I often wonder whether the opportunity to stage your “life” in a beautiful place for social media is a part of why so many more people head into the woods than did ten or 20 years ago. I mean, the woods were there the whole time, and arguably the weather was better.
Cars are better.
Roads are better.
And of course, maps are exponentially better. Not only in terms of directions. Discovery is exponentially better. That waterfall that only showed up on the USGS topo map, is now on the map in your pocket...and Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.
And the Forest Service website.
Now, if they'd bring some Leave No Trace principles into the woods with them, that'd be great. Seeing how the eternal September played out on Usenet though, that may be a bit overly hopeful on my part.
I encounter many miserable looking poorly equipped people constantly asking me to take selfies of them posing with a fake smile. I was stopped 7 times on a 50km hike recently.
People want to be seen to do it. They don’t appear to be enjoying it though.
Edit: ironically considering the article I tend to wear AirPods now because people don’t ask me to do it.
If they’re asking someone who is not themself to take a photo, the photo in question is, by definition, not a selfie.
As for the selfie, I’m on the fence on your semantic definition. I consider myself to be a meat flavoured selfie stick when asked. I’m merely a tool that happened to be walking past that is good for pointing their device at a bulbous ass obscuring the scenery.
But I have literally (in its original meaning!) never heard anyone but gw99 describe “pictures of myself taken by a bystander” as a selfie.
I’ve taken a lot of posed photos of tourists with their own cameras, I don’t see why “the camera is now a phone” would make that phenomenon merge with the specific thing people do with the front facing camera.
“Me, posed at destination” seems like a wholly distinct phenomenon to me.
Well, the wandering nature of the word has been linguistically noted since at least 2014 by my knowledge[1]. Read more linguist blogs, I guess?
I think so. For me and my friends, we’re not “staging our life”, but a lot of times I’ll see someone post a photo of a trail on Instagram or Strava and I’ll comment asking where it is. We still went out 10 years ago. We still took photos 10 years ago. But now it’s SO much easier to share what the different trails look like and it’s possible to share the exact GPX tracks with each other.
It’s a wonderful time to be wandering around in the woods and if someone just got into the hobby yesterday and wants to post the beauty of their quarter mile “hike” more power to them.