Oxford Dictionaries announced their Word of the Year 2013: selfie noun, informal (also selfy; plural selfies): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website
Go ahead and shake your head. Chuckle. Laugh out loud. And ask yourself, “Seriously?”
Yes. Seriously. (By the way, it beat out ‘binge-watch’, ‘schmeat’ and ‘twerk’.)
But are we really surprised? I don’t think there’s anyone out there who can claim that they haven’t taken a selfie. And with the rise of the smartphone, it would be really, really, really, hard not to. I’m guilty of taking them. Lots of them. Especially on my digital camera or even on my film camera. (Do people actually expect you to carry around tripods? I was infamous for turning my camera around, reaching my arm out as far as I could in front of me and snapping a selfie, or self portrait as I used to call them.) Look at social networks and you’ll see social streams and feeds that are full of pictures, including a selfie or two. So, to celebrate selfie being the Word of the Year, I decided to pick out some of my the selfies from over the years.
Are there selfies that aren’t meant to public? (Like the ones of me taking pictures of my teeth to check if there’s anything stuck in them–there usually is.) Of course there are, and those will stay private, but as long as I can look back at photos and laugh or relive memories, then the photo has served its purpose, selfie or not.
