27 February 2014, 10:46 PM IST
Why 'selfies' have become all the rage, and what they'll do to us
President Barack Obama likes to do it to himself. So does British Prime Minister David Cameron. Maybe so do Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal. Why not? After all, everyone — or almost everyone — seems to be doing it to themselves these days. Taking selfies, that is.
When i first heard the term selfie, it puzzled me. What on earth did it refer to? Was a selfie someone who belonged to the so-called 'me, my, mine' generation, a selfish person, in short? Was a selfie a self-appraisal form that you had to fill in and give to the head of HR in your company if you wanted a raise? Was a selfie an act of auto-eroticism so hush-hush it wasn't even mentioned in the Kama Sutra?
As it turned out, a selfie was none of these things. A selfie was you taking a picture of yourself — along with a couple of your pals perhaps — on your cellphone. And selfies have become all the rage these days.
Telephones were invented so that people could speak to each other from long distances. While talking to people over long distances is still one of their functions, the primary use of phones now is to take pictures of the owner of the phone from a very short distance.
How and why this happened is a story of technological progress. Thanks to the invention of the jetliner, people began to travel to far off places, which boasted exotic landmarks, like the Taj Mahal.
Now what was the point of taking all the trouble and expense of going to all those exotic places if you couldn't prove to people back home that you'd been there, done that? Problem was, even if you remembered to take your camera with you, you had to depend on other people — often total strangers, other tourists like you — to take your snap against the Taj, or the Mysore Palace, or Mukesh Ambani's humble abode of Antilia, or whatever other marvel of the ancient or modern world you'd travelled far and wide to sightsee.
And sure enough, the person would take a picture of you with the backdrop of the Taj, Mysore Palace, Antilia, whatever. Except while the person had got the backdrop (Taj, etc) in perfect focus, he'd knocked your head out of the frame. So what you had was a picture of a headless person posing against a famous landmark. And no proof whatsoever that the headless person in question was you.
That's when the selfie invented itself. Now you didn't have to depend on some dumbass stranger to shoot you and in the process cut your head off. Now you could shoot yourself, head and all. Say cheeeese!
Selfies have changed the primary function of the cellphone, which is no longer an instrument for talking to other people, but an instrument to provide visual evidence of you having been to wondrous places and seen spectacular sights.
There is only one problem. While technology is ensuring that selfies become sharper and clearer, there is an anatomical problem to the taking of the perfect selfie: the length of the human arm. If our arms were longer our selfies would have that much more pictorial depth, be that much better.
Will genetics kick in? Will the innate urge for selfies cause our arms to grow longer so that, orangutan-like, they dangle down past our knees? If so, the next step in human evolution will have been taken. Homo sapiens sapiens will have become homo selfies selfies.
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