by Admin Team

Me, Myself and iPhone

10:10 am in General by Admin Team

By DAVID COLMAN

Smile.

At least that was the conclusion of a recent study by OkCupid.com, the popular dating site for 20-somethings. To determine which factors made a photo more attractive, the staff tabulated the number of interested responses to thousands of pictures, then broke down their characteristics. The findings were intriguing, to say the least. Women responded more often to pictures in which the man is looking off camera, not into it. Men were more likely to respond to pictures in which the woman is at home (and looking a little come-hither), rather than out with friends or on a trip. But for both sexes, pictures in which the subjects are smiling uniformly trounced the stone-faced ones.

“For pictures of men, especially,” said Sam Yagan, a founder of the site, “the smile is critical.” Good to know.

But what was most striking to Mr. Yagan about the OkCupid pictures was how much thought and effort went into even the most casual snapshots. “People are really putting their best foot forward, for complete strangers,” he said. “It’s pretty remarkable.”

Remarkable indeed. Human vanity has been jolted by any number of power surges over the years: the late-Neolithic-era development of the mirror, the late-19th-century popularization of makeup, the late reign of Tom Ford at Gucci. With the debut last week of Apple’s newest iPhone, the latest show of vanity has kicked into high gear. With a second camera lens that faces the viewer (instead of the view), the iPhone has simplified something people have been struggling with — some covertly, some flagrantly — ever since they signed up for AOL more than a decade ago: taking a good picture of themselves. Finally, the iGeneration has a good head shot.

The fine art of self-presentation used to be something mastered only by models and movie stars. Mere mortals did their best for special occasions, like family outings, with what was, one hoped, a single, pleasant expression. Then having a camera phone aimed your way became as much a part of life’s pleasure and pain as ordering a coffee at Starbucks.

“People are so much more attuned to adjusting how they look in front of a camera,” said Keith Gould, the creator of Daily Mugshot, a free Web site that allows users to automatically upload a picture of themselves every day. (The results can be embedded, like any picture, on your own Web page, and they can be played in rapid sequence, like an animation.) “Now they make precise decisions about every part of their face and angle of their head.”

As a result, the self-snap is fast becoming as vital a facet of how we present ourselves as our clothes, figures or voices. Photographing oneself easily and well is a talent that, like being able to download music via mind control or reduce whole paragraphs to acronyms at warp speed, is now a given for young people. And it is a skill that, if you are single or younger than 50, you cannot afford to neglect — especially if you are both.

The practice is so common that it is changing photography itself.

“This really represents the shift of the photograph serving as a memorial function to a communication device,” said Geoffrey Batchen, formerly of the City University of New York and now a professor of art history at Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, who has written extensively on historical and contemporary photography. “The camera was used to record something that happened so it could be remembered. Now it’s used immediately. It’s uploaded to Facebook to say, ‘Here I am in Istanbul’ or whatever, so it also goes back and forth between personal and promotional use. It really represents the refashioning of the self for a semipublic view.”

AND it starts early. This came as quite a surprise to Amber Ward, a largely technophobic mother of two who lives in Lower Manhattan. Two weeks ago, she found her 3-year-old son, Beckett, playing with her iPhone, as usual.

“He was holding it up like he was taking a picture, but he was holding it in the wrong direction,” she said. “So I went over to take it and show him, but he clutched at it and said, ‘No, Mama — me!’ And he held it up to show me: He was taking a picture of himself.”

Apple had already had huge success with its Photo Booth software, which allows you to use a MacBook’s built-in Web cam to take a self-portrait. And recently, Canon and Samsung introduced cameras that facilitate the process. The Canon PowerShot G11, which came out last summer, has a hinged LCD screen that pivots to the side so you can see it when the lens is pointed at you. Samsung’s DualView cameras, which were introduced in 2009, were such an immediate hit that the company brought out more models, promoted in an ad campaign with the eerily appropriate Alicia Keys song “Wait Til You See My Smile.” And innovative photo accessories, notably the Gumby-legged Gorillapod tripods that can mold to any terrain or even wrap around a pipe or tree limb, are a boon to the self-shooter.

That’s not all. Even as aesthetic watchdogs wage campaigns to persuade glossy magazines to stop the digital retouching of models and actresses, the word over at Adobe, whose Photoshop is by far the most widely used photo-retouching software on the market, is that more consumers are joining (not beating) ’em. Adobe has for several years made a cheaper, simplified version of Photoshop for nonprofessionals, but the new, easier-to-navigate version of Photoshop’s premier program, CS5, reflects the fact that a growing number of consumers can handle (and will pay for) the full suite of tools, including two, named Pucker and Bulge, that are perfect for a little body-sculpturing. You can bet people aren’t shelling out to make photos of someone else look better.

“We understood we needed to make it easier to use, in terms of image retouching and manipulation,” said Bryan O’Neil Hughes, the product manager for Photoshop. “Everybody is suddenly representing themselves to the world this way, and you see people doing different things, just to make themselves look better or stand out — anything from mild retouching to putting themselves in pictures and making themselves look like paintings, and all that ‘Avatar’-y sort of stuff.”

The artist Cindy Sherman, who uses herself as a model for her intense tableaus, has recently become proficient at Photoshop. “I actually love it,” she said. “Instead of doing real makeup for the shoot, I’m adding it digitally. Of course, I’m adding wrinkles while most people are taking them away.”

Ms. Sherman does share one characteristic with the self-shooting masses: She feels far less comfortable as a subject when she is not the photographer. “I’m still very self-conscious when someone takes my portrait,” she said. “A lot of pictures, I just cringe when I see them.”

With yourself as the photographer, though, self-consciousness fades fast, as Mr. Gould of Daily Mugshot noticed when he began capturing himself daily for his own program. “When I started doing it, I was pretty self-conscious,” he said. “You want to make sure you look good and the lighting’s good. But as it becomes part of your life, you just embrace your crazy hair. Or you notice that you’re still wearing the same shirt from yesterday and you don’t care.”

Basically, he said, what starts off as an exercise in narcissism and image control eventually devolves into something more routine and candid, a chronicle of the same face we present to the world, despite our best efforts at airbrushing our flaws.

As mundane as that sounds, one of the findings of the OkCupid research was that people respond more favorably to straightforward photos that clearly are taken by the subjects themselves — with, say, the telltale curve of the arm snaking up the side of the picture — than to pictures that are better composed and show them in a more flattering light.

Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You,” has done studies on the assumptions people make about strangers in photographs. He reasons that people are drawn to candid snapshots because they seem more trustworthy than a lovely picture that may not be a faithful rendition.

“What we’ve found is that this stuff is harder to manipulate than you think,” he said. “We’ve done studies with Facebook where we take down people’s impressions of someone’s Facebook photos, then compared those impressions to how that person wants to be seen, and how they actually see themselves.” The result: They see you as you see yourself, not as you want to be seen

The camera doesn’t lie, after all — not when it really gets to know you.

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by Admin Team

Friendship in an Age of Economics

9:39 am in General by Admin Team

By TODD MAY

When I was 17 years old, I had the honor of being the youngest person in the history of New York Hospital to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. This was at a time in which operations like this kept people in the hospital for over a week. The day after my surgery, I awoke to find a friend of mine sitting in a chair across from my bed. I don’t remember much about his visit. I am sure I was too sedated to say much. But I will not forget that he visited me on that day, and sat there for I know not how long, while my humanity was in the care of a morphine drip.
We benefit from our close friendships, but they are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure.

The official discourses of our relations with one another do not have much to say about the afternoon my friend spent with me. Our age, what we might call the age of economics, is in thrall to two types of relationships which reflect the lives we are encouraged to lead. There are consumer relationships, those that we participate in for the pleasure they bring us. And there are entrepreneurial relationships, those that we invest in hoping they will bring us some return. In a time in which the discourse of economics seeks to hold us in its grip, this should come as no surprise.

The encouragement toward relationships of consumption is nowhere more prominently on display than in reality television. Jon and Kate, the cast of “Real World,” the Kardashians, and their kin across the spectrum conduct their lives for our entertainment. It is available to us in turn to respond in a minor key by displaying our own relationships on YouTube. Or, barring that, we can collect friends like shoes or baseball cards on Facebook.

Entrepreneurial relationships have, in some sense, always been with us. Using people for one’s ends is not a novel practice. It has gained momentum, however, as the reduction of governmental support has diminished social solidarity and the rise of finance capitalism has stressed investment over production. The economic fruits of the latter have lately been with us, but the interpersonal ones, while more persistent, remain veiled. Where nothing is produced except personal gain, relationships come loose from their social moorings.

Aristotle thought that there were three types of friendship: those of pleasure, those of usefulness, and true friendship. In friendships of pleasure, “it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant.” In the latter, “those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.” For him, the first is characteristic of the young, who are focused on momentary enjoyment, while the second is often the province of the old, who need assistance to cope with their frailty. What the rise of recent public rhetoric and practice has accomplished is to cast the first two in economic terms while forgetting about the third.

In our lives, however, few of us have entirely forgotten about the third — true friendship. We may not define it as Aristotle did — friendship among the already virtuous — but we live it in our own way nonetheless. Our close friendships stand as a challenge to the tenor of our times.

Conversely, our times challenge those friendships. This is why we must reflect on friendship; so that it doesn’t slip away from us under the pressure of a dominant economic discourse. We are all, and always, creatures of our time. In the case of friendship, we must push back against that time if we are to sustain what, for many of us, are among the most important elements of our lives. It is those elements that allow us to sit by the bedside of a friend: not because we know it is worth it, but because the question of worth does not even arise.
Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic.

There is much that might be said about friendships. They allow us to see ourselves from the perspective of another. They open up new interests or deepen current ones. They offer us support during difficult periods in our lives. The aspect of friendship that I would like to focus on is its non-economic character. Although we benefit from our close friendships, these friendships are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure. And while the time we spend with our friends and the favors we do for them are often reciprocated in an informal way, we do not spend that time or offer those favors in view of the reciprocation that might ensue.

Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic. Consumer pleasures are transient. They engulf us for a short period and then they fade, like a drug. That is why they often need to be renewed periodically. Entrepreneurship, when successful, leads to the victory of personal gain. We cultivate a colleague in the field or a contact outside of it in the hope that it will advance our career or enhance our status. When it does, we feel a sense of personal success. In both cases, there is the enjoyment of what comes to us through the medium of other human beings.

Friendships worthy of the name are different. Their rhythm lies not in what they bring to us, but rather in what we immerse ourselves in. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life. It is, while not neglecting my own life, to take pleasure in another’s pleasure, and to share their pain as partly my own. The borders of my life, while not entirely erased, become less clear than they might be. Rather than the rhythm of pleasure followed by emptiness, or that of investment and then profit, friendships follow a rhythm that is at once subtler and more persistent. This rhythm is subtler because it often (although not always) lacks the mark of a consumed pleasure or a successful investment. But even so, it remains there, part of the ground of our lives that lies both within us and without.

To be this ground, friendships have a relation to time that is foreign to an economic orientation. Consumer relationships are focused on the momentary present. It is what brings immediate pleasure that matters. Entrepreneurial relationships have more to do with the future. How I act toward others is determined by what they might do for me down the road. Friendships, although lived in the present and assumed to continue into the future, also have a deeper tie to the past than either of these. Past time is sedimented in a friendship. It accretes over the hours and days friends spend together, forming the foundation upon which the character of a relationship is built. This sedimentation need not be a happy one. Shared experience, not just common amusement or advancement, is the ground of friendship.

Of course, to have friendships like this, one must be prepared to take up the past as a ground for friendship. This ground does not come to us, ready-made. We must make it our own. And this, perhaps, is the contemporary lesson we can draw from Aristotle’s view that true friendship requires virtuous partners, that “perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good.” If we are to have friends, then we must be willing to approach some among our relationships as offering an invitation to build something outside the scope of our own desires. We must be willing to forgo pleasure or usefulness for something that emerges not within but between one of us and another.

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning. They render us vulnerable, and in doing so they add dimensions of significance to our lives that can only arise from being, in each case, friends with this or that particular individual, a party to this or that particular life.

It is precisely this non-economic character that is threatened in a society in which each of us is thrown upon his or her resources and offered only the bywords of ownership, shopping, competition, and growth. It is threatened when we are encouraged to look upon those around us as the stuff of our current enjoyment or our future advantage. It is threatened when we are led to believe that friendships without a recognizable gain are, in the economic sense, irrational. Friendships are not without why, perhaps, but they are certainly without that particular why.

In turn, however, it is friendship that allows us to see that there is more than what the prevalent neoliberal discourse places before us as our possibilities. In a world often ruled by the dollar and what it can buy, friendship, like love, opens other vistas. The critic John Berger once said of one of his friendships, “We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.

Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death,” and is at work on a book about friendship in the contemporary period.
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by Admin Team

Coming along smoothly

10:01 am in General by Admin Team

We have made some changes to the software and our new SOCIAL NETWORKING website has some great new features.

Spread the word: If you speak English or Spanish (or both) and are a straight single over 40, please join and spread the word that we are now open for memberships.

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by Admin Team

Hello singles world!

1:44 pm in General by Admin Team

Welcome to BESO.NET – the international singles website for making friends state-wide or worldwide and developing a health and sustainable social life. Welcome aboard.

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