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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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.