Irish Examiner view: A cheeky selfie

Paul Mescal posing for a selfie with fans on the red carpet for the screening of the film 'God's Creatures', which opened the 2023 Dublin International Film Festival. Picture: Brian McEvoy No Repro Fee For One Use

One of the numerous curses visited upon the world by the rise of social media — it would take a far higher word count than the length of this column to list them all with supporting evidence — is the apparently insatiable desire to grab “a cheeky selfie” with flavour-du-jour celebrities.

For some people intruding on others uninvited is simply a case of bad manners while simultaneously demonstrating excessive neediness on the part of the perpetrator, one more example of the self-aggrandising “look-at-me” mentality which is encouraged by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, to name just four platforms.