What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon

Selfies are suddenly ubiquitous. In declaring selfie Oxford Dictionaries’ 2013 Word of the Year, Editorial Director Judy Pearsall explained that their big data analyses of English words in use showed “a phenomenal upward trend” in mentions of selfies (Oxford Dictionaries, 2013, para. 3). “Are you sick of reading about selfies?” asks an article in The Atlantic (Garber, 2014, para. 1), announcing that selfies are now boring and thus finally...