The selfie is everywhere. From celebrities to astronauts in space, preening politicians at a funeral and even "selfies after sex", everyone is just one smartphone away from a selfie.

Originating in the early 2000s, selfies took hold when digital cameras were first used for arms-length self-portraits or a photo in a mirror.

But with more dictionaries now picking up the word, the ubiquitous selfie says more about how technology is changing behaviour and even our perception of events.

On the tech front, digital cameras - now usually smartphones - make it possible to shoot multiple takes of ourselves, immediately proof the pictures and then pick the right one.

Back in the time of film cameras, why would anyone pay for film developing and then wait for several days only to look at multiple pictures of themselves? But more than technology, who wanted to take self-portraits when there was other stuff and people to

photograph? And when pictures of one's self were required, the camera was usually handed to a bystander who obliged.

In an era when social media is how we show off ourselves to the world and when everyone is the biggest star of their own hit movie, it shouldn't be a surprise that taking pictures of ourselves has never been so popular.

And it is an extension to the culture of how smartphones are used to chronicle our lives.

It recently occurred to me at a concert when all around us people stood, smartphones over one eye, shooting video of each song, sometimes panning the camera around to film themselves mugging as the band played behind them on stage.

I wondered about the smartphone's ability to deprive us of an authentic sense of experience.

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Gormley: Focus on selfies misses the big picture

If this vans a-rockin well, go ahead and do come a-knockin since the undulations will be due to my marrow-deep existential moaning, not sexualcongress.

For nearly three months now, my accommodations have been vehicular: I live in a 20-year-old converted Chevy van with a dented door and two bald tires. Though I am loath to use the word, I suppose I am, technically, homeless. Mr. No-Fixed-Address. The bottom of the 99 percentbarrel.

My plummet has been precipitous: from a thriving movie-industry career in Los Angeles and sleeping on 400-count Egyptian cotton sheets to a twin mattress in the back of a van with brown shagcarpeting.

How did I gobust?

Slow, thenfast.

The ignominious Readers Digest version: acrimonious divorce, a cancer-riddled mother who hung on for years, an investment fund that turned out to be a fetid Madoff tributary, IRS horrors, being a north-of-40 screenwriter, and, of course, that old standby,hubris.

With a collapsed souffl of a career, no wife or kids, sans Elk Club membership, and living in this mobile mansion, I am by nearly all accepted societal standards an abject failure. Most days I totally concur with the consensus opinion and self-flagellate with wet rawhide thoughts of lack andregret.

Here I am, just one of the more than 100 million denizens of this Great Land of Ours with less than $1,000 saved. Vast numbers of our population with work-a-day jobs living from paycheck to meager paycheck, if they are even lucky enough to have one of those at all. I am no Trotskyite, but something would seem to be amiss here. If this is the land of honey and milk, why are so many sucking hind teat, or no teat atall?

Even as I pinch pennies until Lincoln winces, the day is basically my own. This morning I awoke at 8, parked on a shady S.B. backstreet, opened a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, extracted a half gallon of milk from my trusty red plastic Coleman ice chest, drank straight from the container, and enjoyed breakfast along with the crows pecking a nearby lawn and cursing at the wormyfare.

I strolled to the corner, bought a paper, and read about S.B. businessmen up in arms about homeless gents and ladies invading their hallowed streets and stealing the suns very rays, it seems. I guess they meanme.

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Van Man