In a revelation that has humbled me more than the time I tripped walking upstairs following the scent of cake in high school, I learned today at about 3:32 P.M. CST that the latest Apple software update (iOS 9.0) for iPhone creates and automatically sorts an special album just for selfies. All. The. Selfies. Gone are the days when you just had to worry about people unwittingly swiping their way into your private selfie reserve, now all your selfies have been consolidated into a single folder that facilitates blackmail and humiliation.
Say, do you remember that night you took a burst of about 50 selfies because your hair looked perfect, but the lighting was bad and the way you looked in the mirror was not how you looked in your phone, and eventually time and screenshots swept those castoffs away into in the never-scrolled-upon section of your camera roll? Well, they're all front and cente again in a shameful gallery all of their own, demanding the recognition you denied them. It's a highlight reel of all your worst angles, ill-timed blinks, and duck faces. O! the duck faces.
Of all the functionality Apple could add to their software, why this? Why should we be confronted by our discarded selfies before we have the ability to search within text messages, a feature that would expedite the speed of "I told you so" screenshots by 73%? Step forward and show yourself, you who recklessly demanded that selfies to be filtered into a singular album of narcissism and vanity.
See, the thing about taking 100 selfies is that it doesn't feel like 100 selfies. There are so many snapshots of pets and food and trees in my photos that the impact of a bout of mindless selfie-indulgence is hardly felt in my camera roll. True, I'm assuming the risk of prying scrolls when the selfie stream monopolizes the lower rows of my recently taken photos, but in a few days' time it's as if they never even happened. Finding incontrovertible evidence that I was late to dinner because I was taking selfies was a lot more difficult when it required seven full thumb extension scrolls to unearth the photographic evidence that my lip gloss was poppin' and I spent 15 minutes in the car taking pictures of myself that I knew I'd probably never look at again. But now all the shunned selfies that have made me late are just a few taps away.
If the programmers at Apple think that this addition has somehow enhanced the selfie process, they're wrong. It's only called attention to our latent selfiopathy. In fact, I expect that the uncomfortable transparency of the Selfies album will decrease the number of selfies taken by 34% over the next three years. Selfies are as much about celebrating the way you look at one moment in time as they are about shame, hoarding, and deceit. Before the Selfies album I could reasonably convince people that my perfect profile picture was a rare gem I got on the first try; if I try to do that now, I'll have all those subtle head tilt, closed-mouth versions that didn't make the cut weighing on my conscience.
You can't even delete the folder. You're forced to confront yourself. All of you. You with the weird eyebrow. You with the unflattering TV glare that completely washed you out. You with stray hair that ruined everything. You in a moment that you were feelin' yourself that was meant to captured, glanced at, and immediately buried.
This is a doomsday scenario: a pocket Brady Bunch opening of my all my long-lost selfies paused at the worst moment. Apple has given our exploited selfies the means to organize and revolt. In the next update, Apple may as well move all the unused canned apps that we hide somewhere (Compass, Tips, Stocks, etc.) and put them in the top row of our home screens like, "Hey, remember us? We're still here." It seems there are three options:
- Take less selfies and risk a bad photo someone else took being used if you ever go missing.
- Take the same amount of selfies, but actually delete the ones you don't want instead of concealing them with newer photos in the same way women use dark nail polish to cover stuck-on glitter traces that eluded the nail polish remover.
- Switch to the Samsung Galaxy S-Whatever.
- NEVER UPGRADE TO iOS 9.0.
Selfie safely, everyone.
(P.S. Apple also changed the font on everything just enough to test your eyesight. I think they asked the Google logo designers if they knew any freelance psychopaths who could recommend a change subtle enough to drive a person mad.)
Katie Hoffman is a writer living in the suburbs of Chicago. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @bykatiehoffman.
