“I’m not a real social-media person. I’m not on Twitter … I try not to read too much online because I always get my feelings hurt, even if someone’s flattering you. Like somebody tweeting, ‘Call me crazy, but I think Amy Poehler’s attractive.’ And you’re like, ‘OK? Thank you?’ Or like someone writing, ‘I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I’d have sex with Amy Poehler.’…The amount of Instagram selfies seems crazy out-of-control…The idea of, ‘This is my face and everyone needs to see it all the time,’ is so far from the privacy that people used to seek. Now everyone acts the way ’80s performance artists used to act. Everybody’s Karen Finley. Everybody’s like, ‘This is my vagina! I’m gonna put shit all over me and take pictures!’…When I was a kid, you’d go to a party or a punk rock show and you’d have fun, and you’d bring a camera, and you’d take pictures, and those pictures would stay inside the camera…Pictures were an addition to the experience. Now the picture is the experience. If I’m hanging out with a friend, and they take a picture of me, it’s like ‘Ugh.’ I mean, I hate looking at pictures of myself. It immediately takes me out of the experience.”
–Amy Poehler explains her social media aversion in Paper magazine. God, I can relate. And I’m not famous. Mean internet comments have made me cry and I almost never tweet because I’m too long-winded for 140 characters. It’s good to know I’m not the only one. As far as the selfies, I understand her stance, but often enjoy looking at others’ selfies out of sheer fascination, horror or even admiration. But she’s right in the sense that performance artist Karen Finley is best enjoyed live. For those of you who’ve never seen her, she’s famous for shoving a yam up her ass on stage and covering her naked body in stuff like honey and feathers. It’s quite captivating.
[Paper Magazine]Original by Ami Angelowicz
