GoPro Pole
A selfie taken with an American President is called a POTUS-elfie. Source: ghananation.com
Have you ever taken a selfie? If you own a cell phone or GoPro Pole the odds are that you have taken hundreds if not thousands. The activity has become so popular that in 2013 Oxford Dictionaries added the word to the lexicon of the modern English language. With the selfie becoming ubiquitous with social media pop culture we thought it might be fun to checkout 10 fun facts about one of our favorite pastimes.
10. Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, might have credit for the first selfie ever taken in 1839. Keeping with the self-promotion theme of the selfie, he wrote on the back of the photo, “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
9. The term “selfie” may have first been coined by photographer Jim Krause in 2005, but the term can actually be tracked back to 2002 when it was used in an Australian online forum.
“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.”
8. Neuroscience research shows that selfies by non-professional photographers show a slight bias for showing the left cheek of the selfie-taker.
7. There are over 35 million posts containing #selfie among the 150 million Instagram users.
6. With the increase in selfie related injuries in Russia; in 2015 the Russian Ministry of the Interior released a “Selfie safety guide” to warn selfie enthusiasts about some of the common dangers associated with selfie taking.
5. A 2013 survey found that selfies are most popular in Australia with two-thirds of Australian women between the age 18-35 active selfie takers. The United States was second in selfie popularity followed by Canada.
4. A group selfie is called an “usies.”
3. A selfie taken by Ellen DeGeneres during the 86th Academy Awards is the most retweeted image ever.
2. A selfie of an American President is called a “POTUS-elfie”
1. Arguably the ultimate measure of social and language popularity; the word “selfie” was officially accepted for use in the game Scrabble in 2014.
