Il rapporto tra Selfie e Personalità

Pictures Speak Louder than Words: Motivations for Using Instagram

While Instagram, the rising photo-sharing social networking service, has received increasing attention from scholars and practitioners, little is known about the social and psychological factors that lead consumers to become fanatics of this app. To provide a baseline understanding of Instagram users, the current study aims to uncover the structural dimensions of consumers’ motives for using Instagram and to explore the relationships between identified motivations and key attitudinal and behavioral intention variables. A comprehensive survey was developed in which a total of 212 Instagram users evaluated their motivation, primary activities, use intention, and attitude regarding Instagram. The results suggest that Instagram users have five primary social and psychological motives: social interaction, archiving, self-expression, escapism, and peeking. The implications of this study’s findings are discussed.

What does your selfie say about you?

Selfies refer to self-portraits taken by oneself using a digital camera or a smartphone. They become increasingly popular in social media. However, little is known about how selfies reflect their owners’ personality traits and how people judge others’ personality from selfies. In this study, we examined the association between selfies and personality by measuring participants’ Big Five personality and coding their selfies posted on a social networking site. We found specific cues in selfies related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. We also examined zero-acquaintance personality judgment and found that observers had moderate to strong agreement in their ratings of Big Five personality based on selfies. However, they could only accurately predict selfie owners’ degree of openness. This study is the first to reveal personality-related cues in selfies and provide a picture-coding scheme that can be used to analyze selfies. We discussed the difference between personality expression in selfies and other types of photos, and its possible relationship with impression management of social media users.

What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon

To date, discourses about the cultural meanings of selfies have tended to extremes. For understandable reasons, marketers deploy selfies as an indicator that one is young, fun, and connected: A quick look through any advertisement for digital imaging equipment these days seems to feature a happy consumer snapping a selfie. Yet in news stories, it is almost impossible to encounter a discussion of selfies that doesn’t dabble in discourses of pathology. Each month or so, a news article appears linking taking selfies to harmful mental states such as narcissism (Nauert, 2015), body dysmorphia (McKay, 2014), or even psychosis (Gregoire, 2015). Selfies have even been blamed for harm to others, such as accidents caused by a preoccupation with the camera over one’s surroundings (Hughes, 2015). Perhaps the most obvious argument to be made against conceptualizing selfies as only acts of vanity or narcissism is the fact that as a genre, selfies consist of far more than stereotypical young girls making duck faces in their bathrooms. When people pose for political selfies, joke selfies, sports-related selfies, fan-related selfies, illness-related selfies, soldier selfies, crime-related selfies, selfies at funerals, or selfies at places like museums, we need more accurate language than that afforded by 19th-century psychoanalysis to speak about what people believe themselves to be doing, and what response they are hoping to elicit.

The Lonely Selfie King: Selfies and the Conspicuous Prosumption of Gender and Race

Taking selfies has become an integral part of the social media experience. As discussed in the introduction to this special issue, selfies are internationally pervasive and evoke strong reactions from those that encounter them. Even if users do not produce selfies themselves, they cannot help but consume them. But the production and consumption of selfies is not merely a social media trend; selfies have become social artifacts that deliver social messages created and negotiated by the culture that produces them. Even within a single culture, an artifact’s meaning can shift with context and those decoding the message. Gender and race play an important role in creating the context of almost all social messages and are particularly salient when analyzing the production and consumption of selfies. In this article, we provide a sociological analysis of selfies, interpreting them as a social tool that can be used in producing and consuming racial and gender identities. To do this, we share the results of a study we conducted that considered the attitudes and experiences associated with producing and consuming selfies among millennials in New York and Texas.2 Though we interviewed a relatively small number of participants—40 in total—we feel that the trends uncovered in this study warrant scholarly exploration. Our analysis focuses on both the production and consumption of selfies and on personal experiences associated with taking selfies.