Sigh. Remember the innocent days of 2010 when if someone said "Selfie" you might have thought they had a speech impairment?

The now ubiquitous self-portrait may strike us as a new trend among young social media users, in fact the word first appeared back in 2004 on photo sharing sites Flickr and MySpace.

Selfie is now defined by the English Oxford Dictionary (yes, it's official) as "A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website." 

Typically a Selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face and/or an individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.

A couple of stats about Selfies...

• More than 31 million Instagram photos are hashtagged #selfie (Pew Research Center, 2013)
• 91 percent of teens have posted a selfie online (Walker, 2013). 

Initially, most Selfies were distributed by SMS. 

However, costs and the availability of free alternatives have pulled youths towards apps instead. As well as Instragram, services like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik and the newer Facebook Slingshot now dominate.

As reported by Irish telecoms regulator Comreg, among those aged 12-15 an estimated 187 app-based messages are sent in a typical week - and still going up. In contrast, the number of texts has fallen by 30% since the start of 2012.

All this is kind-of to be expected.

Teenager’s inquisitive nature places them at the forefront of new technologies. They love to push boundaries and revel in the freedom that social platforms bring.

But, not all use is benign. 

As we'll see in our next post, the more nefarious trend of "Sexting" emerged almost as quickly as the original surge in Selfies.

Download our complete research report into Selfies & Sexting on our website, www.selfiecop.com