Selfie
How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
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Selfie
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Jack Hawkins
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By:
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Will Storr
About this listen
We live in the age of the individual.
We are supposed to be slim, prosperous, happy, extroverted and popular. This is our culture's image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We're told that to be this person, you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success.
But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell?
To answer these questions, Selfie takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyperindividualistic neoliberalism in which we live now.
It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately - our self.
Exclusive to the audiobook, Selfie includes a unique 15-minute interview with the author, Will Storr, and reader, Jack Hawkins.
©2017 Will Storr (P)2017 Macmillan Digital AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
Also a few times too biased. To discredit safe spaces at universities by using the most ridiculous examples is very deceptive.
Fascinating account - perhaps too long
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The problem is not simply that the narrator does accents - it’s that his enthusiasm is undiminished by the fact he has no natural talent for them. From one chapter to the next, I groaned inwardly whenever he began quoting a new interviewee who had the misfortune of being based anywhere except the UK. Even then, I suspect on at least one occasion he chose to introduce a Scottish accent when nothing in the text justified it. It made whole swathes of the audiobook almost impossible to concentrate on as the narrator blundered his way through barely intelligible approximations of American, Australian and Irish accents.
His tiresome dedication to his art had some limitations, however, as I noticed with some amusement that he did not attempt to do an accent for a Korean professor interviewed in the book. In truth, it would have hardly been any less crude (or at times inappropriate) than his other performances. This perhaps exposes a blindspot suffered by audiobook producers - would this kind of excruciatingly stereotypical accent, performed so poorly, be appropriate in other contexts? Given the answer is clearly no, it should raise questions about why it’s allowed to persist at all. Particularly when it makes a good book almost unlistenable.
Why the accents, why?
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Loved this
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Highly Recommend
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Interesting insights
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