Of the cultural objects generated by the rise of ubiquitous digital media, few are perhaps more loathed than the selfie. The simple act of taking your own picture and distributing it via social media to the public is apparently symptomatic of any number of social and individual ills. It has been deemed the icon of social narcissism, an emblem of our collective tendency to get lost in ourselves. It has also been classified as a symptom of mental illness and a risk indicator for suicide, evidence of an overwhelming lack of a sense of self. Generationally, they seem to be the cultural product of the so-called me-meme- generation (Time magazine's update on the derisive title given to baby boomers), those digital millennials who grew up overly coddled by protective, helicoptering parents who provided them with plenty of self-esteem but little self-reliance. Even the act of taking a selfie, posing with one's arm stretched in front of oneself, has become an object of scorn. Locked in a face-to-face interaction with one's screen and the mirror image it offers, the self who authors a selfie is a poster child for the sort of digital insecurity and obsessive insularity that writers such as Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr and Mark Bauerlein have described.

But this obsession with the selfie misses a larger point. In the course of photographing ourselves, we seem to have opened up a new mode of authorship that enables and encourages everyone to document the world around themselves. As image capture becomes a common cultural practice, it alters the relationship between the self and the world, inviting one to view the world, if not photographically, then at least as it might be photographed. These interactions with the world and others seem to obviate the apparent self-centredness and narcissism of the selfie.

To see this at work we need to consider the selfie in its native habitat, on the social networking site Instagram, and place the site within the longer history of autobiography, photography and social networking of which it is a part.