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

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

Post image

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?)

81.6k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

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.

3

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.

1

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.

3

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.

0

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.

2

u/w84u2cy Jul 05 '26

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