Posting #selfie on Instagram: What are People Talking About?
Keywords:
social media, likes, commentsAbstract
Due to the rise in popularity with Instagram and posting selfies, and the potential negative outcomes on psychosocial health, the purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the nature of the comments/captions left by users on #selfie photographs. A secondary objective was to investigate the characteristics of the author posting the #selfie image. Approximately 4,500 posts were analyzed for word content and networking, and author’s sex, age, location, number of posts, and the number of followers and following were collected. The most common words associated with #selfie were to gather more followers and/or likes, followed by image descriptors, feelings, or were Instagram-specific. Among the #selfie authors, being female (p = 0.023) and the number of posts (p <0.001) were associated with having a following to follower ratio greater than 1. This is the first analysis of the #selfie conversation on Instagram, however, further research is needed to determine the motivation for posting #selfies and/or the impact of posting #selfies and gaining more followers/likes.References
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Suler, J. (2008). Image, word, action: Interpersonal dynamics in a photo-sharing community. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 11(5), 555-560. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0153
Sung, Y., Lee, J. A., Kim, E., & Choi, S. M. (2016). Why we post selfies: Understanding motivations for posting pictures of oneself. Personality and Individual Differences, 97, 260-265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.032
Time Magazine. Top 10 everything 2012. Retrieved from http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-news-lists/slide/selfie/.
Toma, C. L. (2013). Feeling better but doing worse: Effects of Facebook self-presentation on implicit self-esteem and cognitive task performance. Media Psychology, 16, 199-220. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2012.762189
Weiser, E. B. #Me: Narcissism and its facets as predictors of selfie-posting frequency. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 477-481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.07.007
Alshawaf, E., & Wen, L. (2015). Understanding digital reputation on Instagram: A case study of social media mavens. In ECSM2015-Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Social Media. Porto, Portugal.
Bakhshi, S., Shamma, D.A., & Gilbert, E. (2014). Faces engage us: Photos with faces attract more likes and comments on instagram. Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems. Toronto, Canada.
Barry, C. T., Doucette, H., Loflin, D. C., Rivera-Hudson, N., & Herrington, L. L. (2015). “Let me take a selfie”: Associations between self-photography, narcissism, and self- esteem. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/ppm0000089
Business Insider (2014, June 11). One simple number determines how cool you are on Instagram. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-cool-ratio-2014-6.
Chua, T. H. H., & Chang, L. (2016). Follow me and like my beautiful selfies: Singapore teenage girls’ engagement in self-presentation and peer comparison on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 190-197. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.09.011
de Vries, D. A., Peter, J., de Graaf, H., & Nikken, P. (2016). Adolescents’ social network site use, peer appearance-related feedback, and body dissatisfaction: Testing a mediation model. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45(1), 211-224. doi: 10.1007/s10964-015-0266-4
Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books: New York, NY.
Gruzd, A. (2016). Netlytic: Software for Automated Text and Social Network Analysis [software]. Available from http://Netlytic.org
IBM Corporation. (2016). IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22 [computer software]. Armonk, New York.
Jang, J. Y., Han, K., Shih, P. C., & Lee, D. (2015). Generation like: Comparative characteristics in instagram. Paper presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 4039-4042.
Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). Uses and gratifications research. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 37(4), 509-523. https://doi.org/10.1086/268109
Kearney, A. (2018). Uses and Gratification of Posting Selfies on Social Media. Retrieved from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Scholar Works. Available from http://scholarworks.rit.edu/theses/9717/
Kim, J. W., & Chock, T. M. (2017). Personality traits and psychological motivations predicting selfie posting behaviors on social networking sites. Telematics and Informatics, 34(5), 560-571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2016.11.006
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 34-47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0033-2909.107.1.34
Malik, A., Dhir, A., & Nieminen, M. (2016). Uses and gratifications of digital photo sharing on Facebook. Telematics and Infomatics, 33(1), 129-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2015.06.009
Manikonda, L., Hu, Y., & Kambhampati, S. (2014). Analyzing user activities, demographics, social network structure and user-generated content on Instagram. Retrieved from http://149.169.27.83/instagram-icwsm.pdf.
Mendelson, A. L., & Papacharissi, A. (2010). Look at us: Collective narcissism in college student Facebook photo galleries. In The networked self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites. Retrieved from http://zizi.people.uic.edu/Site/Research_files/Look%20at%20meAMZP.pdf.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Selfie. Retrieved from http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/selfie.
Oxford Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionaries word of the year 2013 is ‘selfie’. Retrieved from http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner/.
Porch, T. (2015). Society, culture, and the selfie: Analysis of the impact of the selfie practice on women's body image (Unpublished Honors dissertation). Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
Pounders, K., Kowalczyk, C. M., & Stowers, K. (2016). Insight into the motivation of selfie posting: Impression management and self-esteem. European Journal of Marketing, 50(9/10), 1879-1892. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-07-2015-0502
Re, D. E., Wang, S. A., He, J. C., & Rule, N. O. (2016). Selfie indulgence: Self-favoring biases in perceptions of selfies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(6), 579-587. doi: 10.1177/1948550616644299
Sales, M. J. (2016). American Girls: Social media and the secret lives of teenagers. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
Scissors, L., Burke, M., & Wengrovitz, S. (2016). What's in a Like?: Attitudes and behaviors around receiving Likes on Facebook. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1501-1510). San Francisco, USA.
Siibak, A. (2009). Constructing the Self through the Photo selection - Visual Impression Management on Social Networking Websites. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 3(1), article 1. Retrieved from https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4218/3260
Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Frackowiak, T., Karwowski, M., Rusicka, I., & Oleszkiewicz, A. (2016). Sex differences in online selfie posting behaviors predict histrionic personality scores among men but not women. Computers in Human Behavior, 59, 368-373. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.02.033. 0747-5632
Sorokowski, P., Sorokowska, A., Oleszkiewicz, A., Frackowiak, T., Huk, A., & Pisanski, K. (2015). Selfie posting behaviors are associated with narcissism among men. Personality and Individual Differences, 85, 123-127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.05.004
Smock, A. D., Ellison, N. B., Lampe, C., & Wohn, D. Y. (2011). Facebook as a toolkit: A uses and gratification approach to unbundling feature use. Computers in Human Behavior, 27, 2322-2329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.07.011
Suler, J. (2008). Image, word, action: Interpersonal dynamics in a photo-sharing community. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 11(5), 555-560. doi: 10.1089/cpb.2007.0153
Sung, Y., Lee, J. A., Kim, E., & Choi, S. M. (2016). Why we post selfies: Understanding motivations for posting pictures of oneself. Personality and Individual Differences, 97, 260-265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.032
Time Magazine. Top 10 everything 2012. Retrieved from http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-news-lists/slide/selfie/.
Toma, C. L. (2013). Feeling better but doing worse: Effects of Facebook self-presentation on implicit self-esteem and cognitive task performance. Media Psychology, 16, 199-220. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2012.762189
Weiser, E. B. #Me: Narcissism and its facets as predictors of selfie-posting frequency. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 477-481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.07.007
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2018-05-31
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