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 “selfie nation”.
Over 1.2 billion selfies were taken in the UK in the last twelve months, a trend which has increased with the growing usage of smartphones among Brits, according to a recent report.
“The UK is now a smartphone society,” according to Ofcom. Over 30 percent of smartphone users in the country have admitted taking selfies, and ten per cent also admitted that they take one selfie at least once every week. Selfies have become a fixture of social media, with everyone from celebrities like Kim Kardashian to politicians participating to the revolution.
The Selfie Nation
Ofcom’s 2015 Communications Market Report finds that a third of internet users see their smartphone 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 an average to use the internet from their smartphones, a frequency which has been fuelled by rising internet speed. All this 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, described by the online Collins dictionary as “an elongated stick to which you attach a camera or mobile phone to take a better photo”, have been banned by venues in the UK including the National Gallery, the O2 arena and Tottenham Hotspur football club.
SelfieCity
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 recently presented its findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions in Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New york and Sao Paulo.
Their interactive selfiexploratory allows web surfers to navigate a set of 3200 photos from around the globe.
The Networked Camera
According to Alise Tifentale, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY), selfies can tell us quite a lot about the specific individuals who happened to take and post their self-portraits from a given geographical area within a given time.
“Selfies make us aware about a particular method of self-fashioning and communication that is historically time-specific in the sense that it could materialize only in the moment when several technologies have reached a certain level of development and accessibility,” Tifentale explained.
“These include the availability of Internet connection, hardware such as easy to use smartphones with cameras, and software that drives the online image-sharing platforms, geo-tagging of uploaded images and other features”.
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”.
What do you think of the selfie mania? Share your views in the comments section below.
This selfie stick would not medicate the sickness, but it’s affordable and effective:
https://youtu.be/rtbfDSRbTts
The Selfie Mania is Incontrollable in This Country
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