Summary
When “selfie” was deemed the word of the year in 2013, people freaked it. How had society become so vapid? Were we all narcissists? Did this mean young people would spend all the precious time they COULD be building a Forbes empire… taking pictures of themselves? But did selfies really make Narcissuses of us all, or have human beings always been fascinated by their own self-image? The selfie as we know it today may have been invented by a clumsy Australian man. But from its origins in the days of Renaissance courtships, to 19th century “cartes-de-visite”, to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, it may be that the selfie has been with us all along. Moreover, can selfies be… art? In this bonus episode, Hannah and Maia breakdown the history, and question its future. Tangents include: Maia and Hannah moving countries, the importance of the word “gullet”, and why we’re so afraid of Victorian ghosts.
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| 0:00.0 | Returning to our earlier conversation, do you think the selfie was like in a way inevitable? |
| 0:06.0 | Yeah, I think that the smaller technology becomes and the more private it becomes, the more that people are going to start experimenting, like, within the comfort of their own homes with this technology. |
| 0:19.0 | And we do take photos of like mundane objects and stuff, but like, I don't know. The best mundane object is simply ourselves and our faces. And we're just transfixed by our own faces. Like it's just, again, we can't see ourselves. So it's really fun to be able to like look at yourself. I think like there was so much novelty in that, especially with the back camera of the iPhone, like being able to actually just |
| 0:38.5 | look at yourself in real time, as opposed to having to turn the camera on yourself, there's so |
| 0:42.7 | much fascination with that. So I think inevitably, yeah, the more that technology moved in that |
| 0:47.1 | direction, the more that we would also start to like turn inwards and it would become kind |
| 0:51.6 | of like smaller scale, if that makes sense. Like photography would become smaller scale, more private, et cetera. |
| 0:57.6 | Yeah, I think like researching this made me realize like we've always been a very narcissistic |
| 1:03.2 | species, but we're also like a very shameful one. |
| 1:05.6 | And that I think that what might be the case is that before there was the kind of socially acceptable context to share |
| 1:13.1 | photos of ourselves provided by something like Instagram, we probably just weren't sharing the |
| 1:19.7 | photos we were taking of ourselves, but not necessarily not taking them. I'm sure that people |
| 1:25.4 | who, whenever film is cheap or like whenever it's like affordable and reasonable to take photos of yourself, I think people take photos of themselves. |
| 1:32.9 | I just don't think they're going around and saying, hey guys, look at my photo, unless it's the mid-1800s and have their cart to visit, you know? |
| 1:41.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:41.7 | The first phone with the front camera was actually invented in 1999 by a |
| 1:46.8 | Japanese phone company, and it was made for like video conferencing. But for the first decade of the |
| 1:52.2 | 21st century in North America, we just had good old-fashioned camera flip phones. But obviously, |
| 1:59.4 | like we said, people were still taking selfies, whether it was on |
| 2:02.2 | your digital camera or your webcam or through, yeah, your old phones. I went through old photos. |
| 2:08.9 | I, yeah, have been taking selfies for as long as I knew that I could turn around the camera, |
| 2:13.6 | you know? Oh, but of course. But of course. And before they had a name for it, people were still posting those on social media in like |
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