On a recent Monday morning, Clare Harper's cousin sent her a picture of herself for "Selfie Monday" via Snapchat, a texting and image-sharing service that deletes pictures soon after they are sent.

Harper, 18, responded with a selfie of her own, except instead of posing to capture her best angle as her cousin had done, she contorted her face into something between silly and scary.

With the photo she texted, "This is what I think of selfies."

Still in her pajamas and not yet out of bed, Harper was already receiving images from friends.

She was also being given the opportunity to take and share photos of herself.

Selfies, pictures taken of oneself usually with a smartphone and then shared over a social media app, are just what she and her peers do, she says.

They generally don't give it a second thought.

"If you want to have a normal Facebook page, you're going to have pictures of yourself on it," she says.

Anything otherwise would be weird.

She's nonchalant, unassuming.

It's not that there's much pressure to post pictures, she assures. It's just the norm.

On the one hand, having a profile picture helps friends to know they're connecting to the right person on social networking sites.

On the other hand, especially if you're female, that picture had better look good.

"What you look like is what's defining you. It's like you're defined by how pretty you are. This is me because this is what I look like," Harper says. Continue reading

Source

• Meghan Murphy-Gill in U.S.Catholic

Meghan Murphy-Gill is a writer living in Chicago.

We might talk about the ‘me' generation, the addiction to selfies, or the overbearing politician in any of these terms.

But this ignores their important differences, and threatens to flatten out all the interesting contours of the landscape of the self.

The English poet John Milton offer a useful starting point for discussing these notions.

He thought, rightly, that a ‘pious and just honouring of ourselves' was essential to us - ‘the fountainhead whence every laudable and worthy enterprise issues forth'.

Writing in an essay on church government in 1642, he called for sufficient self-respect or self-confidence to fit us for the undertakings that enrich our lives or those of others.

Too little of it, and we would shrink away from things that we might well need to do.

Too much, and we start doing things that we are not actually fit to undertake.

Milton was talking of modest self-confidence, enough to give us courage to face problems and tackle difficulties.

Today we might think of it as having appropriate self-esteem, and it ought to be one aim of a good education.

But here we need to add an Aristotelian caveat.

The root idea behind the concept of esteem is that of an estimate.

In nearly all contexts it is better not to estimate things too highly or too lowly, and it is the same with estimates of the self.

If I estimate myself too highly in most respects, I am likely to head for a fall: literally if, for example, I think I am a better climber or horse-rider than I am, but metaphorically in almost any other respect. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: Yves Herman/Reuters / Aeon

The study tracked nearly 200 families with at least two children, over a period of seven years — from age 8 to 15. (It is not clear from this report whether all the families had both parents at home.) The families were not representative of the whole of the US, being "almost exclusively European American, working and middle-class families living in small cities, towns and rural communities," say the researchers from Penn State University. Read more

Sources

• Carolyn Moynihan in MercatorNet
• Image: The Guardian

Carolyn Moynihan is a New Zealand journalist with a special interest in family issues.