But we certainly aren’t passive victims of the selfie age, being swept along by a tide of narcissism; we’re all in control of how we selfie. “The more we recognise selfies as visual journals, the sooner people will realise that they do not represent the decline of civilisation or a narcissistic generation,” says Hibberd. “It’s healthy to mark significant occasions and revel in a success, and selfies help punctuate these moments in our lives. Celebratory selfies, such as toasting a promotion, can combat our natural tendency to play down our successes.”

We also use selfies as a networking tool, a branding device. Reputations were once built on a CV and references, while a privileged few had access to publicists and agents. Today, the image we present to the world is in our hands; as individuals we’re able to control our own image, to curate a selfhood, to build a personal brand.

“One of the critical ways in which the brain constructs the sense of our self is by observing other people’s reactions to us,” says Will Storr, author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing To Us. “The famous quote from psychological literature is: ‘We are what we think other people think we are.’ If we think other people think we’re beautiful and special, for example, we’re likely to think that too. So you see how the comments underneath the selfies we post can have potentially powerful effects on our sense of self.”

In fact, being slightly selfie-obsessed is a trait that could once have been advantageous in evolutionary terms. “Being overly concerned about pictures of yourself doesn’t make you a narcissist,” says Dr Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and the author of The Willpower Instinct. “It’s entirely normal, and from a survival perspective helpful, to be obsessed with gossip about yourself, pictures of yourself or responses to you online. Status anxiety is part and parcel of being in a society.” We are interested in what friends and family are doing, saying, thinking and feeling – particularly if it’s a response to us. This is how we establish our place in society and form supportive relationships with likeminded people.

“Social historians see selfies as part of a long tradition stretching back to self portraits, as a means of exploring ourselves and experimenting with our identity,” says Hall. “All that’s changed is the technology.”