Selfies: Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life

Study – First Significant Experimental Research on Selfie

 
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have scrutinized through 2.5 million selfie post on Instagram, to comprehend the photographic spectacle better and how people tend to form their personalities online and to determine what types of identity statement people tend to make on taking and sharing selfies. When it comes to Selfies, appearance tends to be almost everything.

Almost 52% of all selfies tend to fall in the category of appearance, with images of people portraying their make-up, clothes, lips etc. Images regarding looks seems to be twice more well-known than the other 14 categories altogether. After the appearance category, social selfies with friends, loved ones as well as pets were most common to 14%.

The ethnicity images at 13%, travel – 7% and health and fitness to 5%. It was observed by the researchers that the prevalence of ethnicity selfies is an indication that people seem to be proud of their background and also found that several selfies were solo picture instead of taken with a group. The data had been collected in the summer of 2015.the Georgia Tech team are of the belief that the study is the first significant experimental research on selfies.
 

Selfie – An Identity Performance

 
Generally, on Instagram, an overpowering 57% of selfies had been posted by 18-35 year old multitude which according to the researchers is not too surprising taking into account the demographic of the social media platform.

Selfies posted by the under-18 age group was about 30% while the older group of 35+ shared them less often around 13%. Appearance on the other hand was most popular among the crowd of all age groups. Julia Deeb-Swihart, lead author stated that selfies are an identity performance which means that users tend to carefully craft the way they may tend to appear online, which is an extension of that.

 Deep-Swihart had stated that `just like on other social media channels, people are inclined to project an identity promoting their wealth, health together with physical attractiveness, with selfies we decide how to present ourselves to the audience and the audiences tends to decide how it identifies you.

 

Type of Blending of Online/Offline Selves

  This work is stuck in the theory offered by Erving Goffman in `The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. The attires we tend to choose to wear together with the social roles we are inclined to play, are all intended to control the version of ourselves we prefer our peers to view.

Deeb-Swihart had commented that `selfies are a type of blending of our online and offline selves and is a way to prove what is true in your life or at least what one would want people to believe is true’. The data had been accumulated by the researchers by searching for `#selfie’, then utilised computer vision to confirm that the pictures really included faces.

 Almost half of them did not seem to have and they found plenty of spam with blank images or text. The accounts had been utilising the hashtag in order to show up in additional searches for the purpose of obtaining more followers.