Non-Obvious 2016 Edition: How To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future by Rohit Bhargava

Author:Rohit Bhargava [Bhargava, Rohit]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Published: 2016-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

SELFIE CONFIDENCE

What’s the Trend?

The growing ability to share a carefully created online persona allows more people to use social content such as selfies as a way to build their own self confidence.

What would you do if your most embarrassing picture went viral?

Caitlin Seida unfortunately found out, when her most embarrassing photo, of her at a Halloween party dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, went viral.

For weeks before she saw it, the photo had been making the rounds online—and commenters had been posting snarky comments about her choice to wear the costume despite being overweight. The cruel caption “Fridge Raider” had inspired hundreds of anonymously mean comments in response.

When she first found it, she was devastated.

It was the perfect example not only of the culture of nastiness that Internet commenting has become known for, but also of a technology-induced problem that has been accelerating so fast we have had to create a name for it: cyberbullying.

According to recent statistics from the i-SAFE Foundation, more than half of all adolescents and teens have been bullied online and about the same number have engaged in cyberbullying themselves. In response, there are a growing number of educational programs designed to help adolescents and teens deal with cyberbullying and even how to fight back.

When it comes to that fight, Seida’s story has a positive outcome. Not wanting to hide from the past, and realizing that removing the image from the web was next to impossible, Caitlin Seida did that only thing she could think of; she embraced the embarrassment and told her side of the story.

On October 2, 2013, she wrote an article on Salon.com sharing her embarrassment at discovering the photo and also the fact that she had been having fun that evening and didn’t regret dressing up as her favorite video game character.

She told her personal story of her medical struggles with polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland, both of which caused her weight to spike. And she shared her story of confronting many of these commenters with a short message:

You’re being an asshole. Why don’t you just do the right thing and delete the post and stop sharing it?

It takes self-confidence to stand up and confront a bully.

Thanks to the world of low privacy filters and an online culture of meanness and sarcasm—the ability to find new ways of discovering your own self confidence has become a daily necessity. The problem is, not everyone can find the type of courage Caitlin Seida did and channel it toward building (or rebuilding) their own confidence.

After the whole embarrassment faded, Seida did her own photo shoot with a retro pinup photographer and described the experience with these words: “that particular shoot felt great. Just to be seen a little bit more as I wanted to be.”

That same sentiment underlies the rapid growth of the world’s most unlikely tool for building self-confidence: selfies.

The Upside of Selfies

A “selfie” (as you have likely seen in the media many times) is essentially a photograph someone takes of him- or herself, usually with a mobile phone camera.

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