By Meg Chu, Staff Writer, Emerson College
My family made the upgrade from a large, box-shaped Dell computer to a sleek iMac in 2005. I was thrilled with how high-tech and sophisticated the computer seemed, and I was excited about all the desktop apps it came with like iChat and GarageBand. But at the tender age of 11, what I was especially captivated by was the most narcissistic app of all - Photo Booth.
Confession: I loved taking selfies. I didn’t even think about how vain it was because everyone else was doing it, too. I’d go over to my friends’ houses and we’d spend hours taking pictures of ourselves in sepia or bulge. I even downloaded extension software for Photo Booth so I could use effects, such as coloido and film stock. When I created a Facebook account several years later, my first profile picture was a Photo Booth selfie taken in thermal camera. (It’s still buried deep in the recesses of my profile pictures album. I keep it there as a reminder of the dark days.)
Yet, the first time I heard the actual term “selfie” wasn’t until my freshman year of high school when a friend of mine mentioned that she needed a new selfie for Facebook. A selfie? What was that? Urbandictionary helped me out:
Selfie: A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.
In August 2013, the Oxford Press added “selfie” to the Oxford Dictionary Online, defining it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” But the concept of the selfie didn’t need the ODO to officiate its existence – as it turns out, selfies have a history that can be traced back centuries before even Myspace.
With the popularization of the Kodak Brownie camera in the early 1900s, selfies could be taken in front of a mirror. One of the earliest recorded selfies is that of thirteen-year-old Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in 1914, which she enclosed in a letter to a friend. However, I like to argue that the origin of the selfie predates cameras themselves -the inception of the selfie lies in self-portraiture, which blossomed as an artistic trend during the early Renaissance period.
Confession: I loved taking selfies. I didn’t even think about how vain it was because everyone else was doing it, too. I’d go over to my friends’ houses and we’d spend hours taking pictures of ourselves in sepia or bulge. I even downloaded extension software for Photo Booth so I could use effects, such as coloido and film stock. When I created a Facebook account several years later, my first profile picture was a Photo Booth selfie taken in thermal camera. (It’s still buried deep in the recesses of my profile pictures album. I keep it there as a reminder of the dark days.)
Yet, the first time I heard the actual term “selfie” wasn’t until my freshman year of high school when a friend of mine mentioned that she needed a new selfie for Facebook. A selfie? What was that? Urbandictionary helped me out:
Selfie: A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person's arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.
In August 2013, the Oxford Press added “selfie” to the Oxford Dictionary Online, defining it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” But the concept of the selfie didn’t need the ODO to officiate its existence – as it turns out, selfies have a history that can be traced back centuries before even Myspace.
With the popularization of the Kodak Brownie camera in the early 1900s, selfies could be taken in front of a mirror. One of the earliest recorded selfies is that of thirteen-year-old Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna in 1914, which she enclosed in a letter to a friend. However, I like to argue that the origin of the selfie predates cameras themselves -the inception of the selfie lies in self-portraiture, which blossomed as an artistic trend during the early Renaissance period.
So what is it exactly that compels someone to take a selfie? Selfies are typically an attempt for people to present themselves in a flattering manner, and, unlike the average situation in which the subject is not also the photographer, the person taking the selfie has all the control over how he or she is viewed. Posting a selfie on a social media site requires a certain amount of self-confidence. A selfie upload says hello world. This is who I am. And I am proud of my face.
The creation of the popular app Snapchat in 2011 brought the introduction of a new kind of selfie – one that doesn’t classify as being narcissistic. Snapchat allows users to send friends photos or videos that will be displayed on friends’ screens for an allotted number of seconds; after that, the “snap” can no longer be viewed. Snapchat brought into existence the concept of “the ugly selfie,” as users could now send completely unflattering pictures of themselves to contacts without worrying about having the image preserved forever as potential digital blackmail. Snapchat revolutionized the selfie in that the app turned it into a method of self-deprecating humor.
Regardless of whether or not a selfie is vain, a way of fishing for compliments, or a six-second snap to a friend, there is always a level of judgment we feel when we witness someone hold an iPhone in front of their face and pose for a picture. But why be so judgmental of selfies when we can simply embrace them with pride? Centuries ago, the only people who owned pictures of themselves were the people rich enough to have their portraits painted or photographed. Cheap and portable cameras (and the fact that nearly every cell phone on the market has a built-in camera) give the common people the liberty to take a picture of themselves and celebrate their own image. The popularity of selfies among our generation does not signify that we are a self-obsessed culture. It signifies that we are one in which self-portraiture has been democratized. We should rejoice – we should be proud of our democracy, our camera phones, our very own face. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Viva Generation Y. Viva la selfie!
Images: mirror.co.uk, Wikipedia
Meg Chu is a freshman WLP major from New York. She was born on the day the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed its Origins of Impressionism exhibit, and she enjoys wearing a variation of black and dark grey. In her spare time, she likes running, reading, eating tofu, and complaining about things on the Internet.
The creation of the popular app Snapchat in 2011 brought the introduction of a new kind of selfie – one that doesn’t classify as being narcissistic. Snapchat allows users to send friends photos or videos that will be displayed on friends’ screens for an allotted number of seconds; after that, the “snap” can no longer be viewed. Snapchat brought into existence the concept of “the ugly selfie,” as users could now send completely unflattering pictures of themselves to contacts without worrying about having the image preserved forever as potential digital blackmail. Snapchat revolutionized the selfie in that the app turned it into a method of self-deprecating humor.
Regardless of whether or not a selfie is vain, a way of fishing for compliments, or a six-second snap to a friend, there is always a level of judgment we feel when we witness someone hold an iPhone in front of their face and pose for a picture. But why be so judgmental of selfies when we can simply embrace them with pride? Centuries ago, the only people who owned pictures of themselves were the people rich enough to have their portraits painted or photographed. Cheap and portable cameras (and the fact that nearly every cell phone on the market has a built-in camera) give the common people the liberty to take a picture of themselves and celebrate their own image. The popularity of selfies among our generation does not signify that we are a self-obsessed culture. It signifies that we are one in which self-portraiture has been democratized. We should rejoice – we should be proud of our democracy, our camera phones, our very own face. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Viva Generation Y. Viva la selfie!
Images: mirror.co.uk, Wikipedia
Meg Chu is a freshman WLP major from New York. She was born on the day the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed its Origins of Impressionism exhibit, and she enjoys wearing a variation of black and dark grey. In her spare time, she likes running, reading, eating tofu, and complaining about things on the Internet.