'Selfie' Mania!

When I first heard “Selfie” by Nina Nesbitt, I fell in love with it so I thought I would share it with you:

At first you just see a song about somebody talking pictures of themselves but when you delve deeper into it you see that it has a much different meaning. It is about the fact that people only show the parts of their lives that they want you to see, hiding emotions of sadness and forcing a smile instead. For example, the music video shows Nina pulling down a white screen in her bedroom and dressing up to take a photo labelled “Photoshoot” or posing in sunglasses and an ice lolly in front of a picture of a palm tree on the beach with the tagline “In Hawaii!” and another selfie with her and a stranger who brought Nina her pizza saying “My New Boyfriend…”. One comment on Youtube states: “Let's face it, every teenager pretends to be happy sometimes even when all they want to do is cry, if anything Nina deserves some praise for being clever enough to use something that we can relate to as material” and I definitely agree!  

This song got me thinking about where we got the idea about ‘selfies’ from so I did a little research and this is what I found:

Since social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have swept the nation so has our obsession with taking pictures of ourselves in black and white with our lips pushed together in so called “duck face” expression. Thus, the ‘selfie’ was born! I will be the first to admit that I have more than several camera rolls on my phone dedicated to my strange and somewhat embarrassing selfie addiction. You would have thought that I would have been the kind of person who changed their profile picture every day, unfortunately you are wrong. Many of those selfies are just too horrific to share on the web- they’d give you nightmares believe me- so for that reason my profile picture has not changed for many months and I don’t think it will change any time soon.

However I was not the first to catch on to this craze, in fact you would be quiet shocked if I told you that it was not only a man who took the first selfie but if he was alive today he would be 175 years old! That’s right, American photographer Robert Cornelius took the first ever recorded selfie. It was blurry, stuck in between that awkward stage of black, white and coloured and he looks a bit like Mr Tumnus from C.S Lewis’s series The Chronicles of Narnia. However, you can’t argue with the fact that his ‘serious selfie’ face is a massive big turn on:

75 years later in the history of Selfies, comes along a 13 year old Russian girl named Anastasia Nikolaevna who was the first person to come up with the amazing idea of taking her own picture using the reflection of her bedroom mirror. The Anastasia Method has been used by millions for their own selfies and yes *blushes* I use The Anastasia Method too! I’m just glad that my selfies don’t come out looking like I am a half-dead human perched on a chair:

Love Beth xx