The narcissist buzzword

Shot from a high angle, exaggerating the size of the eyes & giving the impression of a slender pointed chin, yes you guessed right the word I am describing is called ‘Selfie’. We all are currently in love with it or as I like to say are obsessed with it (knowingly or unknowingly).

So let’s spare half an hour of our precious time to figure out how this thing called selfie came to be, shall we?

A little bit of history

It can technically be called self photography, the first mention of which can be found even before digital photography came into the foray in form of ‘Self-portraits’ back in 1839 by Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, he was the first to produce a daguerreotype (the first publicly announced photographic process, see above) of himself, it is also one of the first photographs of a person.

“I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling.” - Anastasia Nikolaevna

In 1914, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (Age 13) was one of the first teenagers to take her own picture using a mirror to send to a friend in 1914. In the letter that accompanied the photograph she poured her excitement.

The origin story

The first use of the word selfie in any paper or electronic medium appeared in an Australian internet arena. Karl Kruszelnicki’s ‘Dr Karl Self-Serve Science Forum’ on 13 September 2002 read,

“Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer (sic) and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.” – Nathan Hope

There, that was the beginning of the madness. It was popularized when the Sony Ericsson Z1010 mobile phone was released in late 2003 introducing the concept of a front-facing camera. Time magazine considered ‘selfie’ one of the “top 10 buzzwords” of that year 2012 and by 2013, the “selfie” had become commonplace enough to be monitored for inclusion in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. In November 2013, the word “selfie” was announced as being the “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary, which gave the word itself an Australian origin.

Time for some wild tales

When any activity is done by an astronaut or cosmonaut outside a spacecraft beyond the Earth’s appreciable atmosphere it is called Extravehicular activity (EVA). E.g. spacewalk made outside a craft orbiting Earth, going by this logic Buzz Aldrin took the first EVA selfie in 1966

In 2011, a crested black macaque (black ape, an old world monkey that lives in the Tangkoko reserve, northeast of the Indonesian island) pressed a trigger on a wildlife photographer’s camera (David Slater, Britain), set up in an Indonesian jungle for that specific purpose; when the camera was later recovered it was found to contain hundreds of selfies, including one of a grinning female macaque. This incident set off an unusual debate about copyright. In 2016, a federal judge ruled that the monkey cannot own the copyright to the images.

The first known selfie-related death occurred 15 March 2014, when a man electrocuted himself on top of a train.

The alternative view

Some dispute the notion of Nathan Hope, being the originator of the word selfie, they feel there is a common assumption that a word can be traced back to a sole identifiable inventor who forged it in a burst of creativity. While sometimes the case is the best we can do is to follow the trail of evidence as far back as it takes us without uncovering an originator. Furthermore, in this case, it’s very likely that there was no single moment when the word was created. Instead, as cellphone photography became commonplace more than a decade ago, numerous Australians probably thought to apply the hypocoristic –‘ie’ to make selfie. And it is also a good bet that, as is often the case with slang, the word traveled orally before anyone like ‘Hopey’ thought to type it out in a forum that could be retrieved online by future word-hunters.