Those selfies could do away with more than just self-restraint

With selfies becoming a social media pandemic in 2014 — along with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge — it was inevitable that the year would also bear witness to the requiem for that stalwart of the Handwriting Age, the autograph and, by extension, philography as well. Apart from official documents, prescriptions, treaties, MoUs or oaths of office, practically everything else will eventually be deemed better endorsed and authenticated with selfies rather than signatures. With chip and pin already replacing individual scrawls, selfies could very well replace signatures everywhere else too before this decade is over.

Shane Warne may have been the first to tweet (naturally) that the sports autograph was dead, but this demise was definitely foretold with the prescient selection of ‘selfie’ as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries in 2013. Indeed, the decline of the handwritten word — hence signatures and autograph — was only to be expected in the era of keypads, especially with pictures traditionally worth a thousand words anyway. Incomprehensible, hastily-scrawled squiggles that often passed for signatures may have been okay in more trusting times, the ‘see it to believe it’ generation will lay greater store by facial recognition. Perhaps from 2015 onwards, these documoments can be called selfie-graphs.