We are only hours into the New Year and I am hopeful that we can keep a few things in 2013. One being the #selfie. 2013 has been the year of selfie’s from celebrities, politicians, even the pope.

The term selfie blow up thanks in part to the media trying to coin a term for photos that were “self-taken”. Anyone with a camera phone already knew what it was, we just didn’t have a term for it. As a young photographer myself, I simply witness the rise of self taken pictures as nothing more than — well pictures. In my opinion, a term wasn’t needed to describe self-taken photos before, so why do we need one now? And as an active Twitter user, I personally see 50+ selfies uploaded daily as I scroll through my timeline. Facebook provides no relief from the craze. But the biggest culprit is Instagram.

Instagram is everything I have rebelled against from a personal stand point for years. Although I love to photograph others, I hate taking photo’s of myself. Why? Well I’m not really sure yet. But I believe that no one needs photo’s of every second of their life. And it bothers me when I am scrolling through dozens of photo’s of someones face from different moments during the day. There is no one I want to see that much. Aside from my personal dislike of seeing someones every emotion displayed online, I feel that the selfie is making it difficult for people to truly be social in public. I can’t count how many people I’ve seen in person being anti-social because they’re taking selfie’s or scrolling through Instagram. This obsession with photographing your every move is not only strange, but awkward when you catch someone in the act of a selfie.

To my current knowledge, there is no research on selfies, and the effects on society in a social setting. But I just hope we can focus more on being social, rather than trying to capture the moment for social media.