????奧巴馬總統、脫口秀主持人艾倫?狄珍妮和教皇方濟各有什么共同點？答案是，他們去年都玩起了自拍。其同道中人還包括演員麥莉?賽勒斯（她在Twitter上發了121張自拍照）、墜機事件幸存者費迪南德?普恩特斯、宇航員史蒂夫?斯沃森。另外我敢肯定，你八成也是個自拍迷。

????自拍本身并不是新鮮事物，它與攝影技術同時誕生。早在1839年，由化學家半路轉行成攝影家的羅伯特?科尼利厄斯就拍攝了一張自拍照。不過在過去兩年里，自拍開始瘋狂地流行起來，從一種潮流變成一種現象，到現在，就連你的鄰居大媽也會在打毛衣時“咔嚓”一張。《牛津英語辭典》將“自拍”（selfie）評為“2013年度單詞”。據皮尤研究中心（Pew Research Center）的一項民調，一半以上的“千禧一代”（即18至33歲的人）曾經自拍并且把照片分享到網絡上。ABC電視臺今年9月末將上映一部新的情景喜劇，名字就叫《自拍》。（這是真的。）獨立樂隊The Chainsmokers制作了一部叫做《自拍》的MV，在網絡上極其火爆（看上去非常可怕）。那么，在這個智能手機大行其道的社會，為什么人們如此熱衷于自拍呢？

????What do President Obama, Ellen Degeneres and Pope Francis have in common? They’ve all snapped selfies in the last year. So has Miley Cyrus (she’s posted 121 of them on Twitter). Plane-crash survivor Ferdinand Puentes. And astronaut Steve Swanson. And so, I’m nearly positive, have you.

????The selfie, of course, isn’t new—it has been around since the advent of photography, when chemist-turned-photographer Robert Cornelius captured one in 1839. But in the past two years, it has become explosively popular—the sort of meme that scales, seemingly overnight, from mere trend to phenomenon to something your Aunt Edna talks about in her crocheting circle. The Oxford English Dictionary called out “selfie” as the 2013 word of the year. More than half of all millennials (age 18-33) have taken a selfie and shared it online, according to a March 2014 Pew Research Center poll. ABC is debuting a new primetime sitcom called Selfie in late September. (Seriously.) Indie band The Chainsmokers produced a music video called #Selfie that became a viral hit (and was awful!). How the heck did these hastily snapped-and-shared self-portraits become le dernier cri of smartphone society?

????文化的傳染——“自拍”如何從自戀小青年的自娛自樂，發展為一種新的視覺語言。

????在《財富》（Fortune）研究傳染的系列文章中，我和我的同事決定探索事物傳播的秘密——從嚇人的中東呼吸綜合癥（MERS-coV）到企業并購謠言，從市場恐慌到暢銷書現象，再到研究Twitter如何成為美國大學校園的一門顯學。在探究“傳染”這個奇妙的過程中，我們非常想知道，我們能否從一種社會流行現象的歷史中學到什么？答案也許是肯定的。

????Cultural Contagion—How the ‘selfie’ went from narcissistic kids’ play to a new visual language overnight. Data Source—Google Trends / Cyrus Photo: Jeff Kravitz—Getty Images

????In a new Fortune series on Contagion, my colleagues and I have set out to explore how things spread—from the frightening MERS-coV virus (here and here) to M&A rumors, from market panics to book sales to how studying Twitter itself became a go-to discipline on American campuses. In probing this strange viral process, we wondered, was there something to be learned from studying the history of a social epidemic? Well, maybe so.