SELFIE was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year for 2013, with a claimed 17,000 per cent increase in use between October 2012 and 2013, but have we reached ''peak selfie''?
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Apparently not, according to one expert who says we should expect to see more of them.
The act of taking a photo of yourself has never been easier, nor has the ability to share it with the world at the touch of a button. But with the likes of Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama now getting in on the act, the demographic of selfie-takers is expanding as quickly as the phenomenon.
''This activity is promoted from social learning, so if politicians - leaders of the country who represent you to the world - also engage in these kind of activities, it sort of makes people think that it's very normal and it must be something that people are doing,'' Lubna Alam, a social media expert at the University of Canberra, said.
''Because they're doing this, it must be OK for everyone else to do it.''
Ms Alam calls the behaviour ''internet-based self-obsession'' - and said it is not just teenagers who are engaged in it.
''I think this epidemic has surpassed the iGeneration and has moved to Gen X and the middle-aged people who are more and more engaging in social media activities,'' she said. ''It's not just the iGeneration, Generation Y, who are using Facebook; if you look at Facebook and their current user base, it's mostly from 25 to 40 years old … and they're the people, if you like, who are changing their profile pictures every day.''
But as Gen X competes on who can have the best selfie profile picture, the iGeneration seems to have gone a step further and is now competing to take the most unusual selfie.
Be it on a plane wearing the deployed oxygen masks, while dissecting a cat, or any number of the other absurd situations catalogued by the hashtag #SelfieOlympics, the selfie has taken on a new turn.
''That type of behaviour is probably displaying more acceptance of selfies becoming quite normal … as the whole society becomes more self-absorbed in internet-enabled communication,'' Ms Alam said.
But the trend does come with a warning.
''Even though this is becoming quite fun, where our politicians are participating, we still need to remember that in the future these activities can still be found on the internet.''
