Selfie Click

It has been four short months since Oxford Dictionaries editors declared "selfie" their word of the year for 2013, but already the word’s meaning is shifting. A selfie, it seems, is no longer just "a photograph that one has taken of oneself," but a photo that features the picture-taker. A selfie isn't just "a photograph that one has taken of oneself," but also tends to be "taken with a smartphone or we**am and uploaded to a social media website," as the editors at Oxford Dictionaries put it. That part is key because it reinforces the reason why we needed to come up with a new name for this kind of self-portraiture in the first place. Think of it this way: A selfie isn’t fundamentally about the photographer's relationship with the camera, it's about the photographer’s relationship with an audience. In other words, selfies are more parts communication than self-admiration (though there’s a healthy dose of that, too).