A group selfie! Top row (l-r): Wendy Dodd, 67, Vicki Hardy, 33, Mary Clark, 89. Bottom row (l-r): Betty Ludwig, 93, Lyla Stone, 84, Katherine Zimmerman, 94.
The Drumheller Mail/inSide Drumheller reporter, Lauren Main, went to the Sunshine Lodge Thursday, August 21 to asking a hard question: What is a “selfie”?
The term, coined in 2009 on a Flickr feed, and incorporated in 2012 as Time magazine’s top ten buzz words of the year, refers to someone’s self-portrait.
A person, usually youth, will take a photo of themselves using a camera phone, usually one with a front facing camera, to put it on a social media site like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat.
Picture this: you are waiting for the bus, procrastinating at work, or settling down at home, and you’re taking a mindless scroll through your favourite social network. As you sweep your fingers down your phone screen, you go through a flurry of ranting statuses, hilarious retweets, and those classic cat pictures, all with one reoccurring theme intertwined throughout: the ever-present selfie.
You see selfies of your distant friends at the bar, selfies of your ex at home with their new significant other, selfies of your coworkers out for a night of bowling; plainly, you see people taking selfies everywhere. You may “like” the selfie, you may comment, or you may scroll by, dismissing it as “just another selfie.” But this reoccurring theme on our social networking sites sheds light on a slightly arrogant side to our society: people, now, love to take pictures of themselves.
The “selfie” has become such an integrated part of society’s pop culture, The Drumheller Mail/inSide Drumheller wondered, how far is the “selfie” grasp? Is Grandma Dorothy going to show up on our Facebook newsfeeds, posing, lips pursed, in the ever-popular “duck-face” fashion that seems to rule the “selfie” kingdom?
When The Drumheller Mail/inSide Drumheller reporter showed up at the Sunshine Lodge, any suppressed worry of our seemingly innocent older folk jumping on the selfie bandwagon was put to rest.
Maybe a little off center, but who can Katherine Zimmerman, 94, taking her first selfie ever.
blame the girl? Even though Madelyn Sherman,
90, has an iPad of her own, this was her first time trying to take a selfie.
Out of the seven women, and one rowdy man, one woman had a cell phone, another was the only one to own an iPad, (though she repeatedly stated how much she hates it), and as for the selfie? When asked, a surprising two women, Wendy Dodd, 67, and Betty Ludwig, 93, knew what a selfie was, but neither of the ladies ever tried to take one for themselves- until that fateful Thursday.
It was a new experience for all: there were some laughs, a few complaints, and even one *photobomb, but altogether, the time of “senior selfies” was short lived. None of the seniors believed they would take another selfie again, and Ludwig even exclaimed “they are such a waste of time!”
In the end, everybody agreed that though they had fun, selfies were more suited for the younger generation.
