Georgia Tech University Publishes Results Of Study On Selfies

Yup, you read that headline right. A group of researchers hailing from the Georgia Tech University have actually conducted what may be the first ever large scale study regarding the subject of self portraits (or selfies, for short). To nobody’s surprise, the results of the study show that people like to post selfies for the sake of appearances -- specifically in showcasing how beautiful they are, how rich, how majestically gifted with hair (or facial hair), or how physically toned (plus with the exotic tattoo to boot). 

What the Georgia Tech University research team actually did was conduct a computer aided analysis of more than 2.5 million images posted on social media platform Instagram with the hashtag #selfie within a three month period some time in 2015. The researchers found that people actually use the hashtag for images that do not feature any human face. In order to further narrow down the results, the team took full advantage of computer vision to only count those Instagram posts with actual human faces in them. Intriguingly, this method successfully eliminated almost half of the images that were considered to be spam, with some even carrying blank images. Naturally, nearly 52 percent of the remaining Instagram posts that were deemed qualified for the study came with other hashtags that include #beauty, #king, #queen, #flawless, or #piercings. 

The Georgia Tech University researchers had shared the results of their study a month ago during an international conference on the Internet and social media held in the city of Montreal in Canada. The expansive scope of their study actually covered 15 categories (out of possible hundreds), but “appearances” was the category that was most popular when it comes to selfie posts. The second most popular was “social” (mostly visible in images taken with family, friends, and even pet animals), followed by “ethnicity” or “nationality,” “travel,” and then “health and fitness.”

Much has been written about the ridiculous popularity of selfies in this day and age. Back in February early this year, a couple of researchers from the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany found that 77 percent of people fully admit that they take selfies regularly, and some 62 to 67 percent of them actually are aware that taking selfies could have potentially negative consequences. 

The results of another separate study published a month earlier this year by a research team from the Brigham Young University show that there are basically three types of selfie takers -- communicators (who see selfies as a means of letting people know that they are still, you know, alive), autobiographers (who use selfies to chronicle their existence), and self publicists (who just want to show off to the rest of the world how cool they are).