This week we present our tech term of the year for 2013. I know most news sites and blogs like to do these, oh I don’t know, right around Halloween, but in all fairness we here at the greatest geek-culture and technology podcast the galaxy has ever SEEN…. um, I’m sorry, HEARD (Trademark Pending) made the decision to wait until the year was actually over before bestowing this most prestigious honor. What if there was a late surge in some previously obscure tech term that suddenly became as ubiquitous as Miley Cyrus or the Harlem Shake? We’d be left with a carton of egg on our face now wouldn’t we.
This wasn’t an easy decision to make as there were some great contenders out there but in the end we realized there was only one tech term that dwarfed all of the others. Hey, if it’s good enough for The Oxford Dictionaries Online to choose as their word of the year, then it’s good enough for us! Although, I must point out that there is a difference between the O.D.O. and the the Oxford English Dictionary. The O.D.O. focuses on current English and includes modern meanings and uses of words. The O.E.D. is a historical dictionary and it forms a record of all the core words and meanings in English over more than 1,000 years, from Old English to the present day. I’m not just throwing words at you, that comes straight from the word nerds at Oxford.
“Selfie” is the 2013 Pop Tech Jam Tech Term of the Year!
They define the newly minted informal noun as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”
According to The New Zealand Herald the first confirmed recorded use of the word selfie is from 2002, in a photo and report of a drunken party posted to an Online forum but self-portraits have been around since well — forever.
Not surprisingly, Hollywood celebrities and pop-singers are some the most devoted selfie artists out there but one look at Instagram clearly shows that many of us in the hoi polloi can shamelessly self promote with the best of them.
In an opinion piece for The New York Times actor, poet, artist, director, screenwriter, producer, teacher, author and, apparently, selfie-expert, James Franco gets to the heart of what the selfie phenomenon is all about. Beyond the vanity, the narcissism and the self-involvement Mr. Franco states, “attention is power. And if you are someone people are interested in, then the selfie provides something very powerful, from the most privileged perspective possible.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, El Kaiser is not getting enough attention, and is not nearly powerful enough, so he must get in a few minutes of duck-face practice before the Polar Vortex freezes his lips off.