Selfie: narcissism or solitude?

Wikipedia describes selfie as:

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often shared on social networking services such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. They are often casual, and are typically taken either with a camera held at arm's length or in a mirror.

Once a novelty, selfies have now become our bread and butter....

Be it you are President Obama at Madiba's funeral, be it the oscar star studded selfie, be it a biker on a Roman bridge, be it an F1 fan going to a race, be it a 9 year old playing with mum's or dad's phone or iPad and experimenting a selfie.

Even NASA could not resist the charm  and glamour of a selfie and decided to launch a campaign asking folks to take a selfie. Guess what 36,000 people (where they narcissists or terribly lonely folks) responded to their call, resulting a stunning mosaic of our planet to celebrate Earth Day.

I guess if you are anywhere between 5 and 50ish, chances are, you may have done a selfie. Not sure anyone will admit that their selfie is a sign of narcissism, and I am equally sure no one will admit that it is a sign of solitude..... Maybe it is somewhere in between.

What struck me the other day, as I was crossing one of the beautiful bridges in the eternal city, were two ladies, one a bike, and other one obviously travelling on her own, both of them fully engaged in a selfie. I had the urge to ask them whether they wanted me to take their picture. But their posture and look of pleasure on their face taking a selfie made me reconsider my offer.

Before the advent of selfies, we would have stopped someone, conversed and asked them to take our picture. Today, on the other hand, conversation seems to be luxury and the quest for self-sufficiency and immediacy seems to annihilate everything else.

I committed the same sin on Sunday.... We were getting ready to leave for the Monaco F1 race and I had the urge of posting my excitement on social media. While my family was getting ready,  I resorted to selfie......

After committing the sin, I thought to myself, would it have made a difference if I had posted the picture 15 minutes later? And of course the answer is NO, not at ALL. So why did I resort to a selfie......

And the honest answer, is I do not know, maybe because I had never done one before..... Maybe because I was super excited and wanted to share my excitement with my friends in real time. But then so what? Did they really care? Did they see it the moment I posted it?

What ever the motivation of a selfie, I wonder how it will at the end of the day transform our identities and culture. Now that we've seen the selfie version of our planet, of the Pope, President Obama, Hollywood stars and you and I, what next?