Millennials no longer own the selfie.

Often described as a negative aspect of the “me” generation, the selfie has officially gone from a generational epidemic to a pandemic, infecting everyone from parents to the President of the United States.

On April 17, Vice President Joe Biden and the White House both tweeted a selfie of Biden and President Barack Obama. While the White House captioned it, “Pals,” Biden called it “The First Selfie.” If you didn’t believe it when the Oxford Dictionary named it word of the year or when Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar selfie became the most retweeted photo in Twitter history, believe it now. The selfie no longer is unique to a generation. Instead, it characterizes our society as a whole.

The evolution of the selfie is splashed across the pages of the Internet. If you look up when was the first selfie, some websites say it was in 1839. But the first recorded use of the word “selfie” was in 2002, by an Australian man referring to the quality of a photo on an online forum: “sorry about the focus, it was a selfie,” according to a November 2013 Slate article.

And then social media happened and selfies became mainstream, earning millennials their narcissistic status. From MySpace to Instagram, our generation were the leaders of the #selfie. But as social media expanded to all ages and more and more people started buying smartphones, the selfie made the natural jump from millennials to everyone else.

When millennials post selfies, it usually means we’re “self-obsessed.” With the selfie craze expanding beyond our generation, however, I think it’s showing something else. Instead of exemplifying that society is self-obsessed, it’s revealing just how saturated our lives are with technology and just how connected we are to our phones.  That may sound like a bad thing, but actually, it’s not.

Society is simply using the technology they’re given. We use phones for social media, GPS, research, communication; it’s only natural we would use it to document moments by snapping a selfie. We’re embracing the fact that smartphones and social media give us the tools to share our experiences with our friends, so why fight it?

At this point, the selfie has evolved past the individual. The most popular way to take selfies is with other people, or a group selfie. Even Chancellor Kent Syverud has hopped on the selfie bandwagon. After his inauguration, there was a photo of him posing for a selfie with another student on the university’s website. Currently, most selfies are no longer about looks, attractive or unattractive, and are meant to be funny. The selfie has finally evolved past its own name and brought more than one person into the frame.

Through its lifetime, the selfie has made the jump from an Australian slang word to a narcissistic millennial characteristic and has now become a societal norm. And it’s not going away. There’s no way to know what the selfie will evolve into next. It could continue to be used for socializing, or could return to being a contest in narcissism.

One thing is for sure though — as long as we have smartphones with front-facing cameras and a place to post those pictures, the selfie will stay not just in the lives of millennials, but everyone.

Kate Beckman is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at kebeckma@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Kate_Beckman.

 

 

 

 

Published on April 22, 2014 at 1:00 am