Study Turns Selfies Into A Science

Seflies — images one takes of him or herself, often with the front-facing camera on their smartphone — has become a digital world staple so common the word has made its way into the dictionary. As such, it isn't surprising one team of researchers conducted a mass study of thousands of images, breaking them down into details like pose, location, and gender.

Instagram alone is home to millions of images tagged as "selfies", and millions more wallpaper the Internet across many social networks, personal blogs, and more. Researchers spent six months analyzing these Instagram selfies, and from them drew many intriguing facts about the self-taken images and how they pan out among various demographics.

The data gathered was compiled into the interactive Selfiecity, which allows Internet goers to read about the researchers' findings, view imageplots, visualize the style differences among different cities, including Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Pailo.

Among the details that were discovered, Selfiecity shows that women take more selfies than men, with the largest gap being represented in Moscow, where 80-percent are taken by women. The exception to this is with age, with men over 40 being more likely to take selfies than women over age 40. Women are also more likely to tilt their head when snapping the image.

SOURCE: Wired