10 interesting facts you might not know about ‘Selfies’

By Bhagyesh

| Updated: Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 14:03 [IST]

Be it an event, a date, a holiday or even a visit to a hospital is just incomplete without a 'Selfie'. From young kids to grandparents and from Snoop Dogg to Barack Obama, everyone has got a hang of this trend. It has also substituted the idea of an autograph entirely.

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Well the word 'Selfie' may be short but it has a long history and a chain of facts & events attached to it. Here you will find everything from its origin, to its impact on social lives of people and as well as its global impact as a trend.

#1

Robert Cornelius was an amateur chemist who took the first selfie ever! In 1839, Robert had to wait for 3 minutes before he could see the picture of himself and then he wrote "The first light picture ever taken" on the back.

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#2

He said "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie." And hence the word ‘Selfie'.

#3

‘Selfie' was awarded with Word of the Year in 2013 by Oxford Dictionaries when they updated in their online dictionary.

#4

In 2004 Flickr had used the first ever #Selfie before any other social network.

#5

In 1966, Buzz Aldrin took the first ever self-portrait photo beyond Earth.

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#6

In 2012, Time magazine featured the word in its "Top 10 Buzzwords" and in 2014, the word was officially accepted for use in the word game Scrabble.

#7

According to Ohio State University's study, men who post numerous selfies online tend to show higher levels of narcissism and psychopathy.

An example of this would be Danny Bowman, 19, who left school and never went out of his house for 6 months in an attempt to take the best selfie of him. He spent 10 hours taking up to 200 selfies per day using his iPhone. He used to became aggressive when his parents tried to stop him.

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#8

Breanna Mitchell posted a selfie of herself smiling in front of the Auschwitz concentration camp on Twitter in June. But a month later, on July 20 she started receiving hate retweets and comments which made that selfie and her quite infamous.

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#9

Rebecca Brown had been affected by trichotillomania - a mental disorder which gives her the compulsive urge to pull her hair out, leading to hair loss and depression. So she used social media to cope with her depression by taking a photo of her every day for six years.

#10

A Seattle-based entertainer and musician, Jason Rodjanapanyakul (a.k.a JasonSoSilly2) took over 50 ‘self-explanatory' video selfies with total strangers inspire people to overcome fears of social interaction.

So now you probably know almost everything about selfies and the good & bad effects or consequences it has depending on its use or how it is looked upon. Have a Safe Selfie..!