From Self-Portrait to Selfie
Hearing the word selfie, you might immediately think of how the younger generation seems completely addicted to Snapchat and Instagram these days. We tend to associate the term selfie with the rise of modern social media as we know them today. Selfie was even Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year 2013, indicating how it’s really a thing of the last decade. But besides the term, are selfies really just photos of yourself taken with your phone, and is this really a phenomenon of only recent years?
The first known use of the word was in 2002, but the actual first selfie ever taken dates back to the year 1839. This was of course long before the age of smartphones and computers that we live in now. The picture was shot using one of the earliest invented methods of photography, with which it could take three to fifteen minutes to shoot a single picture, making it really difficult to shoot a self-portrait, as it was called back in the day.
In the days long before the internet, these self-portraits were mainly used to display at home to show off status. However, photography became more widely available for everyone to use in 1888 by the introduction of the first camera that was targeted towards consumers rather than professionals: the Kodak №1 camera. This caused a huge shift in the way that people took pictures. They started to shoot pictures of moments and people that were important to them, instead of going to a professional to have their portrait taken.
As self-timers became popular, it was actually possible with cameras from that time to shoot selfies already. With the rise of Polaroid’s instant cameras in the mid-20th century, this became even easier. The instant cameras allowed people to snap a picture and have it printed instantly from the camera. Because these cameras were quite lightweight, they were easy to take with you and take a quick picture of your favourite moments, while making it easy to include yourself in those pictures as you could lift the camera and shoot the photo with one hand.
Now that we always carry a camera with us on our phone and have practically unlimited space to store photos, opposed to with a film roll, it has become even easier to take selfies. People post them to social media everyday. However, because of this unlimited number of selfies you can take, they seem to have lost their value in some way. What once was a way to capture your favourite moments, has now turned into a way to capture every moment, even the dullest ones. This has become a lot more extreme with the rise of platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram where people share these photos with their friends and family. Just think for yourself how often you have seen a random selfie in your Instagram feed without any meaningful context.
This phenomenon has caused people to start thinking more critically of selfies in recent years. Especially if a situation is inappropriate to take a selfie, for example at a funeral, most people will feel that it’s very disrespectful and egotistical. But also if people feel that you are taking a selfie just to have yet another picture of yourself, they might consider it to be narcissistic. This applies to the infamous “duck face” selfies as well.
It should be noted though, that not everyone feels the same way about selfies. Massive amounts of people are posting these photos each day, so there is a huge group that is completely in favour of taking many of them. And then of course there are also the people who hate on every selfie they see, usually because they simply have no interest in seeing them all over social media and they have no desire to take any of themselves. However, most people seem to identify with the group that feels okay about selfies, as long as they can relate to the reason why they are taken.
Aside from whether people like selfies or not, there has been increasing attention for their effect on mental health, mainly so in the case of teenage girls. The way that social media make people feel validated by the number of likes they get on a picture, can be damning for one’s self-esteem. Research has shown that viewing others’ selfies on online platforms generally has a negative impact on people’s well-being, assumably so because the photos being posted online often paint an unrealistic picture of the real world. Moreover, a study from 2015 shows that people who post a lot of selfies tend to have an unhealthy amount of self-confidence, as their motivation for posting so many photos of themselves is usually to get either attention or validation. However, this often only reinforces those feelings of too much or too little self-confidence, both of which can ultimately cause harm to your mental health.
Social media is probably the biggest cause for the negative effects of selfies. Historically, people would enjoy taking the photos with the most recent innovations in cameras, and share them only in a much smaller circle. Nowadays people see so many selfies online everyday that the negative effects of this massive activity become more apparent. People’s more negative traits such as narcissism start to show more, and our mental health becomes increasingly at risk. Therefore, everyone should be aware that sharing too many selfies does not gain you anything in the long run, although we also shouldn’t be too hard on people for posting selfies of their precious moments. After all, what would be the point of photography if not to share the special things in life?
