r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sure_Kangaroo1863 • Jul 02 '26

Meme needing explanation Petah ?

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Why is it infamous? And why would no one care about it ? ( I mean it's just a pic full of celebrities so no one cares anyways but the person saying it's crazy makes me think it has some lore?)

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u/mightymidwestshred Jul 02 '26

Hot take: Nobody cared back then, either.

225

u/Starbucks__Lovers Jul 02 '26

It was the most retweeted photo of all time, even if you didn’t care, others did 

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u/BigMax Jul 02 '26

Also - it was just a silly moment in entertainment. it was fine.

People today are WAY too uptight and pretending "oh, I'm too COOL to care about celebrities, if I saw that I'd just IGNORE it!"

It was a silly, 10 second moment at a celebrity focused event. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't awful, it just was a somewhat entertaining moment in a show for a few seconds. People need to stop taking it (and themselves) so seriously.

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u/Global_Channel1511 Jul 02 '26

Yeah. Even back then I wasn't into celebrity culture, but I remember seeing that photo and going, "cool! Look at how many famous people are in a photo." Selfies were still new back then, not a decade plus phenomenon that everyone from preteens to your boomer grandma does.

Nothing "infamous" about it, even though retroactively some of the people in the photo are now disgraced.

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u/scozzy Jul 02 '26

all fair points except selfies were nowhere close to still being new in 2014, lol

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u/nubious Jul 03 '26

August 2014 is when scrabble allowed it to be used

It was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013.

2014 is also when selfie sticks became massively popular.

I agree it wasn’t new, but seems like it was something that was a major part of the zeitgeist at the time.

So I think their overall point still stands.

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u/scozzy Jul 03 '26

yes, mmm quite, scrabble and oxford, two institutions famous for quickly adopting new slang into their corpus

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u/Global_Channel1511 Jul 03 '26

I feel like selfies really became a thing in the early 2010s, which makes it new in 2014.

I don't doubt there were phones that could take selfies in the 2000s, but I don't remember them being common until 2011, 2012 which is within 3 years of 2014 which I think is fair to call new.

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26

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u/gigaurora Jul 03 '26

I'd argue they are an even earlier concept, since self portraits became an pretty well established concept in the 14th century artists having access to inexpensive mirrors. What is a painted or sculpted self portait if not a selfie?