SELFIE WAVES

Here on July 1st of
2015 a long-standing ban was lifted

visitors were finally allowed to take
selfies at the White House and this is the first legal selfie ever taken on a White House Tour but a year before the ban was lifted in February of 2014 Vsauce met with the president and secretly took an illegal selfie while on the toilet In The West Wing thanks Obama, why is he admitting to this crime now? well a lie can't be covered for too long,so it's time for the truth.
who took the first selfie really?


It is the oldest known self-portrait a
depiction someone made of themself that includes Head and Shoulders it was
sculpted more than three thousand years ago by Pharaoh akhenaten's first Chief Royal sculptor. A man named Beck next to himself Beck sculpted his wife to Heart making this also a contender for oldest known Asy but the roots of the selfie goes back further than this. We have been making things that resemble ourselves in whole or in part knowingly or not for as long as there's been cause and effect.

Just looking into a pool of water
creates some kind of selfie, A Primitive
ephemeral one you can't preserve or send to anyone but it is undoubtedly an image of the self made by one self even the earliest life forms on Earth were capable to some degree of self-discrimination they could distinguish themselves from the environment around them which they have inside in some chemical form or a crude
pre-conscious sense of themselves I call
things like that first wave selfie.


First wave selfies are unintentional
automatic or accidental resemblances
something makes of itself in whole or in
part like prehistoric human Footprints
or the mental images animals have of
their own bodies the first big leap in selfie history
The second wave began with the first
intentional depictions of oneself second wave selfies include everything from Chauvet caves 32 000 year old hand stencil prints to the paintings of Jan Von Ike and Judith leister but in the 19th century self-depiction changed in another Major Way a technology emerged that allowed likenesses of the self to be made faster and with less skill that seemed more accurate less mediated and more indexical than ever before.

Photography ushered in the third waveselfie in the fall of 1839 outside his family's lamp and chandelier store in Philadelphia thirty-year-old Robert
Cornelius stood completely still for
about 15 minutes in front of a camera he built using a modified opera glass and a sheet of silver plated copper the result was a significant image it could be found on his gravestone in
Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery. The Smithsonian calls it the first selfie
but they also don't in that same fall of
1839, A man named Henry Fitz Jr took a photograph of himself in Baltimore
Smithsonian Magazine and pretty much everyone else has called cornelius's Selfie the first but in their archives the Smithsonian calls Fitz Juniors the first the reason for this confusion is that honestly we don't know which of these came first all
we can be sure of is that neither of
them is the first equally by a Frenchman wrote of taking a photo of
himself in 1837 two years before these but it's been lost and other even
earlier examples may have been lost as well because these are photographs people took of themselves it's largely uncontroversial to call them selfies but you know they're not like selfie selfies if you've seen my video is cereal soup you know what I just did there contrastive Focus reduplication that's when you repeat a word in order to focus on prototypical examples in contrast to edge but the point is no one called these selfies when they were taken they were photographic self-portraits the word selfie wouldn't even exist for another 160 years after they were taken so at some point between this and this our relationship to self-depiction changed and our vocabulary had to expand to discuss it.

What rough Beast emerged to make the coining of selfie necessary well let's keep going around 1846 Czech photographer MV lobethal took the earliest known selfie with a mirror this of course would become a classic selfie technique mirrors provided an easy early way to capture the self with a camera but in my opinion this mirror selfie from around 1900 is the most arresting I think you die at least three times once when your body stops living again usually sometime later when your name is spoken for the
last time but now thanks to photography more and more of us are able to save ourselves from the third the last time and image of you is seen. The identity of this woman is unknown that makes it the oldest known selfie taken by a person whose name we have forgotten this is the oldest known example of the classic outstretched arm selfie technique it was taken by Joseph Byron in 1909 images like these were a significant step toward the eventual fourth wave selfie the presence of a camera or arms or poles in the shot evidence of how it was made are Hallmarks of the modern day selfie stereotype for example a 2013 ad campaign for the cape times reimagined
famous historical photographs as selfies
and in every single one an arm
connecting the subject to the camera was
used
five years after Byron's armed selfie
Anastasia nikolivino Romanova the
youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II
and great-granddaughter to Britain's
queen Victoria and Prince Albert took
a photo of herself
she was 13 years old at the time, so many
have claimed it to be the first selfie
ever taken by a teenager but that's not
true in 1852 61 years earlier British

chemist William Henry Perkin took a photo of himself when he was just 14.
However even though Anastasia wasn't the first teenager to take a selfie in another way she was unlike Perkins whose shot feels like a self-portrait she took pictures that feel much more like we today would call selfies the photos she took were personal, she sent them to friends to share in her mood and daily life she posed with fake novelty teeth in 1915 or 16.
four years after taking the famous
selfie her camera was confiscated and
not long after Bolshevik revolutionaries
executed her and her entire family
together in a basement conclusive
evidence of her death in 1918 wasn't
uncovered until 2007.
although her work was cut short she
pioneered the use of Photography as a
social behaviour as a way to communicate
not just commemorate she has been called
the Kardashian of her day but despite
her influence she was more of a
trendsetter for hairstyles than
photography she didn't usher in a
worldwide shift in Behavior were young
people everywhere started taking selfies
camera manufacturers didn't rush to make
self-portraiture easier and articles
weren't written about how great or how
scary it was that young people were
taking pictures of themselves
though the modern day selfie still
wasn't born it continued to gestate and
kick within the womb. One such kick was
the use of sticks and pulls to activate
a camera's shutter in 1925 newlyweds
Arnold and Helen Hogg used a long Pole
to take this picture in 1934 Helmer
Larson used a fallen tree branch to snap selfie with his wife Naime in
Sweden on Reddit Chooch 37 shared his
grandfather using a selfie stick in the
late 1940s
An early depiction of what is now the
recognizable human selfie, If you Google self-portrait you
get a lot of self-portraits there's only
one image that shows someone making a
self-portrait Norman Rockwell's famous
triple self-portrait but if you Google
selfie a lot of what you get aren't
selfies they're pictures of people
taking selfies
four the selfie as we know it today the
pose of taking one is just as if not
more Salient than the actual result
blogs and articles containing outrage
over people taking selfies in
inappropriate places or when they should
be behaving differently rarely complain
about the actual images they dislike the performance
In 2015 Joanne paternapatania published
a book of pictures of people taking
selfies from which she had removed the
environment giving us what feel like
selfie poses preserved in specimen jars
the idea that those taking photos can be
a nuisance didn't begin with selfies far
from it there's a long tradition of
photographers especially tourists
raising eyebrows for being annoying
centering themselves over the location
and being predictably heard like for
example the Pisa pushers found in Italy
the modern day selfie that was to come
however makes a person look like a
tourist everywhere they go not because
everything suddenly became a landmark
but because people have always loved
looking at themselves and as cameras
became smaller and easier to handle it
was inevitable that people would start
snapping more self-portraits.
Vivian Dorothy Meyer took really cool mirror
selfies in the 1950s and 60s but she
kept them to herself her selfies were
unknown and unpublished during her
lifetime a couple of years before her
death she failed to make payments on a
storage unit she rented and her Works
were auctioned off six months after her
death in 2009 a collector who had
acquired them uploaded her images to
Flickr and they went viral inspiring
exhibitions a documentary, a road in
Paris was even named after her the
popularisation of instant cameras in the
60s and 70s made taking selfies
physically and mentally easier.. you
didn't need to know how to develop the
film yourself or feel self-conscious
turning in selfies to be developed
but instant cameras with mirrors on the
front didn't come around until decades
later, selfies still hadn't reached a
Tipping Point. In 1983 Hiroshi wada
submitted a patent for a telescopic
extender for supporting a compact camera an early selfie stick and two years,Lester wisbrod started what was to become a personal tradition using his new auto focusing compact camera to snap
selfies with famous people Whiz broad
was the pioneer of the celebrity selfie
still though no one was using the word
selfie, selfies hadn't become a thing yet
but then
something happened in Japan
in 1995 19 year old toshikawa haromi
known as hero mix was nominated for the
new Cosmos of Photography award by world
renowned photographer Nobi Yoshi araki
she submitted a portfolio of snapshots
she'd taken of her daily life and she
won the grand prize, there was already a
unique culture of photo diary and photo
booth use among young people in Japan
but hero mix's sudden Fame amongst
teenagers and the educated Elite made
the practice a thing suddenly young
people all over Japan wanted to be like
her. The New York Times called it Hero Mix syndrome increased demand for
cameras that made self-portraiture and
proto-instagramming easier LED camera
manufacturers to speed up the release of
features that served immediate frequent
photography Hero mix took a lot of
photos tens of thousands and her work
generated polarised reactions some
critics adored her While others found it
all baffled now by the time selfies were
called selfies the same debate was
started again but it was about the
behaviour Hero mix had brought into focus
more than a decade before you know, it's
hard to say who took the first selfie
but in my opinion Hero mix took the
first selfie selfie her work hastened
and christened the arrival of the fourth
wave selfie. The selfie as we know it
today
now if it hadn't been her it would have
been someone else people love looking at
themselves and it was becoming easier
and easier to do so but Hero mix
popularised taking pictures of yourself
as a social sharing activity more akin
to speaking than remembering less a
memory than a message nowhere is this
more clear than in the story of the
first camera phone picture on June 11
1997 while his wife was in labor
Philippe Khan Jerry rigged together a
makeshift system involving his star
attack flip phone a Casio QV and a
Toshiba laptop when his daughter was
born he took a photo with the camera and
used the laptop and phone connection to
immediately email the image to more than
2 000 people social media is strongly
associated with the fourth wave selfie
but as we've seen it wasn't its origin
instead social media was simply a mouth
that showed up later and demanded to be
fed them
online we have no bodies we can't just
walk in and be seen we have to upload
images of our bodies for them to be
there. Selfies are an easy solution
because they don't require other
people's help
but on top of that there's a sense in
which a photo of yourself taken by
someone else is that person's point of
view it's their story
but a selfie well a selfie's point of
view doesn't belong to another person
when I look at a selfie of you I'm not a
third Observer looking at you through
someone else's eyes
it's just me
looking at you
selfies allow us to be online first hand
not second hand
in the same way that brown bears who
migrated to the cold lands of the north
evolved pale guard hairs and became
polar bears as humans migrated into the cold lands of the screen they evolved

Selfies by 2006 everyone knew that something was happening the New York Times published an article that year about how young people were suddenly taking a lot of photos of themselves, was it weird? what did it mean? not once in the article is the word selfie used but it could have been because sometime between 1995 and 2006 the word selfie
was born selfie with a Y had been a word since the 1600s it meant self-centered or selfish but selfie with an ie is new. The earliest recorded usage of it is
from a September 13 2002 post on Dr
Carl's self-serve science Forum
Australian Nathan hope uploaded an image he took of how busted up his lip had gotten and he wrote sorry about the focus it was a selfie hope has been hailed as the inventor of
the word selfie but says himself that he
probably heard it somewhere else first
which is likely the word selfie is a
hypocrism a pet name an affectionate
familiar cuter version of an existing
word.

Australians are famous for doing
this barbecue Barbie mosquito mozzie
Australian Aussie self-portrait selfie
they don't only use I.E they love o s
and Z too Australian English has given
us probs Rando totes saws preggers and yes even doggo

Myspace was an early incubator of
thriving selfie colonies but in 2004
when Facebook launched as a serious
social media platform for people at
Elite universities, there was a brief
feeling that selfies were falling out of
favour however when the iPhone 4 debuted with a front-facing camera in 2010, the selfie was declared officially back. In 2013, usage of the word selfie had jumped 17 000 percent in the last year and Oxford
dictionaries declared it the word of the
year everyone knew what a selfie was we started calling things that existed
before the word selfies as well but that
is an anachronym a word used out of
place in time anachronyms can be words that have lingered around too long like when we say we're dialing a number on a smartphone even though actual turning dials are no longer involved or when we call this tinfoil although it's actually the cheaper and more durable aluminum foil that superseded, it anachronyms can
also be words from today like selfie
that barge back into the past like
calling these medieval Church singers
the first boy band nailing down the
definition of a selfie in the modern
sense is tricky of course does a selfie
need to be a photograph if not
why? if so, do I need to be holding the camera? does the use of a timer or a drone I'm not even touching mean that it's not a selfie or just a different kind of selfie? are humans a selfie since God made us in His image? because of questions like this,
I prefer what I've been saying in this article just allow a selfie to mean
anything that something has made that
resembles itself or part of itself that
covers a lot of stuff but can be broken
down into four waves .

A. First wave selfies
are unintentional
B. The second wave began
with the first deliberate depictions of
oneself
C. The third with photography's
promise of recognizable self-depictions
that were significantly more accessible
D. The fourth wave is when selfies became a
thing a cultural phenomenon motivated by a desire not just to have images but to be images
throughout the 20th century especially
we found ourselves increasingly
surrounded by images news and travels
and products and stories the entire
world outside our head could be seen
like never before
not in person but through images in the midst of this, Image world was the human
animal an organism that got to look at
images but wasn't one which was too bad
because to be an image was to be
something, well selfies gave us that
power they put it in our own hands
photography allows more of us than ever before to delay the third death but the fourth wave selfie flattens the
boundaries of time and space now we can be anywhere whenever does my face need to be depicted for it to be a selfie. Well in October of 2013 Kim Kardashian posted an image on Instagram
within a month selfie had been added to
the Urban Dictionary a belfie is a
selfie of your butt but selfie selfie
belfie guides and histories and even a
Selfie stick soon followed
and this all raises a serious question
about Society if a selfie of your butt
is called a belfie shouldn't a selfie of
the face be called filthy?