Opinion Selfie 101
How to take a meme to its logical — and absurd — conclusion.
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Remember 2012, when no one realised there was a word for pointing your smartphone’s camera at yourself and taking a picture posing heroically against the Grand Canyon?
Well, if 2013, when it was anointed by the doyennes of the English language over at Oxford Dictionaries as the word that perfectly captured the cultural zeitgeist, was the year the selfie went viral, 2014 marked perhaps the culmination of its popularity. At the Academy Awards, host Ellen DeGeneres got the likes of Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lawrence to pose for a selfie, which she then tweeted. It quickly became the most retweeted tweet ever. Our own Bollywood stars paid homage to the Oscar selfie at a party. The selfie’s also been to space, Curiosity’s taken one while trundling along in Mars, and the pope popped up in another.
So, given its tremendous popularity, it should come as no surprise that a veritable industry has sprung up around perfecting the selfie. There are aids and accessories to improve the selfie-taking experience, and taking this to its logical and absurd conclusion, a college in London has decided to strip away everything that makes a selfie charming — its dorkiness and spontaneity — and offer a month-long programme that promises to “improve critical understanding of the photographic self-portrait”. City Lit College will charge you $160 for the privilege.
But these are signs of the selfie’s inevitable demise as a cultural cornerstone — or at least of its descent into parody. Sure, a sitcom trying to tap into the lives and loves of the narcissistic Millennial generation chose the ultimate emblem of its self-involvement as a title — you guess it, Selfie. Still, the show lived for about half a second before the internet savaged it and low ratings prompted cancellation. The selfie is losing its cachet. If there’s one thing Millennials like more than gazing upon themselves, it is making the too cool, uncool.
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