A selfie is a selfie.
Selfie is an English term that is used as a synonym for selfie or self-portrait . It is a practice that is more than a century old, but it gained great popularity in the 21st century thanks to new technologies and social networks.
A selfie consists of taking a photo of yourself . The person, in this way, extends his arm and shoots the camera pointing towards his face or his body . Another option is to point the camera at a mirror so that your image is captured in the reflection.
History of the selfie
In the 19th century , there were already people who made daguerreotypes of themselves. Later the practice of taking selfies with box cameras , usually supported by a tripod , began. Then, with handheld cameras , the practice spread.
However, the rise of selfies occurred after 2000 . With digital cameras and mobile phones ( cell phones ) allowing you to take photos and view them in the moment, without too many storage limitations and eliminating the need to develop images, millions of people began taking selfies.
Digital cameras were joined by the development of social networks on the Internet . Through these platforms, users share their photographs with other people. Thus it became common for an individual to take a selfie and then post it on a social network. This way you can show that you are enjoying your vacation on a beach, that you are having lunch at a restaurant or that you have just played a tennis match, to name just a few possibilities.
People take selfies in multiple contexts and circumstances.
A mode of communication
Despite being an apparently spontaneous action lacking technique , the reality is that the selfie has become one of the fundamental modes of graphic communication in recent times, which is why there is much more content than we can see at once. simple view.
First of all, the place and the situation that a person chooses to take are not usually coincidental, but 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 main objective of the selfie is to communicate with a large number of people, although it leaves behind the normal custom in the past of asking a stranger to take a photo of you with their own camera. This contradiction can be seen in most of the popular trends and products of the 21st century, at the head of which are social networks, a true contradiction in itself.
Selfies and artificial life
Since vanity is part of our nature, although in some it is 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 It's your latest hairstyle or your expensive HDTV that "just happens" to appear in the background. The Internet invites us to exhibit ourselves, to value the material more than the intellectual, and this type of photography 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 such an extent that many do not hesitate to photograph themselves semi-naked even to complete their profile in workplaces: when we see that a person He calls himself a journalist on his Twitter account ( today