Wednesday, 30 March 2016

When is a selfie not a selfie?

Ben Innes with hijacker Seif Eldin Mustafa.

When Ben Innes shared a grinning photo of himself standing next to the man who hijacked his plane, he described it as “the best selfie ever”. It was a quote that launched a thousand pedantic tweets.
Innes was one of three passengers and four crew held by Seif Eldin Mustafa, who hijacked an EgyptAir flight bound for Cairo from Alexandria and forced it to be redirected to Cyprus on Tuesday.
“I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked him if I could do a selfie with him,” Innes, 26, told the Sun. “He just shrugged OK, so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while a stewardess did the snap. It has to be the best selfie ever.”
But was it really a selfie? Selfie is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”. They should know, it was their word of the year in 2013.

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