Selfie It is an English term that is used as a synonym for selfie or self portrait . It is a practice which is more than a century old, but which gained great popularity in the XXI century thanks to new technologies and social networks.
A selfie consists of take a picture of yourself . The person, thus, extends his arm and shoots the camera pointing towards his face or body. Another option is to point the camera at a mirror so that your image be captured in the reflection.
At XIX century there was already people what did they do daguerreotypes of themselves. Later the practice of taking selfies with the drawer chambers , usually held by a tripod. Then, with the handheld cameras , the practice spread.
However, the rise of selfies came from 2000 . With the digital cameras and the mobile phones (cell phones ) that allow you to take pictures and see them at the moment, without there being too many limitations in storage and eliminating the need to reveal the images, millions of people began taking selfies.
To the digital cameras - increasingly popular - the development of the social networks in Internet . Through these platforms, users share their photographs with other people. Thus it became frequent for an individual to take a selfie and then publish it on a social network. This way you can show that you are enjoying your holidays on a beach, having lunch at a restaurant or just playing a game of tennis, to name just a few possibilities.
Despite being a seemingly spontaneous and lacking technique , the reality is that the selfie has become one of the fundamental modes of graphic communication of recent times, which is why there is much more content which we can see with the naked eye.
In the first place, the site and the situation that a person chooses to do is not usually casual, but they are part of the message they are trying to send, something that also depends on the context in which the photograph is going to be published.
Ironically, the selfie has as its main objective to communicate with a large number of people although it leaves behind the habit so normal in the past to ask a stranger to take a picture with his own camera. This contradiction can be seen in most popular trends and products of the 21st century, at the head of which are social networks, a true contradiction in itself.
Given that the vanity It is part of our nature, although in some it looks much more pronounced than in others, we cannot deny that most people use the selfie as a means to show their contacts how much they have progressed in the gym, how original is their last hairstyle or expensive your HDTV that "coincidentally" appears in the background. The Internet invites us to exhibit ourselves, to value the material rather than the intellectual, and this type of photographs is the ideal way to take the first step to that artificial and two-dimensional lifestyle .
One of the most fascinating aspects - although not in a positive sense - of the selfie is that it has managed to bewitch people to the point that many do not hesitate to photograph themselves half-naked even to complete their profile at work sites: when we see that a person he calls himself a journalist in his account Twitter but the picture of his profile shows him lying on a bed and without a shirt, we understand that our species has seriously lost its way.
