All by our selfies
LONDON Pope Francis has done it, Michelle Obama has done it (with the First Dog), David Cameron has whipped out his phone to do it. Statesmen one and all — but above all: selfie artists.
If you do not know what a “selfie” is, you are now officially out of the loop, according to Oxford Dictionaries, the publisher of the venerable record of the language of Shakespeare and George Orwell.
“Selfie,” it has decided, is the word of 2013, joining an annual list that has been surprisingly accurate at summing up the zeitgeist. “Chav” was the word of 2004, “credit crunch” was 2008’s, while last year it was “omnishambles.”
A selfie is a self-portrait taken on a camera — invariably a smartphone — before the taker uploads it to a social network, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for their friends or “followers” to see and “like.” As Fiona McPherson, senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, says: “It’s not just taking a picture of yourself; the publishing of it makes it a ‘selfie’. So, ‘self portrait’ doesn’t quite cut it as a term.”
The first recorded use of the word was in 2002 when an unnamed Australian student posted a picture of his split lip after a drunken party. “Sorry about the focus, it was a selfie,” he wrote on an online forum.
Of course, being the first person to write down a word does not mean they invented the term. Jane Austen takes credit for being the first person to record “family portrait,” “door bell,” and “flower seed.” All of these existed long before the Regency era. They just were not written down.
The gap between first utterance and first recording, however, is becoming ever shorter, thanks in part to social networks. The youth of today write far more words per week than their grandparents ever did. They may not be as eloquent, but the gush of texts, tweets, and blog postings greatly help dictionary compilers, who can scan the digital landscape for new words. “Selfie” appeared 97 times per billion words in 2012; it has appeared 5,416 times per billion this year.
This explosion in popularity is partly down to the smartphone, but it was the development of phones with rear and front-facing cameras that made selfies possible. Before, you had to perform a yoga-stretch with your arm to take a photograph that actually had you in the frame. Kat Hannaford, editor of the website Gizmodo UK, says: “The manufacturers starting pushing it as an idea once they had front-facing cameras.”
And while parents may wring their hands as their teens point and post, the urge to self-promote has been with us since Georgian families hired Gainsborough to paint their portraits. It is just much cheaper now.
As Lisa Orban, a psychologist, says: “Experimenting with selfidentity is a key part of adolescent development. And today’s technology allows a strong element of control.
“It is easy to dismiss selfies as narcissistic, but this safe and controlled self-exploration is particularly important for younger users.”