The selfie that broke the Internet

This selfie, initiated by talk-show host and personality Ellen Degeneres and picturing eleven other celebrities on the red carpet of the Oscars in 2014, is popularly known as the selfie that broke the Internet. Posted by Ellen on the social media platform Twitter, it was quickly retweeted over 2 million times, causing outages on the platform and making the news.

While selfie-taking is very much a mainstream phenomenon that is widely practiced among the youth, the media industry and its celebrities are clearly also involved, and very much relevant. The impact of this selfie on the online community suggests the continuing presence of great media bodies and the figures they create to be recognised and held on pedestals by the everyman. Despite the diffusion of production power into the hands of Internet users in that they are able to produce content and distribute it online, we find that there is still nothing quite like the celebrity produced by great media conglomerates.

This selfie also suggests that these media giants have bought into the phenomenon of the selfie, effectively endorsing it and promoting it even more as an socially-desired performative act for greater capitalist purposes. This is supported by the fact that Samsung, the tech giant which produced the smartphone used to take the selfie has since shed some light on the product placement it was promised during the broadcast. This took the form of a clear view of this group of celebrities taking this selfie using a Samsung phone, although it was apparently Ellen who first brought up the idea of wanting to take a selfie to ABC, which is the media company that televised the show.

Whereas such a selfie looks spontaneous and quite akin to any selfie an ordinary person might take with a group of friends, on closer examination we find that there may exist conscious decisions by powerful capitalist bodies that make up the performance that is ultimately televised on mass media, and we therefore should question the nature of this crafted ‘reality’.