Nowadays practically everyone takes ‘selfies’ – celebrities, politicians, musicians … The word is so widely used, The Oxford English Dictionary is monitoring it for inclusion in it’s online version. In 2012 Time magazine considered it to be one of their top 10 buzz words.
A ‘selfie’ can be defined as a self portrait taken at arm’s length with a hand held device, such as a digital camera or phone. Usually it’s also distributed widely on social networks like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
Taking selfies became popular in the early 2000’s with the “MySpace pic” – an amateur photo taken in front of a mirror. Flickr started using the term in 2009 to describe the endless stream of photos teenage girls posted of themselves on the Flickr network.
But are selfies really such a recent occurrence we led ourselves to believe?
[Photo: Twitter / @TheRealBuzz]
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin claims he took the first selfie in 1966 during a training mission where he spent 5.5 hours wandering around outside the space craft.
Unfortunately for Mr Aldrin someone beat him to it – a whole 127 years earlier. In 1839 Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, photographed himself, in what might also be one of the first photographs of a person. Other historical self portraits include Joseph Byron (1909) and the Russian duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna (1914).
Some say this phenomenon is an indication of the self centered society we live in, while others believe it just shows the increasing influence of technology on our lives. Whatever the case, and our opinions might be, ‘selfies’ are here to stay. Until the next technological craze anyway.
[SOURCE: www.wikipedia.org]
Tags: selfie