People are doing it at home, at work, and at school. They’re doing it in the bathroom, in the park, at farms and at funerals. They’re taking selfies, snapshots of themselves to post online. The selfie is such a cultural phenomenon, the Oxford dictionaries named “selfie” their word of the year for 2013.
And there may be as many opinions about selfies as there are Twitter handles. Are they self-empowerment, or narcissism? Are they just personal branding? Or can they be art? Writer and critic Sarah Nicole Prickett came in to give us a primer.