Instagram provided users the ability to easily present curated documentation of their lives, photos of their friends, foods, pastimes, playthings and—perhaps above all— themselves. Selfie, a word that began bubbling up in Australia in the early 2000s, was named word of the year by both CNN and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, thanks in large part to Instagram’s massive popularity and user-facing smartphone cameras.
Today the app sports almost two and a half billion monthly users. That’s nearly a third of the world’s population, many of whom spend time every day meticulously crafting their public personas, posting stories and images designed to showcase how they desire to be seen and known.
But we’d be wrong in assuming Instagram invented this sort of self-definition and display. The idea, as Tara Isabella Burton shows in her book Self Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, has a long pedigree.
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