Selfies
We had to include this didn’t we as it’s easily the most annoying new phenomenon of the last ten years. What’s more, it looks like it’s pretty much a social norm now and doesn’t show any sign of stopping anytime soon. There’s even a fucking god awful TV show named after it, and that stupid song as well. Like it or not, the selfie is here to stay and you had better get used to it.
Amazingly though, it took a hell of a long time for it to become as prominent in society as it is today. Of course, this is mainly due to the fact that it’s so easy to take a photograph now thanks to your smartphone but the selfie has been around in one format or another since 1914. This was the first time anyone ever took a picture of themselves looking into the mirror and the culprit happened to be a young Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna who took one at the age of 13 to send to a friend. She said that it was very hard to take the photograph because her hands were trembling so much, which might have had something to do with why it took so long to take off in the mainstream.
Although there are a couple of notable selfies in the past (like US politician Colin Powell, who regularly took pictures of himself in the mirror), it only really took off with the coming of MySpace in the early 00s, as people would take cringeworthy, low res shots of themselves in their bedroom with a webcam every other day so they could change their profile pictures to try and worm their way into people’s Top 8s. It was around this time that the first ever known usage of the word selfie appeared.
As you might have guessed it was an Australian, and the story was ever so eloquent and fitting for such an important new term:
‘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.’
Even then though, the selfie trend pretty much died down when Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of popularity as people on Facebook tended to use professional photographs at the beginning of it (probably because it was only available in yuppy universities and colleges and they all wanted to let everyone know how much money they had by posting high class photographs) and so the selfie took a back seat once again, aside from the emo and stoner kids that refused to leave MySpace, even after it broke so bad that not even Justin Timberlake could fix it. Despite having its hour in the sun, it seemed like selfies were done.
With the advent of camera phones and apps like Instagram though selfies took off again massively in 2010 and it wasn’t long before they were replacing planking on your newsfeed. Whether or not this is a good thing is open to debate massively though,but it seems like selfies are definitely here to stay, with the word even finding a way into the Oxford dictionary in 2013. It’s just a surprise that it’s taken so long for the world to embrace them fully, especially considering that the MySpace generation loved them so much.
You could say that they came and went – like all the other trends in this list – and then came back even more full on and took over the world, probably for the rest of my life at least. I can only hope to God that that isn’t true of everything else on this list. Aside from Breaking Bad of course, although with Better Call Saul I guess we’re already halfway there on that one.
