Photographs

There is a character in Lawrence of Arabia who doesn't allow his photograph to be taken. "It will steal his virtue," someone else says. You generally first hear about people like this as child, and they sound crazy. Similar when you hear about the Amish, not using certain modern tools, and so forth. Our attitudes as young people are - "those folks are crazy - why not make life as easy as possible? Why avoid modern realities?"

But I'm beginning to understand these attitudes more the older I get. Not in a crazy, I'm not letting people take my picture, or going to go live in a cave, or start sending bombs through the mail, but more, I'm understanding how technology can erode one's sense of self. My particular beef is with Facebook, as readers well know. Zadie Smith puts it better than I can:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

She is right. And I can only think back to 1914 and how an Arab tribesman thinks of himself. He doesn't view himself as an image, but as something much more - probably something to do with his tribe, his family, his name, his achievements/reputation. But the photo reduces him...to this image. We don't question it because we were raised with it. It is all we know. And we pose for it and dress for it and understand in Andre Agassi's words, "Image is everything." The more we do, the more we accomplish, the more we are proud of in our lives, the more the image reduces it. To someone who is vacant, the image is everything. But to someone who lived their entire lives dedicated to a certain set of principles, whether it be religious or otherwise, like the Arab tribesman, sees himself as represented by something else - a name, perhaps - and not an image. The imagine tarnishes who he is.

Point being - you'll be seeing less pictures of me.