It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. People are doing it at home,

at work, and at school. In the bathroom, in the park, at farms, and even funerals. They're taking

selfies, snapshots of themselves to post online. And this has become such a cultural phenomenon,

the Oxford dictionaries named Selfie, their word of the year, for 2013.

Now, there may be as many opinions about selfies as there are Twitter handles.

Are selfies empowerment, narcissism, personal branding, art? If you're like me, you know what a selfie is,

but do you really get it? Writer and critics, Sarah Nicole Prickett, came in to give us a primer.

Steve Paulson talked with her. Well, thank you so much for coming to the studio, and everything

sounds fine, and we can go ahead and start then. Great. How do I look?

Sarah, we asked you to come into the studio to guide us through the selfie phenomenon, particularly

those of us who are not in our teens or 20s. And I have to be honest here, I don't look

at that many selfies myself, but I know they are ubiquitous for a lot of people.

How are people using them?

Well, first of all, we're defining selfie as a picture that you take of your own face, right?

I don't know if many of the people who are making selfies are really trying to categorize it in the way that the media does.

For instance, oh, selfies are feminist selfies or their tools for empowerment.

But I think for most of the people who are taking selfies, you're portraying yourself the way that you want to be seen, the way you hope others see you.

For a lot of people who are older, I mean, I think the whole idea of posting a casual photo of myself for the whole world to see seems kind of odd, frankly.

Have you ever put a picture of a baby on Facebook?

Yes.

Well, babies are a lot less interesting than grown humans,

at least to my way of thinking. They all kind of look the same. Or a picture of a dog or a cat,

...