Rachel del Valle | Know thy selfie

Last week, I went to a yoga studio where there weren’t any mirrors. This sounds plausible enough. Mirrors are less important to the design of a space than, say, windows or doors. But it was weird.

No reflections shone in the bathrooms or on the walls of the studio space. There was no way to know whether my French braids turned out evenly or if my downward facing dog was at the right angle.

By the end of the hour-and-a-half class, I felt good. I didn’t care what I looked like.

Most of us are aware of our appearance at any given time, perhaps to a fault. I’m guilty of occasionally checking myself out in shop windows and blacked-out laptop screens. Sometimes things feel off — is my backpack pulling my skirt up? — and you feel the need to check.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm.” That’s a bit reductive, with a tinge of the male-gaze, but it gets the point across. Forgetting oneself is more attractive than being constantly aware of oneself.

So if we know that confidence is tied to a scarcity of self-reflection rather than an excess of it, why are so many of us so obsessed with our own image?

As you may or may not have already heard, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is “selfie.” The authority on the English language defines the term as follows:

Selfie (noun, informal): a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.

Sounds about right.

What would you have voted for word of the year?

Normally, I don’t put much stock in the Word of the Year choices. They tend to be a little behind, a little less on point than Urban Dictionary. Other candidates for this year were “binge-watch” and “twerk.”

My first encounter with the Oxford WOTY was in high school, when my English teacher presented us with “locavore,” the newly anointed term of the times. No one in my sophomore literature class knew what it meant. The local food movement didn’t have much meaning to a classroom of 16-year-old girls in suburban New Jersey.

Now, six years later, the word has failed to stick. Farmers’ markets are a visible feature of privileged urban life, but the word to describe those who frequent them every weekend like parishioners has fallen out of use.

Suffice it to say, Oxford Dictionary appears to have gotten more with it since 2007. Anyone under the age of 30, whether they like it or not, knows what a selfie is. Unlike previous WOTY winners, “selfie” is an unpretentious term easily understood by anyone with a social media profile.

Some, like myself, may have mixed feelings about the term’s instant recognizability. Selfies are a part of life that I can trace back to grade school. Even if they weren’t labeled as such back then, they were very much a presence. MySpace, the clunkier, more clip-art-like predecessor to Facebook, was a virtual universe of selfies and selfishness.

I haven’t posed for a bona fide, Oxford-defined selfie since those braces-wearing days of MySpace and middle-school dances. I cringe to think that those preteen shots with bows in my hair and naivete in my eyes might one day surface. Those pictures were taken on now-obsolete cameras that are sleeping out the rest of their days in drawers, too fat and slow to ever be used again.

But today, selfies are easy to take. Almost too easy. Most people carry around the tools to take one with them all the time. Most of the Snapchats I send on a daily basis are selfies — but they disappear after I send them, so they don’t count, right?

If a person takes a selfie in a forest, then deletes it, did it ever exist?

Maybe. But selfies are sort of ephemeral anyway. Sometimes, they are a matter of practicality, convenience; sometimes, they are an unsubtle form of vanity; oftentimes, they’re a bit of both.

There are far worse things in the world than selfies. But aren’t there better things, too? Let’s hope next year’s word is less embarrassing.

Rachel del Valle is a College senior from Newark, N.J. Her email address is rdel@sas.upenn.edu. Follow her @rachelsdelvalle. “Duly Noted” appears every Tuesday.

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