The selfie is dead – but self-obsession is universal

In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘selfie’ as the word of the year. Its use had increased by 17,000 per cent in just 12 months, the OED revealed. Before long a cottage industry of feminist scholars sprang up, dedicated to producing gruesome waffle on the subject.

A paper by Emma Renold of Cardiff University and Jessica Ringrose of University College London, for example, was entitled ‘Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: post-human participations [sic] in teen digital sexuality assemblages’. Not to be outdone, Katie Warfield of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada, wrote ‘MirrorCamera-Room: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie’. Dr Terri Senft of New York University founded an international Selfie Researchers Network to study ‘the politics and aesthetics of selfie culture’. It was all very exciting. ‘As an academic known for publishing on selfie culture,’ wrote Senft, ‘I often find myself dialoguing with reporters charged with answering for their readers once and for all whether taking and circulating photos of oneself constitutes an empowering act, or a disempowering one’.

When feminist academics start writing such gobbledegook about a social trend, it’s never long before the real world moves on. In 2018 Wired magazine declared that ‘the selfie as we know it is dead’ — adding that ‘Data from Google Trends has also shown a steady decline in the keyword since it was added to the dictionary in 2013.’

A decade ago, teenagers were addicted to photographing themselves. Today’s Generation Z adolescents can’t be bothered with Instagram, which they regard as an antiquated toy for millennials. And, as far as I can see, the Selfie Researchers Network hasn’t updated its website for seven years.

Today teenagers make TikTok videos in which they perform 30-second comedy sketches and dance routines, or pose as models.