All you need to know about the decline of our civilization is that iOS 9 includes a new “selfies” folder for photos. The geniuses at Apple (they have geniuses there, you can book appointments with them at Apple stores) believe that enough people use their iPhones (or iPads, perhaps even the gigantic iPad Pro coming out in a few months) to take photos of themselves with the front-facing camera to warrant a specific storage location for said images. And they are correct, as the web is awash in digital self-portraits.
Admittedly, my complaint (er, observation) feels somewhat “old man yells at cloud.” It may be that we as a (modern) society have always been vain, it just wasn’t as easy to record in high-definition sound and pictures and spread like some doomsday flu all over the world.
Not surprisingly, there is actually a collection of iPad selfies put together to (wordlessly) mock the very concept, on a website also not surprisingly called ipadisnotacamera.com. Here’s one that nicely illustrates how most tablet selfies simply make the operator look like they don’t know how to use a tablet:
In the future we’ll probably have micro-drones following us that are programmed to take the equivalent of selfies at key moments, using sophisticated algorithms to detect important events like “having food for lunch” or “posing with BFF for the billionth time” or even “chasing away fearful old man who hates how technology enables people.”
