It's All About The Selfie

I prefer group selfies

Did you know the word "Selfie" is not in the dictionary? Well, it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary, not yet anyway. But it is in the Oxford Dictionaries Online. The word "selfie" was also the Word of the Year 2013 and interestingly was not in the dictionary before this.

Now according to the dictionary, a selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, usually with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media site. Now, if you've got any photos of yourself still somewhere and you haven't uploaded it to site like Facebook or Twitter, it's technically not a selfie. So go ahead and upload those selfies now.

According to the leading authority for the English language, Oxford Dictionaries, the word can be credited to the Australians. The earliest mention it seems, was in 2002 in a Australian online forum.
2002 ABC Online (forum posting) 13 Sept.

“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. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”. Referenced from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner/

The Most Famous Selfie

Ellen Degeneres Oscar Selfie

After the famous TV host, Ellen Degeneres, who had hosted the Oscar Ceremony, posted the live selfie on Twitter, it literally exploded, caused Twitters servers to crash, becoming the most tweeted selfie. To date, the Oscar selfie has already been re-tweeted or re-circulated 3.3 million times by Twitter users.

Barack Obama - Four more years

To give you a perspective, before the record breaking selfie was tweeted, the highest re-tweeted twitter message was President Obama's 3 worded twitter message "4 more years" with a picture of the American President hugging his wife, which was re-tweeted more than 780,000 times. The stats mentioned here are only coming from Twitter, if we add in other sites that had shared the Oscar Selfie, it might be at least double the figure mentioned when combined. The record set by Ellen here will most likely on top for quite some time, at least she hosts another Oscar next year probably.

A little trivia that I found, although Ellen Degeneres holds the record for the most re-tweeted selfie currently, she only has 4 selfies out of 839 post in Instagram.

Selfie Honorable Mention

Colin Powels Selfie - 60 years ago

In response to Ellen's record selfie, Retired General Colin Powell, had posted a selfie, which was 60 years ago. You could argue that it wasn't really a selfie until he posted the picture on Facebook but the picture does show him taking his own picture in front of a mirror, which technically is a selfie. And he is probably right to say he's been doing selfies before many other people, unless someone else comes up with an older picture of himself in front of the mirror and uploads it.

SelfieCity - Selfie Statistics on steroids

SelfieCity.net

SelfieCity is basically a dedicated site to the investigation of self-potraits or selfies of 5 cities in the world. It's got a team of people contributing to the site in the name of selfie investigation. The 5 cities listed are Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paolo. I think they should have included Manila too.

If you think there probably isn't much to research about a bunch of selfies other than the obvious like showing the gender, you'd might be surprise (or not) to see there is much to know about the art of selfies in SelfieCity. Something that caught my attention was about the moods of people when taking selfies. If you were angry, would you be taking a selfie? Well it seems there are people who do in those 5 cities. What makes this site also worth visiting, if your interested in selfies, is that they've visualized all their data about selfies and you don't just see statistical numbers and data. Check out their SELFIEXPLORATORY for a visualized data on selfies.

And if your up for some reading, you can also check out theories of their findings, with one it titled "The Selfie: Making sense of the “Masturbation of Self-Image” and the “Virtual Mini-Me”". So go check out SelfieCity.net to see how your selfie compares to the 5 cities in this research.

Time Magazine Selfiest City In The World

Time Magazine Online Selfiest City in The World

Just recently, Time Magazine Online came out with the Selfiest City in The World. For the ranking, data was collected from 400,000 Instagram photos that had tag the "selfie" and also geographic coordinates. The number 1 Selfiest City is Makati City and Pasig, Philippines. Congratulations Makati City and Pasig. Could this have been one of the "Make It Makati" projects?

Makati City & Pasig, Philippines is number 1

So now that know more about selfies, go do your country proud, take out your smartphone and snap more selfies. As for me, I think I'll just stick to group selfies.

Sources:
Oxford Dictionary Online - Selfie
Oxford Dictionary Blogs - Selfie: Word of The Year 2013
SelfieCity - SelfieCity.net
Time Magazine Online - The Selfiest Cities in the World: TIME's Definitive Ranking