It all began by accident. Equipping phones with a front-facing camera was supposed to usher in the age of video calling (the first such phone appeared way back in 2003)—but it didn’t take off as manufacturers expected. Instead, people discovered you could do something simpler and more fun: take a still photo of your own face at arm’s length. Blissfully unintentionally, a new subset of photography had come into being—just in time to define an age of booming social media, look-at-me narcissism, and ceaseless self-consciousness.
If you’d said selfie in 2011, most people wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. By the close of 2013, though, it was a global term—and the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. “It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet,” noted the Oxford Dictionaries blog that November. “If it is good enough for the Obamas or the Pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year.” Usage of the word increased by over 17,000 percent between October 2012 and October 2013. How and why had this happened?
In keeping with their reputation for lexical sleuthing, Oxford’s lexicographers traced the first recorded use of “selfie” all the way back to 2002 and the self-confessedly inebriated posting of an Australian internet forum user. “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,” he wrote on September 13. “I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”1
This doesn’t mean the man in question—Nathan “Hopey” Hope—coined the term. The first recorded example of a word is only rarely the same thing as the moment of its creation. The Australian fondness for slang ending in “-ie” does, however, fit in with an antipodean origin (think “barbie” for BBQ, “tinnie” for can of beer). Perhaps most important for the term’s popularity, it’s both brief and a playfully affectionate sound—a fine match for the sense that selfies are endearing little second selves rather than symptoms of self-indulgence.
For the subsequent success of the term, it’s technology as much as language that matters. Facebook launched in 2004, hit 100 million users by 2008, and reached the 1 billion mark by September 2012. Other sites and services followed in its footsteps. Image-sharing has become a dominant form of self-expression, in parallel with the increasing quality of phone cameras, bandwidth of mobile data networks, and generosity of data allowances. Today, the gamut of selfie subsets includes couples selfies, no-makeup selfies, landmark selfies, seen-with-a-celeb selfies, headless selfies, and everything else you might wish a fully featured visual vocabulary to encompass.
There’s also—a personal favorite—the bookaholic’s “shelfie,” in which you share a snap of your bookshelves. It’s a playful statement of identity, a celebration of what you love, and a way of showing off, all at the same time. A more typical twenty-first-century term is hard to imagine.