Paris Hilton claims she like, totally invented the selfie
When he was running for president in 1999, Al Gore made the unforgettable claim in a CNN interview that he had, in fact, invented the Internet.
At least that’s how the now infamous remark has been translated over the years. His actual words were a little more garbled. “During my service in the United States Congress,” he said, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress and consummate socialite of the early 2000s, made an equally bold assertion recently, telling W magazine that she had invented the selfie.
Unlike Gore, the 36-year-old “celebrity entrepreneur” didn’t seem to equivocate. Per W magazine:
“Despite Hilton’s longtime dependency on various cellular devices, it is perhaps visionaries like Steve Jobs who are indebted to her, seeing that it was Hilton who took their creations beyond their wildest expectations, inventing along the way the maligned but ubiquitous selfie.”
“If a beeper had a camera, I would have taken a selfie with it,” said Hilton later, agreeing that she was truthfully the matriarch of the modern phenomenon.
The story goes on to say that Hilton was “shaping up to be a pioneer and prophet of the zeitgeist as we know it.”
Few would deny that Hilton turned the celebrity world on its head in the early aughts. She represented a new breed of socialite, bursting into pop culture at a time when jewel-encrusted Motorola flip phones were a status symbol and Snapchat wasn’t even a gleam in an app developer’s eye.
Whether any of that qualifies Hilton to anoint herself inventor of the selfie, well, that’s a different story.
For starters, she may have to contend with Karl Baden, a 64-year-old college professor in Massachusetts. Baden has been snapping self portraits almost every day since Feb. 23, 1987, as part of an ongoing art project.
Of course, people have been taking self-portraits for as long as they’ve been using cameras. But it wasn’t until 2013 that “selfie” became fully enshrined in the English language, earning the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year distinction.
According to Oxford, the first recorded usage of the word traces back to a 2002 post in an Australian online forum, where one commenter used it to describe a picture taken of his or her bloody lip.
Hilton was no doubt shooting selfies in 2002, and if nothing else, she found a way to harness them as a vehicle for celebrity.