Why do people like taking selfies? The world has become an amusement park for selfie addicts, but there is a country that beats them all. Brits are so obsessed with snapping pictures of themselves that they have turned their country into a “selfie nation”.
What is Selfie Nation?
Over 1.2 billion selfies were taken in the U.K. in the last twelve months. Taking selfies is now a trend which has increased with the growing usage of smartphones among Brits.
Ofcom states that the UK is now a smartphone society. Over 30 percent of smartphone users in the country have admitted taking selfies. Ten per cent also admitted that they take one selfie at least once every week. Selfies have become a fixture of social media. Everyone does it, from celebrities like Kim Kardashian to politicians participating in the revolution.
Why are Selfies so Important?
Ofcom’s Communications Market Report finds that a third of internet users see their iPhone and Android phones as the most important device for going online; thus overtaking regular laptop users for the first time ever.
At the same time, Ofcom revealed that users spend 114 minutes per day on average to use the internet from their smartphones. Rising Internet speed fueled this frequency. All these factors are contributing to the omnipresence of selfies in the UK.
However, the rise of selfies is not universally popular. The Guardian reported that selfie sticks have been banned by venues in the UK including the National Gallery, the O2 Arena and Tottenham Hotspur football club.
What is Selfie City?
What could possibly a group of selfies, taken in a particular country or city reveal us? Various projects have started investigating the style of self-portraits analyzing the selfie phenomenon in cities across the world.
Selfiecity.net presented its findings of the demographics of people taking selfies. There is a collection of selfie poses and expressions in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New york and Sao Paulo.
Their interactive self-explanatory allows web surfers to navigate a set of 3200 photos from around the globe.
What Do Selfies Tell Us?
According to The City University of New York, selfies can tell us quite a lot about specific individuals who happened to take and post their photos from a given geographical area within a given time.
According to Tifentale, the project Selfiecity reveals the inherent complexities of understanding the selfie as a product of the “advancement of digital image-making and online image-sharing as well as a social phenomenon that at the same time serves as a means of individual and creative self-expression”.
