modern form: the mirror.
Continued at The Original Selfie Craze Was the Mirror | Smithsonian Magazine
Mirrors are a form of deception. Whether regular mirrors or black mirrors. It's there to fool you. I'm positive mirrors were invented for nefarious reasons. It puts you into a self absorbed mental state. Your focused inward. Vanity, narcissism. Mirrors were and are there to make people be obsessed with themselves. Now they do provide good in the form of helping groom yourself, but they lead to the nefarious uses. Black mirrors are worse. Almost everyone has a black mirror now. They take selfies all the time. They look into these black mirrors thinking they are gettting a fulfilling experience when in fact it's purely there for tricking you into a virtual world that is made believe. Ignore the physical reality for the virtual reality. That the point.
Everyone using their black mirror smartphones is now changing everyone toward a society of narcissists. People constantly pumping themselves up posting to social media dumb pictures of themselves and causing their own psyche to be inward focused. Black mirrors are black magick. People have never been closer to walking dead zombies than they are now. When your constantly looking at a small black mirror, you soon lose touch with the physical reality. You see people in this state. Totally oblivious and out of it. So keep looking at your black mirrors and be spelled into loving yourself.
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