Of all the inventions marking the rise of the digital era, perhaps none was as inevitable as the front-facing camera. It’s not surprising that modern humans quickly took to the dual role of being both the shooter and the shot, the sharer and shared, the self and the selfie. It has, after all, never been so easy to find yourself. You just have to look at your own Facebook status updates, your own Twitter feed, your own cell phone camera lens. So it makes perfect sense that the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is Selfie. Selfie is not merely the word of the year. It is the idea of an era.

+ For good measure, here’s a photo of me with the story about Selfie being named word of the year.

+ No service represents the selfie era like Snapchat. And it turns out that no service sees as many photos exchanged daily.