Today mainstream social networks are suffering from the epidemic self-portrait obsession. The phenomenon has reached the scale of the world event: everybody including celebrities – from Barack Obama to Pope – is happy to pose, smiling for the smartphone camera.
London scenery seems to be the best background for selfies, however, most of the pictures are uploaded by users from Asia. Let’s look at the statistics.
Not that the photographic self-portrait is a new phenomenon, but the smartphone wide spreading along with social networking popularity growth provoked a real boom of this genre. Especially when phones can make shots of higher and higher quality.
Narcissistic Hollywood celebrities played a large part in this selfie boom – from Kim Kardashian to Justin Bieber. The most popular selfie in the world is a picture taken by American TV hostess Ellen Degeneres during the Oscar ceremony in 2014 capturing 12 movie celebrities at a time including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey.
Selfimania is progressing. The word “selfie” itself received a formal approval in 2013, having been named as word of the year in the list of the most popular new terms by Oxford Dictionaries.
This word has evolved from a marginal slang word to a widely spread and understandable term – the inscription says
Only in 2014 there were taken nearly a 1 billiard and 200 million selfies in Britain according to recently published report by British Mediamodulator Ofcom. What about other countries?
Pose! Take pics and send them!
- The most popular selfie font seems to be London scenery, however, most of the shots are uploaded not from London at all.
- The Times conducted an extensive research trying to find the selfie capital of the world.
- The editorial board have analyzed 400 thousands of Instagram pics with #selfie tag as well as geographic coordinates of the shots and created a list of 459 cities making a so-called rating by a number of selfies taken in the area per person.
- The leader turned out to be Makati – the financial center of the Philippines capital(258 selfies per 100 thousand citizens) and his closest competitors are Manhattan(202) and Miami(155).
- Taking into account the total population of the country, the most selfiest towns are Mexican Monterrey and the capital of Costa Rica – San Jose.
- Top 10 will also include Doha, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Delhi.
- Selfiecity staff (the project which was organized by New York University and California Institute for Telecommunications) also studied selfie-takers activity in 5 cities: Moscow, San Paolo, Bangkok, NY and Berlin.
The pose is important. Knowing self-awareness is conveyed by the slight raise of an eyebrow, the sideways smile that says you’re not taking it too seriously. A doe-eyed stare and mussed-up hair denotes natural beauty, as if you’ve just woken up and can’t help looking like this. Sexiness is suggested by sucked-in cheeks, pouting lips, a nonchalant cock of the head and a hint of bare flesh just below the clavicle. Snap!