Paris Hilton’s selfie claim a snapshot of assault on truth
Internet does its best to disabuse platinum airhead of any notion she is a kind of cultural pioneer
The next time you hold your phone at arm’s length and awkwardly grin for a selfie, please send an imaginary royalty to Paris Hilton.
The hotel heiress and socialite, who has transformed into a DJ and perfume pusher, was spinning another stinky tale on Sunday when she celebrated a milestone anniversary no cultural historian knew existed.
“11 years ago today,” she declared on Twitter, “Me & Britney invented the selfie.”
To illustrate this bonkers claim, Hilton uploaded two photos from 2006, in which she is posing with one-time BFF Britney Spears, the apparent Wozniak to her Jobs.
Hilton is frozen in side-profile, exuding that patented coquettish smirk. The foreheads on display in Me & Britney are fused together like conjoined twins conceived in a diamond-encrusted test tube. The identical levels of follicle peroxide, bleached enamel and vacant retinas only bolster the familial illusion.
If these pioneering images are ever displayed at the Smithsonian, the exhibit could be called: “Seeing Double: Celebri- ty Hubris in the Early 21st Century.”
It didn’t take long for the internet to fall down laughing. Hilton’s ridiculous brag, which by Monday was closing in on 50,000 retweets, garnered rebuttals as bemused onlookers posted photographic evidence of the selfie as it existed pre-2006. It was as if dozens of audio recordings were unearthed that easily proved the telephone was invented long before Alexander Graham Bell enunciated into the static: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
There was George Harrison taking a picture of himself outside the Taj Mahal in 1966. There was Bill Nye capturing himself and another traveller in an airplane, circa 1999. There was Mr. Bean and Madonna and Paul McCartney and . . . More great moments in selfie history poured into the ether from both blackand-white images from the early 20th century and post-Technicolor scenes from TV and film, including Thelma & Louise, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Seinfeld.
Hilton was treated to a selfie Buzz Aldrin captured in space and one Frank Sinatra shot as a child with the reflective aid of a bathroom mirror.
Cultural institutions recirculated a September tweet from the National Galleries in Edinburgh, which had then uploaded a grainy monochromatic image: “This is the first ever photograph selfie in history, taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839.”
There was even a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh.
The BBC published a story on Monday — “Dear Paris Hilton, here’s a brief history of the selfie” — that further disabused the platinum airhead of any notion she is some kind of cultural pioneer: the selfie was first documented in the late 19th century and then embraced by Russian teenagers in 1914. It shows up in the 1920s within the New York photography scene and is embraced by celebrities the following decade.
The selfie has pretty much existed — I remember my dad somehow taking one with his monstrous SLR when we were kids in Pennsylvania — as a relatively common if unlab- elled part of photographic expression as long as cameras have been around.
Even the word “selfie,” coined in Australia in 2002 before it conquered the global lexicon, predates the Me & Britney exhibit by a good four years.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as much-ado-about-nothing. Who cares? I care because Hilton’s idiotic claim about inventing the selfie — this is the second time she’s made it this year — once again suggests objective truth is no match for confident delusion in this age of streamof-conscious spitballing on social media. I think, therefore it is. Then there is a growing mass psychosis that roughly translates into “the need for extraordinary affirmation.” For too many people in the public eye, it’s not enough to be good; they have to be the best. It’s not enough to part of a group; they have to lead the pack. It’s not enough to be thoughtful; they have to be original.
Hilton stumbles upon an 11-yearold snap and suddenly she is Edison.
I believe Donald Trump could improve his presidency by 50 per cent overnight if he didn’t feel a blinding urge to take 100 per cent of the credit for everything and zero per cent of the blame. After he pardons the Thanksgiving turkeys on Tuesday, those damn birds better cluck out some appreciation or he’ll swiftly change his mind and they’ll be on the Mar-a-Lago dinner table this weekend.
By wrongly claiming to have invented the selfie, what Paris Hilton is doing is contributing to the fake news and bald-faced lying that is now endemic.
She is proving history is under constant assault these days by our reflexive thirst for instant, real-time blasts of info that may not be tethered to reality. I say, therefore it must be. Come on, Paris. That’s not hot. vmenon@thestar.ca