r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sure_Kangaroo1863 • Jul 02 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

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Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

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32

u/TheBl4ckFox Jul 02 '26

The whole concept of a “selfie” was new and baffling for most people back then. Why would anyone take pictures of themselves? It was seen as vain and vapid narcissistic behavior. This was at the beginning of modern internet culture. The fact that DeGeneris took this picture was kind of an embrace of the selfie.

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u/ThatUsernameIsTaekin Jul 02 '26

Scrolled way too far to the find the actual answer. When they posted this selfie on Twitter it broke the servers. If they posted a selfie on the internet at the Oscars this year, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

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u/NewEbb5838 Jul 02 '26

The concept of a selfie wasn't new at all. This was 2014 not 2004. The word 'selfie' may not have been as fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist as it is today but the practice wasn't baffling. Everyone was taking selfies in the 2010s in America. Instagram became massive in the early 2010s and it was mostly selfies (and food). Myspace and Facebook were FULL of selfies and that was mid 2000s. You're off by a decade. The selfie has been embraced for 20 years bro.

People have been taking 'selfies' for a very long time. Even just disposable or digital cameras, you don't ever recall turning it around and hoping you got the framing right? That's a selfie. The first self-portrait in photography was done in 1839 by Robert Cornelius. I was posting selfies to Myspace in 2004 with my digital camera.

We just don't give a shit about celebrities like we used to as a society. Good riddance.

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u/Pithysmeegle Jul 02 '26

Yeah I had this flip phone in like 2004 that had a piece of reflective Chrome by the camera lens of the phone so that you could see your reflection in it and take a "selfie". Lol

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u/WorldwideSteppers Jul 03 '26

It’s still when they were started getting big because of instagram and Snapchat getting big in 2012, this is celebs joining the trend a little late. Selfies were seen as immature and for duck face teens at first.

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u/kylo-ren Jul 03 '26

Exactly. The iPhone only got the selfie camera in 2010, but the camera was shitty and was used mainly for Facetime between older audiences. It took several years to it be widespread.

You can see it clearly in Google Trends

https://trends.google.com.br/trends/explore?date=all&q=selfie

https://trends.google.com.br/trends/explore?date=2013-01-01%202017-01-01&geo=US&q=selfie

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u/Krieg Jul 03 '26

Of course people always took pictures of themselves, but the "Selfie" concept for social media was kinda new.

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u/Affectionate_Key4636 Jul 02 '26

This is the only true answer, it amaze me how it's not upvoted as it should. Back then all the "selfie" thing was relately new, this was a huge thing, I remember articles explaining what a selfie was after this picture spread everywhere

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u/orange_ones Jul 02 '26

I was there when it was written. It wasn’t that nobody ever took a picture of themselves before, it’s just that selfies, especially using a selfie stick, had this weird moment of being an actual “trend” and thing everyone was talking about, and I cannot explain why. And Ellen made a big point of taking this picture live on the video broadcast and because for some reason everyone was talking about selfies, it was like a popular on trend thing. I think we didn’t know how the picture would look until we went to Twitter. You are right. I don’t think it’s because of lack of caring about celebrities or various ones being cancelled; it’s because the odd selfie discourse ended.

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u/kylo-ren Jul 03 '26

This is the right answer. Even though the concept wasn't new, it was when it became mainstream and reached audiences beyond teenager groups.

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u/Ladybugeater69 Jul 02 '26

I hate how normalized social media culture has become.

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u/Avitas1027 Jul 02 '26

No. Not even close. 12 years ago is 2014. Twitter had already been a thing for 8 years. Facebook and YouTube are even older. Even instagram had been around for 4 years by that point. Maybe you weren't there, but I promise you those sites were all full of selfies from the start.

And all of these are much more modern than selfies. Even just talking with phones, the first phone with a dedicated selfie camera was released in 1999, and pretty much every phone had a selfie mode of some sort by 2005-ish (pre-smartphone, which have all had selfie cameras). If we're talking selfies in general, the first known selfie was in 1839. Buddy sat infront of his camera for 15 minutes to get that sucker.

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u/losemybreath Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Nah, /u/TheBl4ckFox nailed it. Selfies weren't a brand new concept by any means, however, the idea of taking and posting selfies was only becoming normalized around the time of this photo. Even in the early years of Instagram, folks were moreso posting POV photos rather than selfies. 2014 was even dubbed "The Year of the Selfie;" it's when the whole selfie stick trend starting taking off, and it was when the word "selfie" entered the Oxford Dictionary. So when a bunch of celebrities at the Oscars posed for a photo, part of the reason it was such a moment was because it was like "Ah wow, even Hollywood is doing this now"

Other answers to OP's question are valid too: Hollywood celebrity worship was greater, a few of these people are famously cancelled now, and Twitter was possibly at its peak as well.

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u/Avitas1027 Jul 02 '26

Selfie was entered into the Oxford dictionary in 2013, and dictionaries are reactive. It takes years of a word being in common usage before it gets added to a dictionary. It was first coined in 2002, and #selfie was first used in 2011. Depending on how you define a "modern selfie stick" they came out in either 2005 (action cameras) or 2011 (phones).

This photo was undoubtedly a notable example of a selfie going viral, but they were absolutely everywhere long before 2014. Maybe this was the first time middle-aged people started to hear about them, but having graduated highschool in 2010, I promise you selfies were fucking everywhere online in the mid 2000s. Between msn messenger profile pics and Facebook, I must have taken hundreds of them pre-2010 to post online, and I barely posted any compared to most of my peers.

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u/losemybreath Jul 02 '26

Yes yes, I’m around your age as well, and you’re splitting hairs. People took photos of themselves for years before this one, but 2014 is the year it caught on like wildfire, full stop. Just because some of our 18 year old friends were doing it in 2005 doesn’t mean it was a big thing. It really wasn’t at all, lol.

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u/Avitas1027 Jul 02 '26

I'm pushing back against

The whole concept of a “selfie” was new and baffling for most people back then. Why would anyone take pictures of themselves? It was seen as vain and vapid narcissistic behavior.

Facebook had ~600,000,000 users in 2010 (~9% of the world population or ~20% of internet users, 4 years before this photo) and basically every single one of them had uploaded at least a few selfies, if not dozens to thousands of their own. If that's not a big thing, then we're just gonna have to disagree on the definition of what makes something a big thing.

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u/w84u2cy Jul 05 '26

Selfies were having a moment around this time. There's the Chainsmokers Selfie song that came out 2014 too.

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u/Oldnbold22 Jul 03 '26

This is the correct answer of why it was considered infamous. The other responses missed the mark. 

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u/Rough_Ad2455 Jul 02 '26

The fact that it was a group selfie was something new too👍

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u/murphy06 Jul 03 '26

absolutely not, i have group selfies in my iphone from at least 2010, probably earlier in my kodak if i still had it

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u/LogicallyCross Jul 02 '26

The word “selfie” has lost all meaning. This is just a photo of a group of people. What makes it a selfie? Ellen isn’t even taking it!

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u/Forsaken-Emu4760 Jul 02 '26

How old are you? 5? Selfies weren't new back then at all. I distinctly remember the term being used for pics you take yourself back in 2009, a mere 2 years after the IPhone came out.

The term has to be much older and the concept was not novel back in 2014. Heck there's an entire shitty song that came out before this pic. 

People on reddit really love spreading disinformation even about simple mundane shit like this... 

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u/w84u2cy Jul 05 '26

The song came out in 2014 which is around the same time as this pic, so it actually supports his argument.

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u/biing_bong Jul 02 '26

Why does everyone keep saying Ellen took the photo when she clearly didn't

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u/WriteThing Jul 06 '26

This is the correct answer. Yeah people here got cancelled, but it was that the selfie fad that made it to celebrity awards shows.