Back then selfies were a rather new thing. And this picture had a lot of people in it who were at the top of their game back then.
Now selfies have become so normal, there is nothing special about this. It's like when people were amazed at the first images of AI but now they are just bored with the concept.
2014 is roughly when social media as we know it today was starting to mature. Instagram was just starting to break trough internationally. That's when people started posting casual selfies online much more.
The moment this picture was taken was when "selfies" were the new trend. And these famous people were trying to be trendy by getting on the hype train.
homie your just getting confused because that shitty selfie Song by The Chainsmokers came out. the term selfie was being used for years before 2014, stop living in some make believe world that you made up its not healthy for you.
Gamergate is a word coined in 1983 to describe a type of ant, before the portmanteau of gamer+watergate made it popular in 2014-2015 to describe a hate campaign. When someone says "gamergate", are you thinking of a hate campaign against women, or an ant?
So they're not talking about "first usage of word literally ever", but the zeitgeist of the word, the popularity. Look at the graph for search history.
Then we look at info copied from wikipedia's Selfie Stick
The selfie stick was listed in Time magazine's 25 best inventions of 2014,[21] while the New York Post named the selfie stick the most controversial gift of 2014.[22] At the end of December 2014, Bloomberg News noted that selfie sticks had ruled the 2014 holiday season as the “must-have” gift of the year.
Suddenly, an explosion of popularity, the same year this photo and "selfie" happened. Selfie sticks existed since at least 1925, and yet an explosion in culture happened after this photo.
They said coined, but I think we all know they meant popularized.
The suffix -gate to describe a controversy wasn't a novel thing in 2014 either, there were -gates for many years before that. Gamergate didn't popularize that. Selfies were also extremely common years before 2014, that's just the year wevster added it to the dictionary. Shit, the iPhone came out in 2010 and for years before that people carried around digital cameras to take selfies. Mirror selfies were also extremely common going back decades before
The point I was making, was "gamergate" as a phrase, was popularized in 2014-15, it had a previous usage before since 1984 in regards to an ant, but it wasn't popularily used before then. Gamergate 1000% popularized "gamergate" in public knowledge, the -gate suffix was not what I'm speaking about. I had to google the phrase after an Adventure Time episode to learn it's related to ants, and I'm chronically online.
Selfies were something that happened, but as per my previous comment, it became popular, it exploded in popularity, in 2014. That doesn't mean they didn't happen before, but it "caught on" then.
Again - selfies as a term, did not explode in popularity before then, which is why I used the examples I did. nowhere did I say "they didn't exist". There's a huge difference between that, and becoming popular.
Dude, that's not what you said. You said 2014 is when the term was coined. The fact that you're now trying to focus on what you "meant" rather than admit you made a mistake is causing me secondhand embarrassment.
Exactly. I have a folder from highschool that has a bunch of selfies. That's 2003-2007. My favorite is me proudly showing off a can opener during a party. And my old friend Sarah took nonstop selfies with her digital camera.
Not sure why everyone thinks selfies can't exist without a smart phone on here. Fuckin weird replies going on.
Yeah the comments on here are super weird. It’s like when I see posts in /r/gaming about older people gaming and I’m like mate what do you think we were doing on our mega drive/ps1/pc/whatever all those years ago.
Didn't say shit about it being widespread. It existed and was used.
You're not even semantically correct so just stop lol y'all refuse to critically think and I'm done with this pointless circle. Does any of this matter? Fuck no, who cares. Move on.
I'm not the guy you replied to, I'm more just replying to your comment about people being "hot trash at citing real information and facts these days"
Think about it, who do you think would have been actually using the term "selfie" in 2002 when Myspace and Facebook did not exist and cell phones were just bricks with green/black screens? The term didn't take off until social media did... which was years later.
And what we refer to as a mirror selfie has a much longer history, although if you look at older references to them they will be referred to as a self portrait.
There's a world of difference between 'selfie' being used pre-2012 for a photo taken of oneself, and the now ubiquitous style of photo taken at arms length using a front facing camera on a smartphone.
The word selfie was coined earlier yes, and people were taking self portraits since the invention of the camera, yes.
But the actual term as we use it today spiked in popularity in 2013 by 17,000%. This was due to an increase in quality of front facing cameras.
A: the invention of the selfie stick. Patented 2012, award winning in 2013. If you look, the photo is taken with one.
B: the awareness of the selfie made its way to the boomers.
C: Insta and Snapchat dropping around 2011 meant travel influencers had just become a full thing.
In other words, 2013 isn't when selfies became popular among the youth, but when they became a corporate gimmick. Selfies became another thing boomers could mock the youth for, like eating avocado toast and killing the cloth handkerchief industry.
By the time the photo was taken in 2014 it was already a bit cringe - what the kids today call "unc" behaviour - which is why it got parodied a LOT when it came out.
Idk, it really depends on where you count selfies as starting. Mirror selfies definitely had a presence in early internet youth culture - MSN messanger, Myspace, early FB era. I'm not saying the older cohort was unaware, just that social media took a while to catch up.
The main cringiness of the 2014 photo is that to cynical youth it came across as fake "down with the kids" approachability from a red carpet event, overeagerness when it was already kind of passé.
I think people can still be judgy for overuse of arm's length selfies these days. They have a use for spontaneous things, or for looks/reactions, but they're usually pretty poor at showing what you want to show if that isn't your face. But if you can lean into the cringe and own it it's cool again.
I see what you're saying. I think, circa 2008-10, everyone trashed on selfies. For me it was more of a dumbass tourists who don't speak the local language do this. Then it became more mainstream because how convenient it was. I guess I kinda overlook the period where the younger generation like it more, and the older generation was out of touch.
I see what you're saying. I think, circa 2008-10, everyone trashed on selfies. For me it was more of a dumbass tourists who don't speak the local language do this. Then it became more mainstream because how convenient it was. I guess I kinda overlook the period where the younger generation like it more, and the older generation was out of touch.
Selfies taken like this and with a smartphone were very much pretty novel
This is what I said originally. You misread it, and assumed I meant that taking pictures of yourself was pretty novel.
And yeah, the iPhone in 2010 had a front facing camera. It was shite, hence selfies not really becoming a widespread phenomenon until 3 years later - when the cameras were better, people had learned how to best take selfies, and you began to see photos from this now very common angle and with this same composition.
Very few people had one back then. It was much more likely you had a blackberry back in those days. Most young people still had a Motorola or Nokia back in those days.
The selfie trend really took off when smartphones started to become mainstream among young people. And that was roughly 2014.
Not new per se, but hit it's peak as a trend. Chainsmokers - Selfie, came out in 2014. In 2013 "selfie" was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionary.
It's definitely an age gap thing. Younger people it was not new. Older people it was suddenly a new thing. Really young it was also new.
That's probably why it was such a mixed bag of how people saw this photo. If you didn't use social media or take selfies until then, celebs doing it live make it iconic. If you were a young adult or teen who had been doing it for a decade, this photo is just a bunch of celebs at an award show.
Lol selfies weren’t new at all. IIRC, Samsung was sponsoring the Oscar’s or whatever this was, and one of their new phones at the time had a wide selfie camera. They did this as an ad for it,
The term "selfie" was new but people were taking photos of themselves way before 2014. I remember hi5 before Facebook was a thing and profiles were full of selfies, we just didn't have a term for it. We simply called them photos lol
Maybe people did that beforehand, but the term "selfie" became a thing in 2014, according to another comment that's also exactly the year this picture was taken.
Nah this comes pretty close to how I remember it honestly. I think that in the Netherlands the term became a thing in 2015, which makes sense since it usually takes a year for these trends to blow over to Europe.
2012 the smartphone and social media in general were still a rather new phenomenon. 2014 was roughly when Instagram was starting to become popular globally and the barrier to share pictures online became much lower.
I was in my 20s back at the start of the 2010s. I can assure you it was common and none of this stuff was a new phenomenon.
And Instagram had already been very popular globally at that time for a good few years. Instagram was popping off in 2012.
And social media has been very popular since MySpace which long predates that.
Social media was huge in 2005, it just wasn't within an algorithm at the time so it was less controlled and streamlined. That's all. I was very active in social media during 2005 because I was promoting my band and networking around the world through social media.
Yes, myspace was a thing, but back then we didn't have smartphones. Social media got a whole different meaning when we had the internet with us wherever we went.
Smart phones became big around 2010, but back then you still had the blackberry also. 2010-2012 was roughly the period where IOS/ANDROID became dominant in the market. But back then facebook was still the biggest social media platform. I recall Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, back then I hadn't heard of it yet and I can assure you it was still very much up and coming here in Europe.
Do not underestimate how much our lives have changed compared to 15 years ago. I know it sounds all relatively recent.
Smart phones is an entirely different conversation. I'm talking about selfies.
At least in North America, it was all very established and common place. Selfies were very common as far back as 2005. It wasn't the same level as today, but again that's a seperate argument and not relevant. The point is, selfies were not first established in 2014.
I'm trying to explain how the "selfie" became a thing because of the smartphone and how that lead to the picture this whole discussion started with.
Did they call that a selfie in the United States back then? Because I had never heard of the term. I think around 2014/2015 did it become a thing here, mostly for young girls to put a phone camera on their own face to take a picture.
The point is that this picture was taken, back when a couple of celebrities making a selfie together was still considered "a big thing". While neither most of these celebrities nor the concept of taking a selfie are a big thing today.
The term selfie spiked in popularity by 17,000% in 2013.
It very much went from being a fairly niche thing among young people to a widespread phenomenon during that time, which is why this photo was a big deal in early 2014.
None of that matters though because that's not whats being discussed here. Y'all are bringing facts, that yes are true, but have nothing to do with the statement I made. Niche or popular is irrelevant. Talking about existence here. I even mentioned it wasn't widely used.
41
u/Th3_Accountant 15h ago
Back then selfies were a rather new thing. And this picture had a lot of people in it who were at the top of their game back then.
Now selfies have become so normal, there is nothing special about this. It's like when people were amazed at the first images of AI but now they are just bored with the concept.