Selfies, selfies, selfies! It is all about selfies! Or is it? The selfie stormed onto the scene with the rising popularity of smartphones, mobile apps, and photo sharing.
Are they still culturally significant as an active trend or pheonomenon or is the selfie just a part of general culture?
Also called popular culture, pop culture chronicles the activities and way of life of a vast majority of the younger generation. It is the assembly of cultural products such as social media, music, fashion, and television, etc., utilized by a great number of the world's population. Selfie according to social media parlance is the self-portrait of the digital age. Everyone does it. With one click of the phone, your camera is on, face backing a source of light, and click goes the shutter. Apply certain filters on it to enhance the photo, and its ready to be posted to social media under an array of hashtags such as #selfielove, #NoMakeUp, #Selfies, and the likes.
Selfie Culture and Celebrities
Celebrities aren't left out of this as well. If you launch the Instagram app right now, you are bound to see at least five celebrities with selfie photos. From reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who posts at least three selfies per week, to market her sister's makeup line, to pop musician Rihanna who never fails to show us what an amazing body she does have.
The men also take part in this craze, as they all love to show us their well-defined abs and toned muscles evident in Justin Bieber's and popular Grey's Anatomy star, Jesse Williams' Instagram accounts, leaving their comments section a total mess, with people declaring their love them and what not.
Maybe it wasn't inherent in the older generation for the lack of social media, but thanks to pop culture, selfies have brought out the vanity in all of us, and we love every bit of it. While it is impossible to say how long this trend will last, selfies are relevant in pop culture at the moment, as on Instagram alone, over 326 million photos are at the moment posted with the hashtag #selfie.
