Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life: A Large-scale Characterization of Selfie Contexts on Instagram

Abstract

Copyright © 2017, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.Presented at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), May 15 – 18, 2017, in Montreal, Canada.Carefully managing the presentation of self via technology is a core practice on all modern social media platforms. Recently, selfies have emerged as a new, pervasive genre of identity performance. In many ways unique, selfies bring us full-circle to Goffman—blending the online and offline selves together. In this paper, we take an empirical, Goffman-inspired look at the phenomenon of selfies. We report a large-scale, mixed-method analysis of the categories in which selfies appear on Instagram—an online community comprising over 400M people. Applying computer vision and network analysis techniques to 2.5M selfies, we present a typology of emergent selfie categories which represent emphasized identity statements. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large-scale, empirical research on selfies. We conclude, contrary to common portrayals in the press, that selfies are really quite ordinary: they project identity signals such as wealth, health and physical attractiveness common to many online media, and to offline life