LIKE it or not we are in the age of the ‘selfie’. In fact the term was named Word of the Year (WOTY) by the Oxford Dictionaries. The selfie is a digital photo you take of yourself that (for reasons best known perhaps only to yourself) you post on social media websites, such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr to terrorise unsuspecting victims who heretofore had taken the treacherous leap of faith and included you on their ‘friends’ list’. So, what are the dangers that await us in the world of ‘selfie’?

As if giving us its approval, the Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus, a research programme that collects about 150 million English words in use each month, last year anointed it WOTY. So, finally we have found a word that fully and ultimately describes our navel-gazing, self-absorbed 21st century life. And then as if that was not enough, the ‘selfie’ received papal blessings. In August 2013, a picture with Pope Francis was taken on a smartphone belonging to one of 500 teenagers who had travelled from the Diocese of Placenza and Bobbio, fifty miles south of Milan for a pilgrimage and shared a private audience with Pope Francis. The papal selfie, which shows a smiling Pope and three of the teens created a major Twitter tsunami and tore up social media. It made the Pope seem hip and happening.

To make matters worse for the non-selfie lovers, like myself, ‘He-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong-No-Matter-What’, the beloved United States President Barak Obama, POTUS, along with other leaders of the free world (British Prime Minister David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt) were caught by the international press taking a ‘selfie’ at the memorial service for former President Nelson Mandela last December. Within a matter of milli-secs that ‘selfie’ of our responsible world leaders, bunched together and mischievously posing, was hurled through cyberspace. Naturally, the usual suspects who would oppose even their own grandmothers, littered social media with disparaging comments about the frivolity of the moment, perhaps forgetting for a nano-second that, influential though they may be, these men and woman were in fact human beings and, horror of horrors, would behave as such.

But I digress, to make the point that the ‘selfie’ appears to have been legitimised and concertised within our modern-day world. So, what is it that awaits us in the world of ‘selfie’? The positives are perhaps even more clear, as on the constructive side, ‘selfies’ are a self-confident stamp of approval of our own selves, declaring our own beauty, charm and uniqueness to a worldwide web spinning maddeningly and overflowing with superfluous and questionable content. It would seem that having not yet exhausted all the methods of self-exhibition technology has now allowed us to firmly turn the cameras within our lives on ourselves for maximum and frequent exposure. ‘Selfies’ are notorious for capturing that lingering arm belonging to the person creating the self-portrait. The arm is the apostrophe that makes the selfie the possessive marker that it has become.

Says Dr Pamela Rutledge, Director, Media Psychology Research Center writing in Media Psychology Blog, (December 12, 2013)… “They are life affirming. Selfies document a moment that celebrates the process of life, freeing us from the tradition of capturing just the happy moments. The ease of the front-facing lens in a camera phone means you don’t have to take the time to line people up and get someone to hold a camera. They provide a freedom to ‘document at will’ what is meaningful even if fleeting. As we all know, life is full of more than Kodak moments. Many are complex, painful and interesting; some are mundane but perhaps personally interesting in their repetitiveness or dreariness. “She believed that these, ‘non-traditional photo moments’ form the fabric of life, they give it meaning and allow us to capture the rich tableau of life, not just the bookmarks.” There is no denying that this is indeed a strong argument for the ‘selfie’ as we know it.

Let us now look on the dark side of the ‘selfie’. Though not a huge fan of beauty contests, I am a firm believer in inner and outer beauty. However, I think if we know within our heart of hearts that we are not ‘camera-ready’ we should not be inclined or encouraged to post ‘selfies’ — at all. Never, no and not at all. Unfortunately, it is those of us who came up short in the looks department who would want to post those many ‘selfies’. Do not post a ‘selfie’ you might regret ten-fifteen hours, or days from now. Those things really do fly across the web. Finally, if you are under the influence of any prohibited substance or have been convinced by your so-called friends or are responding to a dare, don’t post a ‘selfie’. It is important that we enjoy the freedom of expression that the boom in the age of technology and the ‘selfie’ affords us, but let us do so responsibly.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with RO Communications Jamaica, specialising in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.