Did you hear the one about the idiot kid in Italy who broke a 19th century statue when he sat in its lap to take a selfie? Oh, wait, that's not a joke, it's a real thing.
The selfie is eating culture. There are so many selfie apps Apple felt the need to add a selfie section to its app store, despite the fact that taking a selfie is as easy as holding your phone in front of your face, and all any moron needs to do it is the camera app. There's even a selfie social network for people who just want to see selfies. It's been the subject of trend piece, after trend piece, after trend piece.
Last week, a woman took a selfie when her plane crashed. Turns out, she wasn't even the first person to do this, some dude beat her to it by a few weeks. Another woman took a selfie in front of a jumper on the Brooklyn Bridge. And then there's the selfie head-lice story, essentially someone in Santa Cruz with a head lice business attributed a rise in teenage head lice to selfies because as we all know correlation equals causation, or whatever. There's also some nonsensical flim-flam going around claiming that selfies are leading to more plastic surgery. And, yes, we're as guilty as anyone.
I am pretty sure--or at least I am earnestly hopeful--that we have reached peak selfie.
Look, can we stop talking about everything as a selfie? Or at least have a modicum of common sense about it? What these incidents and stories really have in common is an opportunistic news hook. Let me reframe the above stories: Idiot kid breaks statue while being an idiot. Lady documents plane crash. Guy documents plane crash. Callow woman shows appalling lack of regard for human life. Media desperate for dumb trend story; loves to reference head lice. Commonplace practice of headshot as profile photo makes an already narcissistic America even more obsessed with its own self image. Tiny camera displays 3-D images of vital organs.
Yes, people do take pictures of themselves quite a lot now--probably because they always have cameras. But the reality is that people have always been captivated by their own images, long before we had a clever new term for self-portraiture. Because that's ultimately all a selfie is: a dumb word for a common practice that's as old as photography itself(ie). In fact, it even predates photography. You know who was really good at selfies? Van Gogh. I mean, at least he had the decency to cut his ear off to make his selfie more interesting--that beats the hell out of making a duck face, every time. You might be interested to hear that there was once this dude named Narcissus who ... ugh. Forget it.
