Selfie is now a real word, the Oxford Dictionary has made it official. The annoying phenomenon that has been made popular by Facebook and Twitter has its own title. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it just did.
The selfie. It has created the selfie monster -- people who seem to want to scream "look at me" or "look at what I have" every minute of the day. You have seen them. Look at me in my bathroom in my bikini with my duck face or look at my butt or look at me on vacation, or look at me at the gym or look at my pregnant belly -- all 9 months of it. Ugh. This is akin to the parent who used to whip out a wallet of family photos and forced you to look at it, except those were regular photos, not meant to one up somebody.
I get people liking to have fun. But is this about fun? Or is it about how much better they think they are then the people receiving the selfie? I think it is the latter, and that it is why this selfie revolution is annoying. It has made people selfish and narcissistic. The photos of the engagement rings -- I just read one with the caption "This is how much he loves me!" (Since when is a big ring representative of the amount of love?), or the photos of the pregnant Australian Mom who is only eating bananas and some mangoes her entire pregnancy. She made sure she took a selfie in the bathroom to show off what eating almost nothing when your pregnant can do for your figure. And of course she ended the picture post with the famous selfie duck face pose. Isn't that admirable? Because you know in the end it is not the baby that's important, its the selfie and how good you look in it. Do these people not have anything better to do than show off to their fake social media friends? Apparently not. Even Grandmas are doing it -- you know it is serious when Grandma sends out a twerking selfie.
Celebrities started this awful trend -- there must be hundreds of pictures of Kim Kardashian's rear end online from every angle -- put there by her via the selfie. But it is not just her -- there are many others, and apparently the public caught on and thought it would be alright to emulate these narcissistic celebrities.
Let's face it, we are all knee deep in photos that sicken us. What bothers me about all of this is that it is making our society unaware of what is going on around them. They are self absorbed. If it is not social media that is taking up their time, then it is their phones and selfies. It takes effort to take those pictures and post them -- it is time consuming, the set up of it all, you know a perfect duck face takes time to get right -- and it is done quite regularly. And all that time is being spent on doing something so ridiculous with no benefit to anyone except said selfie. And I could make the argument that they are not benefiting from it either and in some cases it can hurt them.
The selfie should be renamed "selfishie" because that is what it really is -- a selfish person taking a photo of themselves. I hope that this selfie revolution slows down and people start focusing on something besides one upping their "friends" with ridiculous photos and realize what really counts in this world is not just yourself.