today, the estimated number of posts with hashtagen selfie to be over 349 million pieces on Instagram. There are previous research that has shown that people who take selfies may cause injury on themselves or on people in their environment or it can be a mental ailment that take too many selfies. But now comes thus, a new research who want to put selfiefenomenet in a social context.
associate professor in pedagogy with a specialization in information technology and learning at the university of Gothenburg. He is one of the researchers behind the study.
– Selfien are treated almost always as an online phenomenon. We became interested in the activity itself and what selfien is in a social environment. We therefore went out and observed the people who took the selfies. We we went to places where tourists often reside, to zoos, festivals, and other places both in Sweden and around the world.
what The researchers found was that taking selfies was a communal and social activity, it often was several people who took the cards together. Thus, it is not always something självupptaget behavior that it can easily be seen as the basis.
take selfies and want to show off their lives on social media is also where a social aspect with an opportunity to interact with other people. This can evoke a sense of being together and can reinforce common feelings and experiences, according to the study.
– There is a lot of criticism in people who take selfies are narcissists or to selfies in any way harm the people of his surroundings. For example, that you accidentally reverse into a work of art and destroyed it. But the vast majority of selfies that are taken may not these consequences, ” says Thomas Hillman.
first of all focused on the psychological aspects of taking selfies and according to Hillman, has lifting selfien out of context and only focused on it as a onlinefenomen.
– obviously, It could be that people are looking for confirmation by taking selfies and posting on social media but it is not what we studied. We have from a research perspective partly contributed to not only see selfien as a product but as a production, ” says Thomas Hillman.
