"if the social ego also beats death"
To patiently queue at a famous person’s funeral for take a selfie with the widow even more famous and maybe even smiled, one must have crossed the entire cable between the human and the inhuman. And above all you must not have missed the appointment even with an episode of Men and women and of You’ve Got Mail.
One must have lost the sense of modesty, the measure of limits and even of death. One must have internalized the idea that the show must go on, rather that the show is life itself, that we are the actors. And one must be, having lost the sense of the monstrous, completely immersed in the idea that you exist if you show yourself.
The funeral selfie
"It’s television, honey and you can’t help it", one could say paraphrasing Hutcheson – Bogart. In reality, things are more complex. It is a pervasive and effective form of cultural hegemony, not exactly Gramscian. It is based on unawareness, distraction, the ephemeral search for a handful of seconds of celebrity to immortalize with a photo on social media.
The funeral selfie celebrates the union between television and social media: I photograph myself with the incarnation of TV and then spam the image on a shared channel.
Bad television teacher
Behind this gesture is the repudiation of any form of confidentiality, of polite respect. There is the triumph of ostentation, of exposing oneself as a vitalistic form, as a sense of existence. Anyone who thinks that today social control passes through social networks will have to think again: television has not yet given up its dominance in forging minds and indeed has fully accomplished its mission, to make us believe that what happens in there is all true while it is art and fiction.
Selfie with the living at the bedside of the dead
That’s why there were so many waiting their turn, not to greet a dead person, but to take a picture with a living person and embark on the hunt for "the Amen of digital devotion which is the like", as Byung Chul Han writes.
To allow this, the world of television leaves the screens and hands itself over to its own people, lets itself be touched – something inconceivable in a true monarchy, where kings are intangible – lets itself be photographed. In the end, the emotion of the selfie remains emotional capitalism it is just it is just one of the commodities to be paid for with shares.
