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Identification in forensic odontology requires that a known characteristic of an individual’s dentition be compared with the same characteristic of the unknown decedent. In South Africa a number of factors render forensic identification of unknown individuals challenging. Many South Africans do not have access to modern dentistry, and consequently do not have ante-mortem dental records. In South Africa, 22 million people are said to own a smart phone, which accounts for close to 40% of the country's population. The aim of the study was to investigate selfies as a source of dental feature information in a government clinic catering to previously disadvantaged patients. Identifiable dental features were observed in 61 (5.6%) of the collected images (N=1098). The low number of useable selfies collected in this study could be attributed to: a lack of smiles seen in the received images. Individuals with poor dental aesthetics would commonly choose to takea selfie with a closed mouth where their teeth would not be visible. The most commonly identified dental features included: diastemas (49.2%), dental jewellery (37.7%), crowding (16.4%), difference in tooth height (16.3%), discoloured (8.2%) and missing teeth (8.2%). This studyfound that selfies cannot solve the identification crisis in lower socio-economic South Africans. Awareness of the importance of selfies in forensic identification should be increased.

In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men that matched viral online images in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. Drawing on the theoretical apparatus of the “affective turn,” in this article I unpack the structural and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. I situate this episode within current debates about the entanglement of neoliberal disciplinary regimes and the reproduction of particular social orders, and argue that attention to such outbursts can help us revitalize and rethink existing notions of class.

The tourist spot of the Top Selfie Kragilan, Mt. Merbabu National Park, a conservation area in Indonesia has not been managed with a business strategy despite the community initiatives increase to utilize the surrounding tourist spots for their livelihood. The study aimed at formulating the tourism business management strategy using Business Model Canvas (BMC) and Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) approaches. BMC modeling used nine aspects, namely customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partners, and cost structure; then analyzed using SWOT approaches. A total of 377 respondents were interviewed to collect the data. The results showed that every aspect of the old business model has been added or innovated according to the analysis of internal and external factors. Also, there has been a "meeting point" between market expectations, the value offered, and the promotional channels used. The combined strategy of Aggressive (S-O) and Diversification (S-T) should be applied to mitigate damage impact, conserve the natural resources, and arranging visits and selfie vehicles/ photo spot to boost revenue streams.

This study investigates the association between selfie behavior (i.e., posting selfies) and self concept-clarity using a correlational design.

This study aims to understand how people engage with art in the era of selfies, digital devices, and social media. It examines the audience experience of an art exhibition, where visitors are encouraged to use social media to share their art experience, to understand how such an approach might change the nature of visitor engagement with art. Arguably, selfies taken in the art space enrich the visitor’s experience and engagement with art and function as co-creational, empowering, and authentic marketing tools for museums. Data for this research were collected through non-participant observation (ethnography) and netnography at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia. The results show that rather than promoting disengagement from the art piece, selfies in the art space become “networked material-discursive entanglements” empowering art consumers to co-create value and arts organizations to reduce their distance from consumers and reproduce the iconic authenticity of the artwork in the virtual space. The article contributes to selfie theory by overcoming the traditional view of selfies as manifestation of narcissistic self-expression. Instead, it promotes an interpretation of selfies as an empowering and democratizing means used by art consumers to develop narratives and identity projects in a context such as the museum where traditionally the development of the narrative is apanage of an elite. A further contribution provided by this research stems from the identification of clusters of visitors (i.e., reality escapers, art lovers, photoholics, and selfie lovers), placed on a continuum of value co-creation, which arts administrators need to be conscious of as they enter a more dynamic era of art consumption. By outlining managerial implications, this study provides an initial reflection on how arts managers can navigate the emerging era of the selfie in the museum context.

IntroductionWith the rise of camera phones, selfie-taking has become a normative part of our modern culture. However, little is known about how this behavior may relate to eating disorder (ED) characteristics, particularly in those who already have eating disorder symptoms of clinical severity. The current study investigated how selfie-posting and selfie-taking with no intention of posting online (offline selfies) were related to ED symptoms.MethodA total of 152 females (average age 22.44 years) with ED symptoms of clinical severity completed self-report questionnaires measuring selfie-frequency (online and offline), frequency of non-selfie photo posting, social networking site use, body dissatisfaction, body checking, ED symptom severity, self-esteem and body avoidance. Responses were collected via an ED social community.ResultsNo direct relationship, or indirect association via body dissatisfaction, was found between selfie behavior and ED symptom severity. However, the more offline selfies an individual took, the more frequently they body checked, and this, in turn, was related to greater ED symptom severity.ConclusionsThese results suggest that offline selfies may be a modern form of body checking. Our findings are the first to imply that offline selfie-taking may be a problematic behavior and a potential maintenance factor for individuals with severe ED symptoms.

Este artigo analisa como os artistas da diáspora africana no Brasil engajam com espaços institucionais de memória coletiva e com o mundo das artes em seus novos lares, e consideramos o que isso implica para as políticas da memória no Brasil e além. Descrevemos a parceria de produção de imagens e performances entre Shambuyi Wetu, artista congolês que vive em São Paulo, e nós, uma antropóloga brasileira e um britânico. Discutimos algumas questões colocadas no nosso encontro com os artistas da diáspora: Como histórias difíceis podem ser representadas, e quais as implicações de diferentes representações? O que é simplificado - e o que é complexificado - no questionamento transnacional de histórias racistas nacionais? O que significa para um artista africano falar sobre o sofrimento dos negros no Brasil? This article analyzes how artists from the African diaspora living in Brazil engage with the institutional spaces of collective memory and with the world of the arts in their new home; we consider what this implies for the politics of memory in Brazil and beyond. We describe the partnership behind the production of images and performances between Shambuyi Wetu, a Congolese artist living in São Paulo, and us, a Brazilian and a British anthropologist. We discuss some questions catalysed by our work with artists from the diaspora: How can difficult histories be represented, and what are the implications of different representations? What is simplified - and what is made more complex - in the transnational questioning of national racist stories? What does it mean for an African artist to talk about the suffering of blacks in Brazil?

In thinking about the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance and the ways our presence in front of a camera has become engaged with the algorithmic logics of testing and replicating, this project summons Walter Benjamin’s seminal piece The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility with its three versions, which was published in the United States under the editorial direction of Theodore Adorno. More specifically, it highlights two of the many ways in which the first and second versions of Benjamin’s influential essay on technology and culture resonate with questions of photography and art in the context of facial recognition technologies and algorithmic culture more broadly. First, Benjamin provides a critical lens for understanding the role of uniqueness and replication in a technocratic system. Second, he proposes an analytical framework for thinking about our response to visual surveillance through notions of training and performing a constructed identity—hence, being intentional about the ways we visually present ourselves. These two conceptual frameworks help to articulate our unease with a technology that trains itself using our everyday digital images in order to create unique identities that further aggregate into elaborate typologies and to think through a number of artistic responses that have challenged the ubiquity of algorithmic surveillance. Taking on Benjamin’s conceptual apparatus and his call for understanding the politics of art, I focus on two projects that powerfully critique algorithmic surveillance. Leo Selvaggio’s URME (you are me) Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic offers a critical lens through the adoption of algorithmically defined three-dimensional printed faces as performative prosthetics designed to be read and assessed by an algorithm. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen’s project Training Humans is the first major exhibition to display a collection of photographs used to train an algorithm as well as the classificatory labels applied to them both by artificial intelligence and by the freelance employees hired to sort through these images.

Chemical compounds can be identified through a graphical depiction, a suitable string representation, or a chemical name. A universally accepted naming scheme for chemistry was established by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) based on a set of rules. Due to the complexity of this rule set a correct chemical name assignment remains challenging for human beings and there are only a few rule-based cheminformatics toolkits available that support this task in an automated manner. Here we present STOUT (SMILES-TO-IUPAC-name translator), a deep-learning neural machine translation approach to generate the IUPAC name for a given molecule from its SMILES string as well as the reverse translation, i.e., predicting the SMILES string from the IUPAC name. The open system demonstrates a test accuracy of about 90% correct predictions, also incorrect predictions show a remarkable similarity between true and predicted compounds.

Using conceptual tools from semiotics, proxemics, and sensorimotor neuroscience, we propose a duplex model for understanding selfies as non-verbal communication involving an interplay between two layers of interaction: human - media (semiotically primary) and human - human (secondary). We suggest that this approach has promise as a tool for understanding this newborn form of human social behavior and its social, psychological, and neural underpinnings. To support our claim, we do several things. We offer a definition of selfies and outline our model. We review the existing literature on selfies as non-verbal communication to show that there is evidence bearing on our theoretical framework. We present a case study documenting how a combination of image analysis and kinematic measurement can be used to compare taker - smartphone interactions during selfie-taking with image features that play a role in the virtual interaction between the selfie-taker and his or her viewers. Our results support the feasibility of our approach and reveal a sex-related effect on the composition of selfies matching a related difference in the kinematic markers that describe the taker - smartphone interaction. Finally, we discuss outstanding questions in understanding selfies as duplex non-verbal communication and conclude by inviting further research on this topic.

The selfie is one of the most widely publicised, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues—be they representational or compositional—alone are not sufficient for identification (Authors, 2017). Recognising an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to “make inferences about the non-depictive technocultural conditions in which the image was made” (Frosh, 2015, p. 1608). In this paper, we consider in detail the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer (Authors, 2017, a. b.). This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of ‘distorted’ look which makes certain types of selfie possible, e.g. presented selfies (a close up portrait of the selfie maker in an unbalanced composition, and inferred or implied selfies (where perspective of the self is represented by body part or an object). On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented.

In the introduction to On Histories and Stories, A. S. Byatt argues that ‘those of us who write about modern writing have a duty to keep the discussion open’ in order ‘to create new paradigms, which will bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers’. This paper considers how Byatt’s suggestion about the role of the critic writing about living authors can be adapted for scholarship and criticism that seeks to respond to new forms of life writing that have emerged in the digital age.

This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.

This article employs multimodal discourse analysis to explore how mothers represent their everyday experiences of motherhood on Instagram through different forms of self-portraiture. It investigates whether the ‘selfies’ that they share can be characterized as a visual genre and identifies four subgenres: presented, mirrored, inferred and implied selfies. The article illustrates the different ways in which the photographer’s perspective can be represented in each subgenre. The aim is to show that the function of the selfie as a multimodal genre is not solely to represent ‘the self’ but rather to enact intersubjectivity, that is, to generate various possibilities of relations between perspectives on a particular topic, issue, or experience and hence to open up potential for negotiating different points of view.

Social media use has grown rapidly in recent years, with one of the most popular activities for young people being the taking, sharing, and browsing of digital self-photos, known as selfies. However, research has only recently begun to investigate selfies, and little is known about selfie practices in adolescents, or the associations between these practices and well-being and body confidence. This paper aimed to address this gap and conduct a narrative review of selfie practices and the relationships with well-being and body confidence in adolescents. No studies were found reporting on selfie practices and these relationships among children. However, taking selfies appears to be common practice among adolescents, although posting selfies online is less frequent. The studies reviewed indicate that certain aspects of selfie behaviors may be more problematic than others. Specifically, viewing selfies online appears to have a negative impact on adolescents' well-being and body confidence, at least in the short term in experimental contexts. Moreover, seeking and placing importance on feedback from others may also be a harmful aspect of selfie practices. Finally, consistent with research examining social media, social comparison has been identified in this emerging body of research as a potential mechanism which links selfie engagement to well-being and body confidence. To further advance understanding of the correlates and effects of selfie practices, research with children and with boys, and research focused on a wider range of indicators of well-being, is needed. Most importantly, prospective research is required to examine the directionality of links between selfie practices and well-being and body confidence.

The rise of digital and visual communication has brought an increased focus to the places that people occupy. While places are created through various meaning-making processes, one way of establishing the meaning of a place is by inserting oneself into spaces by taking selfies. The places depicted in selfies may reflect a desire to associate oneself with the place, to make a statement challenging that place or the dominant meaning associated with it, or to create new meaning concerning the place and the self. Drawing on the concepts of Thirdspace and heterotopias, we proffer a framework for the practice of taking and sharing selfies that depict a place. We argue that people colonize points in space to reproduce, counter, or mix the meanings of places. People then both draw from and contribute to the construction of places and are motivated to “place” themselves to provide alternative or personalized perspectives of these places but also to represent their self.

(1) Summary: Many studies have evaluated the association between traditional media exposure and the presence of body dissatisfaction and body image disorders. The last decade has borne witness to the rise of social media, predominantly used by teenagers and young adults. This study’s main objective was to investigate the association between how often one compares their physical appearance to that of the people they follow on social media, and one’s body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. (2) Method: A sample composed of 1331 subjects aged 15 to 35 (mean age = 24.2), including 1138 subjects recruited from the general population and 193 patients suffering from eating disorders, completed an online questionnaire assessing social media use (followed accounts, selfies posted, image comparison frequency). This questionnaire incorporated two items originating from the Eating Disorder Inventory Scale (Body Dissatisfaction: EDI-BD and Drive for Thinness: EDI-DT). (3) Results: We found an association between the frequency of comparing one’s own physical appearance to that of people followed on social media and body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. Interestingly, the level of education was a confounding factor in this relationship, while BMI was not. (4) Discussion: The widespread use of social media in teenagers and young adults could increase body dissatisfaction as well as their drive for thinness, therefore rendering them more vulnerable to eating disorders. We should consequently take this social evolution into account, including it in general population prevention programs and in patients’ specific treatment plans.

This article is an exploration of what selfies and other images are and do in Not Safe For Work (NSFW) communities on tumblr.com . By analyzing ethnographic and interview data, images and blog outtakes, this article spotlights four kinds of conflicts that arise around how selfies and images are used. These are about: (a) reactions to photo-shopped images, (b) altering other people’s selfies and/or reposting them as your own, (c) misunderstandings from separating text from image (caption-stripping), (d) disrespecting the self-shooters’ way of curating their blogs. Boundary theory as well as concepts of social afterlife of content and assumed trust are used to illuminate that images, including selfies, have significant, yet different meanings to different people and play an important part in creating and maintaining meaningful relationships and communities.

Time spent viewing selfies significantly increases body dissatisfaction, body checking, and eating psychopathology. We examined whether (1) self-viewing screen-time while videoconferencing increased from February to April 2020, following stay-at-home orders across most states. We hypothesized that: (2) participants’ anxiety, depression, appearance orientation, and binge eating would increase and appearance satisfaction would decrease after COVID-19 lockdowns; and (3) recent (“past two weeks”) videoconferencing duration would significantly predict worsened depression, anxiety, binge eating, appearance orientation, and appearance satisfaction. Participants (N ​= ​143; 53% female) were recruited through campus and Mechanical Turk for a study entitled: “Users’ Experiences with Videoconferencing before and during COVID-19.” In late April 2020, participants rated a range of videoconferencing experiences, including time spent viewing themselves on screens in February (retrospective recall) and the “past two weeks,” completing measures of depression, anxiety, appearance orientation, appearance satisfaction, and binge eating for February and April 2020. Anxiety and depression increased, and appearance orientation and satisfaction decreased significantly after COVID-19 lockdowns. Self-viewing time significantly predicted recent depression and anxiety, but not appearance orientation, appearance satisfaction, or binge eating. Most research on the effects of selfies was in higher risk samples, namely adolescent girls. Future research should examine whether videoconferencing is harmful in at-risk populations.

Данная статья посвящена детальному изучению и анализу представленного явления в условиях новых информационных технологий. Показано, что селфи играет в современном мире двоякую роль: являясь средством самопрезентации, оно отражает жизнь человека не только с положительной стороны, но и с отрицательной. Автор говорит о попытке проникновения в суть человеческой личности через селфи., This article is devoted to the detailed study and analysis of the presented phenomenon in the conditions of new information technologies. It is shown that selfie plays a dual role in the modern world: being a means of self-presentation, it reflects a person's life not only on the positive side, but also on the negative side. The author talks about an attempt to penetrate into the essence of the human personality through a selfie.

This paper discusses some aspects of the digital ordinary: the growing digitalization of our everyday life with the pervasiveness of digital practices and the production and storage of digital inscriptions about our ordinary life, relationships, affects, opinions and activities, that become the content of platforms, apps and search engines, as well as the matter the so called big data are made of, whose commodification constitutes the gain source or business model of the corporations owning these platforms and apps. The sociability and forms of self(re)presentation digitally enacted present ethic and aesthetic particularities; and entail forms of contemporary digital labour, face work and affective work, subject to reflexivity, surveillance and control, which are described and discussed drawing on research about the production and sharing of digital images, such as selfies. El artículo explora aspectos de lo ordinario digital: la creciente digitalización de nuestra cotidianidad con la ubicuidad y generalización de los usos y prácticas digitales, así como la producción y almacenamiento de inscripciones digitales acerca de nuestras vidas, relaciones, afectos, opiniones y actividades, que se convierten en el contenido de las plataformas digitales, motores de búsqueda y apps, y también en la materia de la que se producen los datos, cuya mercantilización constituye la principal fuente de lucro, o modelo de negocio, de las empresas propietarias de estas plataformas y aplicaciones digitales. Las formas de sociabilidad y (re)presentación de la persona digitales presentan particularidades éticas y estéticas, así como constituyen formas de trabajo emocional, trabajo de cara y trabajo digital, objeto de reflexividad, vigilancia y control, que son descritas con ejemplos de investigaciones propias acerca de la producción e intercambio de imágenes como los selfies, así como de otras investigaciones y publicaciones.

In 2014, stories appeared in national and international media claiming that the condition of "selfitis" (the obsessive taking of selfies) was to be classed as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and that the condition could be borderline, acute, or chronic. However, the stories were a hoax but this did not stop empirical research being carried out into the concept. The present study empirically explored the concept and collected data on the existence of selfitis with respect to the three alleged levels (borderline, acute, and chronic) and developed the Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS). Initially, focus group interviews with 225 Indian university students were carried out to generate potential items for the SBS. The SBS was then validated using 400 Indian university students via exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Six factors were identified in the EFA comprising environmental enhancement, social competition, attention seeking, mood modification, self-confidence, and social conformity. The findings demonstrate that the SBS appears to be a reliable and valid instrument for assessing selfitis but that confirmatory studies are needed to validate the concept more rigorously.

[Resumen] Las selfies han evolucionado gracias a la tecnología del smartphone, apoderándose rápidamente de los sitios de los social media. El fenómeno es digno de examinar tanto como una tendencia sociológica, así como una forma artística. El potencial existe y muchas personas han empezado a usar selfies de maneras innovadoras, lo que hace que sea más que una moda pasajera. El hecho de que los jóvenes hayan adoptado el uso de selfies utilizando cualquier nuevo avance tecnológico, ha hecho que se convierta en una importante herramienta. Pero dado que estas herramientas son definidas por sus propios usuarios, las selfies han devenido un juego para la gente joven [Abstract] Selfies have evolved due to spiraling smartphone technology, taking over Social Media sites by storm. The phenomenon is worth examining both as a sociological trend as well as an Art form. The potential exists and many people have started using selfies in innovating ways, making them more than passing fad. The fact that young people have embraced the use of selfies, since they utilize any new technological breakthrough, has ascended selfies into an item to be reckoned with and used as a tool. But since tools are defined by their users, making selfies a young people’s game

Personal photo-sharing has become a popular activity across social media platforms as a self-disclosure activity. A survey of 366 (N=366) individuals via a web-based questionnaire measured correlations between photo-sharing on social networking sites (SNS) and fulfillment of self-disclosure goals. Data analysis indicated respondents posted selfies to social media to meet the information storage and entertainment self-disclosure goals. Facebook users also posted selfies to aide in relational development, whereas relational development was negatively correlated with the frequency of selfie-posting on Twitter. Neither gender nor age were found to have any impact on the number of selfies posted to social media, overall. However, Snapchat was a more popular SNS for selfie-posting among younger respondents, while Facebook was the most popular medium for posting selfies amongst the older respondents.

According to previous reports, selfie takers in widely different cultural contexts prefer poses showing the left cheek more than the right cheek. This posing bias may be interpreted as evidence for a right-hemispheric specialization for the expression of facial emotions. However, earlier studies analyzed selfie poses as categorized by human raters, which raises methodological issues in relation to the distinction between frontal and three-quarter poses. Here, we provide converging evidence by analyzing the (extended) selfiecity database which includes automatic assessments of head rotation and of emotional expression. We confirm a culture- and sex-independent left-cheek bias and report stronger expression of negative emotions in selfies showing the left cheek. These results are generally consistent with a psychobiological account of a left cheek bias in self-portraits but reveal possible unexpected facts concerning the relation between side bias and lateralization of emotional expression.

This chapter articulates how women can find both their politics and a comfort in their own skin through sexy selfie practices. "Nude selfies til I die" was the extent of Kim Kardashian's Webbly awards acceptance speech in 2016, when she won an award for her unparalleled success online. Sexy', which is used by many groups but here pertains to 'sexy for Cis women', seems exceedingly hard to pin down for analysis. Selfies are receiving continuing popular and scholarly attention. Katie and Rachel both started posting sexy, naked selfies on Tumblr around 2011, and author have had the privilege of witnessing their journeys. Thus, sexy selfie practices become self-aware. Taking and posting images moves from an impulsive search for a pleasurable subject position, to a reflexive choice of actualising one's subject position through this practice and having a firm sense of personal politics about it.

When taking a self-portrait or “selfie” to display in an online dating profile, individuals may intuitively manipulate the vertical camera angle to embody how they want to be perceived by the opposite sex. Concepts from evolutionary psychology and grounded cognition suggest that this manipulation can provide cues of physical height and impressions of power to the viewer which are qualities found to influence mate-selection. We predicted that men would orient selfies more often from below to appear taller (i.e., more powerful) than the viewer, and women, from an above perspective to appear shorter (i.e., less powerful). A content analysis was conducted which coded the vertical orientation of 557 selfies from profile pictures on the popular mobile dating application, Tinder. In general, selfies were commonly used by both men (54%) and women (90%). Consistent with our predictions, a gender difference emerged; men's selfies were angled significantly more often from below, whereas women's were angled more often from above. Our findings suggest that selfies presented in a mate-attraction context are intuitively or perhaps consciously selected to adhere to ideal mate qualities. Further discussion proposes that biological or individual differences may also facilitate vertical compositions of selfies.

Selfies appear as a double-edged phenomenon. Taking, posting, and viewing selfies has become a daily habit for many. At the same time, research revealed that selfies often evoke criticism and disrespect, and are associated with non-authenticity and narcissism. The present study (N = 238) sheds further light on the somewhat contradictory phenomenon of selfies and their psychological value. In addition to previous studies on selfies and personality traits, the present research explores relations to popular, habitual self-presentation strategies, self-reflections on own and others’ selfie-taking behavior, selfie-related affect, and perceived consequences of selfies, by applying a combination of self-constructed and existing scales [e.g., habitual self-presentation scales (Merzbacher, 2007), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al., 1988)]. Our findings confirmed habitual self-presentation strategies as a relevant factor for understanding selfies: Participants scoring high on self-promotion (promoting one’s strength and abilities) and self-disclosure (revealing one’s feelings for earning sympathy) felt especially positive while takings selfies, whereas understatement was correlated with negative feelings. Nevertheless, self-presentational motives were rather attributed to others’ selfies than to own selfies. Moreover, others were assumed to have more fun and positive feelings while taking selfies whereas own selfies were judged as more authentic and self-ironic. Altogether, participants expressed a distanced attitude toward selfies, with stronger agreement for potential negative consequences (threats to self-esteem, illusionary world) than for positive consequences (e.g., relatedness, independence), and a clear preference (82%) for viewing more usual pictures instead of selfies in social media. The revealed selfie-bias, i.e., the systematic discrepancy between judgments on own versus others’ selfies, and the reported critical attitude toward selfies allows multiple interpretations. Taking peoples’ statements literally, selfies should have never become as popular as they actually are. On the other hand, the selfie bias may fulfill a psychological function. Perceiving one’s own selfie behavior as self-ironic and only half-committed, allows to fulfill self-presentational needs without feeling narcissistic. In conclusion, we suggest that the playful and somewhat ambiguous support of self-presentation may be a key factor for the success of selfies. Relations to biases and mechanisms from social psychology, limitations of the present study and implications for future research are discussed.

Part 8: Interactive Posters; International audience; In this poster, we are addressing the topic of “system’s evaluation” from the point of view of assessing the usability of a gamified experience with 20 teenagers aged 15–17 years. The currently tested experience was ideally designed for children 9–10 years. In order to adapt the application to teenagers, we tested it with 20 targeted users. In this poster, we share the results and encourage a discussion among the researchers about how to adapt the gamified experience designed for children to a teenage audience.

Online diet and exercise programs offer individuals many benefits not previously afforded, such as convenience and an increased network of like-minded individuals who share relevant information, while at the same time providing different levels of anonymity and engagement. While studies conducted of users engaging in groups on the popular social media platforms of Facebook and Twitter, when dieting have produced notable results, including the most frequent content shared between users, research has not yet been published regarding this topic, in relation to the social media site Instagram. There is also a lack of literature regarding the most engaging type of content produced by online-driven diet and/or exercise-related program owners to their networks across social media. Using a mixed-methods approach, it was determined that the engagement of three online-driven diet and/or exercise-related programs (n=926+ posts), when measured over a 30-day period, was greater on Instagram than Facebook or Twitter. It was also found that humorous content, often unrelated to the actual program but found to be relevant by the networks of followers, elicited the greatest amount of engagement, as measured by likes and comments.

This work will explore some of the broader implications of celebrity group selfies, through the example of Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded group shot, taken during the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony, Joan Collins’ 2014 Prince’s Trust Award selfie, just days after, and Collins’ subsequent ‘view from the other side’ tweet; exploring notions of authenticity, performance, intimacy, self-promotion, public visibility, identification, imitation, vicarious consumption and audience participation. Engaging with existing work upon celebrity tweeters, Twitter and other online fandom, photographic theory, star studies and, in particular, Bourdieu’s theories surrounding cultural capital, taste formation, and cultural distinctions, this work not only explores some of the reasons behind the frequently negative judgements of celebrity group selfies, but also seeks to identify some of the very real social functions and more personal gratifications, both for celebrity and fan, that the celebrity group selfie, as a communication and a self-promotional tool, may actually satisfy. More specifically, it is this paper’s contention that selfies offer an ostensibly unmediated, accessible and virtually instantaneous means of articulating and disseminating a coherent, identifiable, aspirational (yet bizarrely, also, seemingly ‘ordinary’) and eminently marketable star image, via a popular and up-to-date medium. With celebrity group selfies this is also the case, but here the photographer subject presents an image of themselves to the world, in relation to a specific group of peers (who themselves also function as signifiers and commodities); perpetuating the notion of a pantheon of star ‘gods’ and the myth of a coherent celebrity community; reinforcing the divide between ‘famouses’ and ‘normals’ and participants and observers; prompting an exponential rise in fan/public interest as more stars enter the equation and allowing the celebrity participants within the image to either borrow some of the greater ‘worth’, ‘status’ or cultural capital of other, more eminent, celebrity subjects also pictured or alternatively, lend their superior cultural capital to less successful celebrities within the image. As such, this work seeks to move beyond a hasty dismissal of such images, their subjects, and their audiences and instead, hypothesise a coherent set of reasons why the most-photographed individuals on the planet (not just film stars, but heads of state and religious leaders) might feasibly choose to create, appear in and/or disseminate such images (or, indeed, decline to participate as did Prince Charles in Joan Collins’ group shot) and why the public may find these images of such interest.

A rede social Instagram tem crescido continuamente desde seu lançamento em 2010. Um tipo particular de foto postada na rede que tem atraído atenção nos últimos anos é o selfie, um autorretrato tirado com um dispositivo digital e publicado em um website de mídia social. Apesar da existência de alguns trabalhos que exploram certas características do Instagram, poucas pesquisas foram realizadas a respeito dos fatores associados à presença de selfies online. Esta dissertação busca preencher essa lacuna estudando as características de selfies, de fotos com faces e de imagens em geral postadas no Instagram. Um conjunto de dados com mais de 150 milhões de mídias do Instagram, bem como metadados dos usuários, foi coletado usando uma versão modificada de uma ferramenta de coleta especialmente desenvolvida como parte desta dissertação. Diferentes amostras foram cuidadosamente extraídas do conjunto de dados original a fim de executar três tipos de investigação: caracterização, análise temporal e análise espacial. Os resultados coletivamente mostram que selfies são muito populares e que são diferentes de outros tipos de conteúdo. Ao capturar quantitativamente essas diferenças, esta dissertação contribui para uma melhor compreensão do fenômeno dos selfies, servindo como ponto de partida para outras pesquisas que podem fornecer importante material de estudo para assuntos como normas culturais digitais e design de plataformas sociais online. One particular kind of photo posted on Instagram that has attracted attention in the last few years is the selfie. Nonetheless, there has been little research on the factors associated with the presence of selfies online. This thesis tries to fill this gap by studying the characteristics of selfies, of photos with faces and of general pictures posted on Instagram. Three kinds of investigations are performed using samples carefully extracted from a large dataset collected from Instagram: characterization, temporal analyses, and spatial analyses. The results collectively show that selfies are very popular and are different from other types of content. In quantitatively capturing those differences, this thesis contributes to a better comprehension of the selfie phenomenon, serving as a starting point for other researches that can provide important insights into subjects like digital cultural norms and design of social-networking platforms.

This paper examines how children aged 11-16 in three European countries (Italy, UK and Spain) develop and present their online identities, and their interactions with peers. It focuses on young people’s engagement with the construction of an online identity on social media through pictures, and explores how peer-mediated conventions of self-presentation are appropriated, legitimated, or resisted in pre-teens’ and teenagers’ discourses. In doing so, we draw on Goffman’s (1959) work on the presentation of self and “impression management” to frame our analysis. Mobile communication and social network sites serve an important role in the process of self-presentation and emancipation, providing “full-time” access to peers and peer culture. Our findings suggest that there are gender differences and the presence of sexual double standards in peer normative discourses. Girls are positioned as being more subjected to peer mediation and pressure. Boys blame girls for posing sexy in photos, and negatively sanction this behaviour as being aimed at increasing one’s popularity online or as an indicator of “a certain type of girl.” However, girls who post provocative photos chose to conform to a sexualised stereotype as a means of being socially accepted by peers. Moreover, they identify with the pressure to always look “perfect” in their online pictures. While cross-national variations do exist, this sexual double standard is observed in all three countries. These insights into current behaviours could be further developed to determine policy guidance for supporting young people as they learn to manage image laden social media.

El artículo explora cómo las selfies promueven masculinidades hegemónicas en el ciberespacio presentadas en la aplicación más popular de relacionamiento del mundo, el Tinder, y cómo estos hombres se relacionan con el smartphone para gestionar performances masculinas a partir de la imagen de sí. Se busca comprender cómo el género y las subjetividades construyen el self por el habitus compartido entre hombres y cómo estas identidades pueden ser percibidas por la imagen en la construcción de un perfil en una aplicación móvil. A través de una etnografía multisituada se analizaron diez perfiles desde agosto de 2015 hasta el marzo de 2017. El estudio es una contribución al campo de las masculinidades y de las identidades de género atravesadas por la red online.

This paper is drawn from the DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture Selfies and Public Knowledge: DOCAM 2014 Founders Lecture, "Selfies and Public Knowledge: Technology & Situational Documents."

This paper is based on visual narrative analysis of cyber-ethnographic material from a 2.5 year field-research with ‘not safe for work’ [NSFW] bloggers and self-shooters on tumblr.com. I use Koskela’s concept of ‘empowering exhibitionism’, Waskul’s ‘erotic looking glass’, and Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ to analyze self-shooting (taking photos of one-self). Constricting societal norms of sexuality, body shape and body practices influence how my participants (N=20, 10 female, 9 male, 1 transgender, ages 21 - 51, average age 34) live their embodied and sexual lives. Through self-shooting and by negotiating the community specific issues of control, power and the gaze, they are able to construct a new, empowered, embodied identity for themselves.I look at self-shooting and selfie-blogging as a practice of reclaiming control over one’s embodied self AND over the body-aesthetic, thus appropriating what is and is not ‘sexy’. The NSFW self-shooting community offers a safe space otherwise so hard to find within the body/sexuality-normative mainstream culture. This makes self-shooting a collective therapeutic activity. In their self-images participants construct themselves as ‘beautiful’, ‘sexy’, ‘devious’, ‘more than just a mother and an employee’ and as someone who ‘likes their body instead of trying to not hate it’. The technologies of the self activated through diaristic blogging and selfie sharing, along with the empowerment from interactions with peers take bloggers on a path of sexual awakening and reintroduce them to their own bodies.

Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and media phenomenon that understands the selfie as far more than a representational image. This, in turn, necessarily redirects us away from the object “itself,” and in so doing seeks to understand selfies as a socio-technical phenomenon that momentarily and tentatively holds together a number of different elements of mediated digital communication.(Published: 8 December 2015)Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 7, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.28073

Dissertação Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior Desenvolvida na Linha de Pesquisa Culturas, Identidades e Diferenças do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (PPGEDU/FURG), esta Dissertação teve como propósito central o estudo das práticas de produção e de compartilhamento de selfies no aplicativo Instagram para, a partir das experiências de jovens na utilização destes artefatos compreender quais representações culturais vêm sendo construídas sobre os corpos, as identidades e as juventudes contemporâneas. À luz da vertente pós-estruturalista dos campos teórico-metodológicos dos Estudos Culturais e dos Estudos de Gênero, foi empreendido um estudo etnográfico virtual, no qual foi realizado um grupo focal online no WhatsApp com 17 jovens usuárias do Instagram. As análises do material empírico produzido no estudo demonstraram que as constantes atualizações do Instagram têm viabilizado uma multiplicidade de recursos para a produção de selfies, os quais conduzem os sujeitos a experimentarem a si mesmos e seus corpos por meio de atos performáticos na busca de sua melhor versão. A partir dessas práticas, almeja-se não apenas a visibilidade, mas também a aprovação social por meio de reações afetivas e feedbacks daqueles/as a quem as selfies são endereçadas, cujos olhares se tornam imprescindíveis para a afirmação de identidades e pertencimentos. As discussões salientaram, ainda, diversas perspectivas através das quais os corpos vêm sendo educados e produzidos por discursos econômicos, culturais, sociais, de beleza, saúde e bem-estar que circulam no Instagram. Incutidos pela lógica do prazer atrelada ao consumo, esses discursos integram e viabilizam uma "economia da selfie", cujas estratégias publicitárias de entretenimento de marca têm constituído outras formas de consumo e outros tipos de sujeito consumidor. Developed in the Research Line Cultures, Identities and Differences of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Rio Grande (PPGEDU/FURG), this Master's Dissertation had as its central purpose the study of the practices of production and sharing of selfies in the Instagram application for from the experiences of young people in the use of these artifacts, to understand which cultural representations are being built on the bodies, identities and contemporary youths. In light of the post-structuralist strand of the theoretical and methodological fields of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies, a virtual ethnographic study was undertaken in which an online focus group on WhatsApp was developed with 17 young users of the Instagram application. The analyses of empirical material produced in the study demonstrated that the constant updates of Instagram have made available a multiplicity of resources for the production of selfies that lead the subjects to experience themselves and their bodies through performative acts in search of their best version. With these practices, the subject craves not just the visibility, but also social approval through affective reactions and feedbacks from those to whom selfies are addressed whose glances become essential for the affirmation of identities and belongings. The discussions also stressed multiple perspectives through which the bodies have been educated and produced by economic, cultural, social, beauty, health, and well-being discourses that circulate on Instagram. Imbued by the logic of pleasure linked to consumption these speeches integrate and make possible a "selfie economy" whose advertising strategies for brand entertainment have constituted other forms of consumption and other types of consumer subject.