#selfie

With the emergence of camera phones starting in 1999, the infrastructure of social media was not advanced enough to keep up with this new jump in technology. Although people could take pictures of themselves, the spreading of this phenomenon was dampened due to the lack of sharing platforms online. This resulted in a lull-period for the selfie which only started to pick up with the emergence of the now billion-dollar platform Instagram in 2010.

With the birth of Instagram, photos could now be shared globally among users, but the digital rise of the selfie truly began on January 27th, 2011, on the day Instagram first introduced hashtags that allowed photos to be catergorized based on hashtags users included in their photo descriptions. According to Instagram, the first photo to be tagged #selfie was uploaded by Jennifer Lee (@jennlee) on January 16th, 2011. She had uploaded the photo before hashtags were introduced, but returned to add that infectious #selfie when the function was introduced on the digital platform and since then, the usage of #selfie has reached over 80 million as of 2014!

(Sources: http://mashable.com/2013/11/19/first-selfie-hashtag-instagram/, http://www.buzzfeed.com/abefg/the-history-of-the-selfie#.soQKzGWNQ)

(Source: Instagram user @jennlee)