How 2013 became the year of the 'selfie' To be fair, they're not even the worst offenders. Yes, that's a casket in the background. It's the boy's grandmother. Welcome to the "Selfies at Funerals" Tumblr blog. This is depressing on so many levels. There have been celebrity selfies, political selfies, papal selfies and selfies from space.... It was even chosen by Oxford Dictionaries to be the "word of the year" for 2013, beating "twerk," "bitcoin" and "bedroom tax." Source: Reuters According to them, usage is up 17, 000% since this time last year. It hasn't made it in to the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (yet), but look at this graph charting its appearance in UK news headlines. Its first known usage was by an Australian university student in Armidale, north-west of Sydney, on 13 September 2002. View Larger Map The next known use was also in Australia, in 2003. Katherine Martin, the dictionary editor, thinks there's a good chance it started out as a typically Australian abbreviation: think "barbie" for barbecue, "postie" for postman or, er, "Aussie" for Australian. "Hopey" posted an image of his fat lip on the website of ABC, the public broadcaster, following a drunken fall at a 21st birthday party. "Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps," said the posting. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie. The first photographic "selfie" was taken in 1839 The chemist and daguerreotype pioneer Robert Cornelius took a picture of himself outside his family's store in Philadelphia. Of course, self-portraits are nothing new. Rembrandt, Raphael and Van Gogh all painted themselves and Andy Warhol shot a few "selfies" when the Polaroid camera came of age in the 1970s. But it is digital photography that started the "selfie" on its current path and smartphones - especially the iPhone 4, which came along in 2010 with a front-facing camera - that turned them into the phenomenon they are now. Look at the uptick in smartphone sales this year - almost twice as many were sold as in 2012. So why do we take them? The American writer John Paul Titlow calls them "a high school popularity contest on digital steroids." But the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz thinks nostalgia is the driving emotion. "If we take a 'selfie', we are documenting our life, creating a portrait-chronicle of time passing," he says. He agrees with Susan Sontag's notion that "all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." So maybe, in the end, "selfies" are a comment on our mortality. Not so superficial.