Blogpost 5: The Science Behind Selfie

As the technology has improved and cameras have gotten smaller, lighter, and more portable, the increase in this behavior has also naturally enjoyed an upswing.Now, though, the technology has made it so you can do it every day instead of just on special occasions or a vacation trip. But whereas I just see a natural historical progression that’s been slowly going on for nearly a century. Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking. But what is the science behind this selfie?

I read an article entitled,  ''What is the science behind the selfie?'' by James Kilner.

He states that selfie is all about control, or what psychologists would term as reputation management. This level of control is made possible through cellphone cameras and social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  According to him, people generally think of themselves as being younger looking and better looking than they actually are.The reason for that is because individuals have a very poor understanding of their own faces. This was proven through a number of experiments where individuals were asked to match facial expressions on a photograph. In most cases, people were unable to accurately produce the same facial expression without seeing themselves.

“People think they’re putting up a photograph of themselves that is a very good representation of themselves, but it’s actually a slightly misleading representation,” James Kilner said.

The idea that people can manipulate peoples’ perspective by how they portray themselves is nothing new.  What is new is the medium of accessibility of being able to share it. The misleading lies behind selfie corrupt the minds of many teenage today that they tend to be more concious of their own looks.

I read an article entitled The Science Of Selfies: Why Are We Obsessed With Our Self Image?, by Chris O'Shea. He stated that selfies is just narcissism. As what he said about a number who has to do with a psychological difference between observing an image of yourself and looking at photos of others. 

According to Chris O'Shea, ''Reading and responding to the facial expressions of others is critical to successful social interactions, and so we spend a lot of time unconsciously interpreting others people's faces and facial expressions — so much so, in fact, that most of us become expert at it over time.''

His statement correlate with the fact that people rarely look at our own faces. We have no idea how out facial expression looks like at any given time and as a result, we have a very inaccurate representation of it. Studies have shown that if you show a person an image of themselves, and then ask them to replicate the expression in that image, they can't do it. And other studies have proven that most people can't identify an image that is their actual image from a set of their digitally altered images, some more and some less attractive images, along with an original image.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that most people don't really like how they actually look. That's not that shocking. It's also not too surprising that people consistently think they appear more attractive than they actually are, going by the choice of their image from a set of digitally altered images. The image we have of ourselves, in other words, is more often younger and attractive than we actually are.  It also explains the logic behind obsessive tendency to take selfies. We continue to snap our own photos until we get an image that we think we look like. 

Taking selfies has more recently gotten some folks in a tizzy. The selfie, like all technology, causes us to reflect on our human values. This is a good thing because it challenges us to figure out what they really are. The selfie has arguably become the greatest photographic trend of our time.  Interaction with technology somehow negates all the time spent doing other things. Sometimes, we must keep in mind that we must devote ourselves in only one way to every task. We can use it for all purposes, to express joy and sadness, to have long conversations or send short texts. We made it. It is us.