Selfie
A selfie is a self-portrait photograph or a short video, typically taken with an electronic camera or smartphone.
The camera would be usually held at arm's length or supported by a selfie stick instead of being controlled with a self-timer or remote. The concept of shooting oneself while viewing their own image in the camera's LCD monitor is also known as self-recording.
Selfie, as it has become known, is one of the most popular forms of self-portraiture in modern life. The availability of current apparatus allows anyone to produce a self-portrait.
Selfies are often shared on social media, via social networking services such as Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Snapchat. Video selfies longer than several minutes are more likely to fall into vlog category.
File:Spegelbild - Köpenhamn 2007.jpg|thumb|Selfie in a surveillance mirror
A selfie may include multiple subjects; as long as the photo is being taken by one of the subjects featured, it is considered a selfie. However, some other terms for selfies with multiple people include usie, groufie, and wefie. Alternatively, one can take a mirror selfie, with the camera pointed at a mirror instead of directly at one's face, often to get a full-body shot.
Etymology
"Selfie" is an example of hypocorism – a type of word formation that is popular in Australia, where it was in general use before gaining wider acceptance.The first known use of the word selfie in any paper or electronic medium appeared in an Australian internet forum on 13 September 2002 – Karl Kruszelnicki's 'Dr Karl Self-Serve Science Forum' – in a post by Nathan Hope. Although Hope later dismissed the notion that he coined the term, describing it as "something that was just common slang at the time, used to describe a picture of yourself", he wrote the following: "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer and landed lip first 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."
By 2013, the word "selfie" had become commonplace enough to be monitored for inclusion in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which announced it as the "word of the year" in November and gave it an Australian origin.
In August 2014, "selfie" was officially accepted for use in the word game Scrabble.
Early history of self-portraits
In 1839, Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself which ended up as one of the first photographs of a person. Because the process was slow, he was able to uncover the lens, run into the shot for a minute or more, and then replace the lens cap. He recorded on the back "The first light picture ever taken. 1839." A copy of his "first selfie" graces his tombstone at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.In 1900, the debut of the portable Kodak Brownie box camera led to photographic self-portraiture becoming a more widespread technique. The method was usually by mirror and stabilizing the camera either on a nearby object or on a tripod while framing via a viewfinder at the top of the box. Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, at the age of 13, was one of the first teenagers to take her own picture using a mirror to send to a friend in 1914. In the letter that accompanied the photograph, she wrote, "I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling." In 1934, a Swedish couple used a wooden stick to take the photo of themselves, which the New York Times called "the original selfie stick".
During the 1970s, photographic self-portraiture flourished when affordable instant cameras birthed a new medium of self-expression, capturing uncharacteristically personal insight into otherwise conservative individuals and allowing amateurs to learn photography with immediate results. This practice transitioned naturally across to digital cameras as they supplanted film cameras around the turn of the millennium.
Origins and development of selfie-taking
Japanese selfie culture
The modern selfie has origins in Japanese kawaii culture, which involves an obsession with beautifying self-representation in photographic forms, particularly among females. By the 1990s, self-photography developed into a major preoccupation among Japanese schoolgirls, who took photos with friends and exchanged copies that could be pasted into kawaii albums. This inspired a young photographer, Hiromix, to publish a photo diary album called Seventeen Girl Days, which included a number of self-posing photos. One of these was a pioneering selfie that was shot while holding the camera in front of herself. She rose to fame in Japan when her album received recognition from camera manufacturer Canon in 1995.The 1983 Minolta Disc-7 camera had a convex mirror on its front to allow the composition of self-portraits, and its packaging showed the camera mounted on a stick while used for such a purpose. A "telescopic extender" for compact handheld cameras was patented by Ueda Hiroshi and Mima Yujiro in 1983, and a selfie stick was featured in a 1995 book of 101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions. While dismissed as a "useless invention" at the time, the selfie stick later gained global popularity in the early 21st century.
File:Purikura Booth 2.JPG|right|thumb|A purikura photo sticker booth in Fukushima City in 2007. The first purikura was introduced by Sega and Atlus in 1995.
The digital selfie originates from the purikura, which are Japanese photo sticker booths, introduced by the Japanese video game arcade industry in the mid-1990s. It was conceived in 1994 by Sasaki Miho, inspired by the popularity of girl photo culture and photo stickers in 1990s Japan. She worked for a game company, Atlus, where she suggested the idea, but it was initially rejected by her male bosses. Atlus eventually decided to pursue Miho's idea, and developed it with the help of a leading Japanese video game company, Sega, which later became the owner of Atlus. Sega and Atlus introduced the Print Club, the first purikura, in February 1995, initially at game arcades, before expanding to other popular culture locations such as fast food shops, train stations, karaoke establishments, and bowling alleys. The success of the original Sega-Atlus machine led to other Japanese arcade game companies producing their own purikura, including SNK's Neo Print in 1996 and Konami's Puri Puri Campus in 1997.
Purikura produced what would later be called selfies. A purikura is essentially a cross between a traditional license/passport photo booth and an arcade video game, with a computer that is connected to a colour video camera and colour printer, and which allows the manipulation of digital images. It involves users posing in front of a camera within the compact booth, having their images taken, and then printing the photos with various effects designed to look kawaii. It presents a series of choices, such as desired backdrops, borders, insertable decorations, icons, text writing options, hair extensions, twinkling diamond tiaras, tenderized light effects, and predesigned decorative margins. Purikura became a popular form of entertainment among youths in Japan, and then across East Asia, in the 1990s. These photographic filters were similar to the Snapchat filters that later appeared in the 2010s. Photographic features in purikura were later adopted by smartphone apps such as Instagram and Snapchat, including scribbling graffiti or typing text over selfies, adding features that beautify the image, and photo editing options such as cat whiskers or bunny ears.
To capitalize on the purikura phenomenon in East Asia, Japanese mobile phones began including a front-facing camera, which facilitated the creation of selfies. Perhaps the first front-facing camera on a hand-held device was the Game Boy Camera, released in Japan in February 1998. The Game Boy Camera was an attachment for Game Boy. The 180°-swivel camera was specifically marketed to allow users to take self-portraits. The first front-facing camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. It was called a "mobile videophone" at the time. It stored up to 20 JPEG images, which could be sent over e-mail, or the phone could send up to two images per second over Japan's Personal Handy-phone System wireless cellular network. This led to a transition in Japanese selfie culture from purikura to mobile phones.
International popularity
Selfie culture became popular in Japan and then other East Asian countries in the 1990s, starting with purikura booths and then front-facing camera phones. However, it was not until the 2000s that selfie culture was popularized outside of East Asia.Outside of East Asia, the concept of uploading group self-taken photographs to the Internet, albeit with a disposable camera instead of a smartphone, dates back to a webpage created by Australians in September 2001, including photos taken in the late 1990s.
In the early 2000s, before Facebook became the dominant online social network, self-taken photographs were particularly common on MySpace. However, writer Kate Losse recounts that between 2006 and 2009, the "MySpace pic" became an indication of bad taste for users of the newer Facebook social network. In 2009 in the image hosting and video hosting website Flickr, Flickr users used 'selfies' to describe seemingly endless self-portraits posted by teenagers. According to Losse, improvements in design—especially the front-facing camera of the iPhone 4, mobile photo apps such as Instagram and Snapchat led to the resurgence of selfies in the early 2010s.
The Sony Ericsson Z1010 mobile phone, released in late 2003, introduced to Western markets the concept of a front-facing camera, which could be used for selfies and video calls. These cameras became common on mobile devices, such as the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4, which adopted the front-facing camera feature from earlier Japanese and Korean phones, helped popularize the selfie internationally, outside of East Asia.
File:Buzz Aldrin self-photograph during Gemini 12 EVA.jpg|thumb|Buzz Aldrin took the first EVA selfie in 1966, using a Hasselblad roll-film camera.
File:Curiosity Self-Portrait at 'Big Sky' Drilling Site.jpg|thumb|left|Curiosity rover's self portrait at Mount Sharp, Mars, 2015|upright
In 2011, the Instagram photo-sharing and social networking service introduced auto filters, allowing users to easily alter their photos. Initially popular with young people, selfies gained wider popularity over time. Life and business coach Jennifer Lee, in January 2011, was the first person to coin "#Selfie" as a hashtag on Instagram. By the end of 2012, Time magazine considered selfie one of the "top 10 buzzwords" of that year; although selfies had existed long before, it was in 2012 that the term "really hit the big time". According to a 2013 survey, two-thirds of Australian women age 18–35 take selfies—the most common purpose for which is posting on Facebook. A poll commissioned by smartphone and camera maker Samsung in 2013 found that selfies made up 30% of the photos taken by people aged 18–24.
File:Macaca nigra self-portrait.jpg|thumb|right|125px|"Monkey selfie" of a macaque who had picked up a cameraSelfies have also been taken beyond Earth. Selfies taken in space include those by astronauts, an image by NASA's Curiosity rover of itself on Mars, and images created by an indirect method, where a self-portrait photograph taken on Earth is displayed on a screen on a satellite, and captured by a camera.
In 2011, a crested black macaque pressed a trigger on a wildlife photographer's camera, set up in an Indonesian jungle for that specific purpose; when the camera was later recovered it was found to contain hundreds of selfies, including one of a grinning female macaque. This incident set off an unusual debate about copyright. In April 2013, the Wikipedia's Selfie page started. In 2016, a federal judge ruled that the monkey cannot own the copyright to the images.
In describing the popularity of the "foot selfie", a photograph taken of one's feet while sunbathing at exotic locations, The Hollywood Reporter said that it could be "2014's social media pose to beat".
In January 2014, during the Sochi Winter Olympics, a "Selfie Olympics" meme was popular on Twitter, where users took self-portraits in unusual situations. The spread of the meme took place with the usage of the hashtags #selfiegame and #selfieolympics.