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Showing posts from June, 2017

What are you smiling at?

There's this photograph in an article in The New York Times, a group of people taking a selfie, smiling (some more enthusiastically than others) at the phone held up to their faces. It makes me wonder, as we sometimes do, in completely random ways, about completely pointless things, about that selfie smile. Who are we smiling at? What makes us smile? What does the smile say? What do we hope the smile achieves? Or...are we thinking at all? Has smiling for a selfie become one of those automatic responses that we can put down to our internet-enabled consciousness? Our smiles then populate our social media feeds and personal digital albums, toothsome, reluctant, wistful, joyous, sometimes a bit embarrassed, crimson-lipsticked or quickly plumped and moistened, a bit crooked or self-consciously straight, even forgetful and resentful...or just automatic. Like Carroll's Cheshire Cat, they waft around to be looked at and thought about, dismissed or dwelt upon, acquiring me