My very first selfie! But why?

I’ve just taken my very first selfie, and I had no idea how hard it would be!

I’m a technological dinosaur, but work has just given me a fancy iPhone so I thought I’d do what everyone seems to do with these gadgets and take a selfie.

What an exercise!  Firstly I couldn’t work out how to turn the camera around, so to speak, so that I could take a picture of myself.  And then, having decided that this monumentous occasion called for a picture of the whole family (sans baby, who was in dreamland at the time), I found it almost impossible to get all our heads into the frame.

Dear readers, why oh why do we do such things?  What is the point of it all?

At the risk of sounding oh so smug, I was actually quite pleased with my effort – a nostril of one son here, an eye of another there, my husband at the back (wondering why he was participating at all).

But alas I think this will be my first and last selfie, because I actually think it’s a load of nonsense.  Call me a wowser, but I’d much prefer shooting a picture the right way, than turning the camera on myself.

Did you notice a recent story ‘doing the rounds’  (the social media whirlpool, that is) that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had declared taking a selfie a mental disorder?

It turns out that the story was a hoax, and that the APA had not in fact named the condition ‘selfitis’ with the definition “an obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of one’s self and post them on social media as a way to make up for the lack of self-esteem and to fill a gap in intimacy”.

Still, I think there’s something in it, because I really can’t understand why people take such inane pictures of themselves and slap them on Facebook with a ‘look at me’ tag.

Vanity thy name is selfie, and thy home is Facebook.  For me, well of course I’m just above all of that – until I next get the bug!