Is the rise of ‘selfies’ an indication of increasingly self-centred society?

Opinion and Analysis

A man takes a “selfie” with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. AFP 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• Obsession with such pictures turning into extreme narcissism.

What do celebrities like movie stars, musicians politicians or athletes who take selfies have in common? They have all broken their ‘selfie–territory.’ In fact some of them are ‘selfie-veterans’.

Granted, for the uninitiated, you may be wondering what this whole brouhaha about selfies is all about. As my teenage sister would say, you are still trudging in the last century.

You see, not only has this word made its way into the official dictionaries; it was specifically nominated as ‘word of the year 2013’ by none less than the Oxford Dictionary.

Evidence on the Oxford English Corpus shows the word selfie in use by 2003, but further research shows the earliest recorded usage as far back as 2002 where it was used in an online source—in an Australian Internet forum.

You may find it interesting to note that the first person to use the word was apparently very intoxicated and he used it to caption his self-image while in his drunken stupor.

According to the 2002 ABC Online, the caption read as follows: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

But usage of the word didn’t become widespread until the second decade of this century and it has only entered really common use in the past year or so.

That notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the taking of self-portraits is in itself is no recent exploit having been around centuries on end.

Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself in 1839 which is also one of the first photographs of a person.

Because the process was slow he was able to uncover the lens, run into shot for a minute or more, and then replaced the lens cap. He recorded on the back “The first light picture ever taken. 1839.”

Further research shows that the debut of the portable Kodak Brownie box camera in 1900 led to photographic self-portraiture becoming a more widespread technique.

The method was usually by mirror and stabilising the camera either on a nearby object or on a tripod while framing via a viewfinder at the top of the box.

Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, at the age of 13 was one of the first teenagers to take her own picture using a mirror to send to a friend in 1914.

In the letter that accompanied the photograph, she wrote, “I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling.

So yeah, selfies have been around; what has only changed is the ease with which we take them, thanks to the smart digital camera phones and further the social media forums on which to display them.