Selfie Steam

I stumbled across this article about the mystery of an unknown person who has taken pictures of himself at many photo-booths.

That got my attention for a couple of reasons. First, mysterious-photos-of-unknown-person-discarded-at-photo-booths was a subplot of the movie Amelie. No one involved in the publishing of this article seemed to know this, and thus didn't realise many reading the article would already know the answer.

But what's also interesting is the way they refer to photo-booth photos as "selfies." That just doesn't seem right. Yes, they are photos of one's self, but they were before the age of selfies. That would be like calling telegrams "e-mails" or Oscar Wilde's witticisms as "Tweets."

But I suppose that's what photo-booths are in the eyes of young people today. They would look on them and think that in the old days before mobile phones, people had to use these giant machines to take selfies.

They have a point. These were, in essence, steampunk selfie machines.  The lesson is that you never know how long technologies will stick around, or how they'll look in the long run.  For instance, future generations may look back on the era of broadcast television as a weird prelude to centuries of culture dominated by on-demand video. Things like bulletin boards and classified ads could be seen as crude attempts to move information around in a pre-digital age.  The next time the world changes in a way that's strange to you, remember that it could just be moving in a way that will ultimately make more sense.