Today marks the debut of Modest Proposals, a new column by Sam Lessin. Sam is the former VP of product development at Facebook and is married to Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information.
The human face is the oldest and most sophisticated communications technology ever developed. But even today, despite the word “selfie” being recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary, I don’t think selfies and their cousin, “Emoji,” are being taken seriously enough by the technorati.
I believe pretty strongly that in the not-too-distant future people will be sharing an order of magnitude more selfies than any other type of media; the front-facing camera is going to turn out to be far more important than the traditional back-facing one.
In the long term—if you believe, as I do, that the future looks a lot like the past—traditional languages in social settings are going to grammatically degrade as we revert to expressing ourselves through our oldest, most natural, and most efficient physical medium: the 43 communication muscles in our faces. Words might still reign in business transactions and some other realms, but we’ll be sending a lot fewer of them.
If once, on a special occasion, you might have written a letter home telling your mother about how relaxed and happy you feel on that beautiful beach at sunset, soon enough you’ll be expressing that with a constant stream of selfies. Facial expressions, clothing, and context let you pack a lot of meaning into a simpler and easier form.
The reason for this shift has little to do with culture or what is “in vogue.” Rather, its about how technology is changing the basic economic equation of personal expression and communication.
The selfie is an extremely efficient way for anyone to express themselves. Historically, however, it’s had two drawbacks. For one, selfies are fast and efficient to share and consume, but not precise. Selfies can be prone to misinterpretation, especially if you don’t know the person involved extremely well. (The face was designed as a communication medium for families or small villages, after all). On top of that, it’s always been expensive to capture and distribute selfies (or “portraits,” as they were once known).
Technology is erasing these drawbacks and compounding the advantages of the selfie.
First, let’s talk about error correction. If you are talking with a friend in person and they say something confusing, it might take a second or two to clear up the ambiguity; a hundred years ago, however, confusion over a clause in a letter might have taken you and your counterpart weeks to resolve.
This meant that precision of language, grammar and expression were critical from a communication economics perspective. It was worth investing upfront in your composition to drive down the probability of an error when the cost of an error was prohibitively high.
The phone in your pocket collapses space-time sufficiently that we can approach communication in an ever-more-conversational way, accepting a higher error rate with inexpensive error correction for the benefit of easier expression. When people talk about English getting “destroyed,” what they are really seeing is the economically rational shift towards publishing quickly as the cost of error or ambiguity goes down.
This model also explains why emoji are popular. They are less effort to write than words—especially in many non-western language—and the cost of misinterpretation has fallen far enough that they are more efficient in many cases than long-form text.
The logical end to this is selfies. The face is an extremely efficient and powerful communication tool which, at scale, can have relatively high error rates. This might have been a deal breaker when ambiguity was expensive, but in a world of cheap error correction it is a golden mix.
Second, let’s talk about the cost of capture and distribution of images of the face. Selfies have always existed, but for most of human history the only people that could afford to capture them were princes and the rest of the very upper crust. Distribution was also extremely hard.
It’s obvious that over the last century the cost of capturing selfies has declined and so their production has gone up.
But I want to make a more expansive point here. In order to want to express myself, the cost of the expression has to be lower than the value I get from expressing myself. The value I get from expressing myself is a function of the value someone else gets from consuming what I have expressed minus their cost of consumption:
Marginal Value of Expression = (Value of Consumption For Counterpart - Cost of Consumption for Counterpart) - Cost of Expression
For me to want to express myself more, I would argue that more and more other people have to get marginal value from my expression, which means that I need to minimize the consumption cost of my communication for others. This leads me to prefer blasting selfies to more and more people, more and more frequently, over other options for expression.
Or, think of it this way: I am only going to read so many text posts a day. They could be awesome, but they are also relatively expensive to consume. I will, however, readily scan hundreds or thousands of faces a day easily and efficiently, and get value from looking at people and reacting to them. Precisely because the costs of consumption, not just production, are so low, I am willing to publish selfies multiple times a day in a way I am not willing to publish other forms of self-expression. Call it the selfie virtuous cycle.
It’s pretty irrefutable that the volume of selfies has risen and will continue to do so. But if you wanted to make a counterpoint to my argument you would simply assert that as communication costs decline all boats will rise. So selfies will increase, but not at any faster a pace than other forms of communication. This is easily testable, and I am more than willing to bet that we will look back at this era and see that the communications explosion was all about the forms which are easiest to publish and consume per-bit of “real” information. Going forward, my money is on the face.
Snapchat might be the first company that is really deeply invested in selfies as communication, but they will not be even close to the last. You might not be doing corporate legal work in selfies anytime soon, but at least for social expression and community, get ready for a sustained selfie explosion.