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Finding Your Visual Voice: Marie Bourgeois at TEDxUND

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Linguistics research: are emojis are the future of communication

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Linguistics research: are emojis are the future of communication

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Linguistics Research: Are emojis the future of communication?

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To represent critical topics in Emojis | Mantas Rimkus | TEDxBreda

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What Your Emoji Says About You | Linda Kaye | TEDxVienna

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From cave drawings to emojis: Communication comes full circle | Marcel Danesi | TEDxToronto

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Emoji: The Language of the Future | Tracey Pickett | TEDxGreenville

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Emojis are making us feel less of the feels

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Emojis are making us feel less of the feels

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https://qz.com/1178558/emojis-are-making-us-feel-less-of-the-feels/

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Every day we rely on a mix of emojis, emoticons, and gifs in our messages to help our friends and colleagues understand what we're trying to say-and how we're trying to say it. We heart and like our way through our feeds, providing support or adding a dash of color to our posts. We tap the sad face to show sympathy. We post a gif of James Van Der Beek crying to show disappointment. Don't know what to say at all? Perhaps a shruggie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ will do.

But something is lost in translation. As we outsource our feelings to tiny pictures, it narrows our ability to express ourselves honestly. We lean on auto-predict emojis to populate our texts, choose Facebook reactions over a heartfelt comment (or, gasp!, a phone call), and select clever gifs to smooth out the rough edges of our internet experience. When we do this, we're not revealing our emotions-we're often stifling them.

Despite the illusion of care and enthusiasm, our emotional intelligence seems to be getting worse, not better. Today's tech-obsessed teens lack empathy. Anxiety, whether age-old envy or relatively new FOMO, lurks beneath the cheerful veneer. Anger, the most viral emotion on social media, drives us further apart and stifles meaningful debate. In other words-or pictures-emojis' feel-good factor is leaving us feeling not so good.

Sad face

How did this happen? Over the past two decades, we've created a suite of tools to humanize humans on the internet. Emoticons-:-) :-( ;-)-emerged out of the ancient primordial soup of ASCII characters to help sort out the confusion between sarcasm and sincerity in early emails. Emojis-🎉😎🚀🍕-began as a light-hearted way to breathe life into our interactions, and have since evolved into a creative art form. Gifs and memes likewise lend levity to our everyday encounters.

Despite this, we often distance ourselves from showing our true feelings online, keeping our emotional life easy-breezy. In fact, we don't even have emotions-we have feels. But maybe not all the feels.

Now that our lives live online, we are presented with daily conundrums at a dizzying pace. When a friend's dog dies, do we choose a sad reaction on Facebook or repeat a platitude that 10 others have already posted? When your best friend says they're feeling blue, do you spend your limited bandwidth figuring out what to say, or do you choose an appropriate gif to do it for you? When an acquaintance bares their soul about a rocky divorce, does it warrant a heart or angry face? Or do you just skim past the post entirely, and blame the algorithm if they question your inaction?

Instead of sorting out our own emotions or trying to understand what the people we care about are feeling, our digital impulse is to keep things light. What seems like an endless array of emotional options is really just a set of basic coping mechanisms.

Back to basics

The idea that our internal workings can be distilled into just a few emotions is central to many aspects of everyday life. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that six emotions-happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise-are expressed by everyone all over the world in much the same way. In this view, emotion starts to look like a simple reflex triggered by an external event: You see a bear, your pupils dilate, you feel frightened, and you run. Or, if we are talking about life online, you see an adorable baby goat, you smile, you feel joy, and you tap the heart.

The problem is that this doesn't entirely capture emotion. The latest research in cognitive science shows that emotions are complex systems comprised of culture, language, and context. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that we constantly construct emotions, cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith traces the trajectory of emotions over time in her recent TED talk, and psychologists like Tim Lomas collect new words for emotions across cultures. They all argue that not all emotions are universal, and they certainly aren't as basic as we once thought.

Anxiety, for example, is a complicated concept. It might accommodate fear and worry or shades of envy. It might manifest in all kinds of ways from agitation to sleep issues to repetitive behaviors. If we were Czech, we might add litost to that bigger concept of anxiety, which is a state of torment caused by the site of one's own misery. And we can now certainly add "three-dot anxiety" (that little lurch of anticipation we feel when we see someone is typing) and cyberchondria (anxiety caused by excessive googling of health conditions) to that anxiety concept.

There's a reason we are drawn to these collections of untranslatable (or just plain made-up) words for emotions. Beyond a fascination with fellow humans, having more emotional concepts at our disposal develops our emotional intelligence. Yet this newfound knowledge comes at a time when our options for understanding and expressing emotion online are reduced for machine readability. Just when we want to feel more feels, we're limiting our own ability to do so.

A new emotional intelligence

Despite the trend toward keeping emotions tidy, humans insist on being messy with their feelings. The internet could use a little more emotional intelligence, so how are we best to cultivate it?

Get creative. Most of us already test the limits of storytelling with emojis, but we also have go-to emojis that can fill-in for most occasions. So resist the temptation to fall back on your favorites, and take a moment to be more inventive in how you use emojis and gifs. The more creative we get with our emotional expression, the more attuned we'll become to emotion itself.

Use your words. Rather than relying heavily on Facebook reactions and Twitter hearts, try words. Challenge yourself to say something original: Platitudes might be appreciated, but they are also easy to parse. If your goal is to be less machine-like, or at least less machine-readable, take a more thoughtful approach than the stock-standard "HBD!!" Original turns of phrase help develop your own emotional sensitivity-and they mean more to the recipient, too.

Resist categories. The more we rely on defaults like Facebook reactions, the more we miss an opportunity to develop our emotional skills-and the more we play into pigeonholes created by big businesses. It's in the interest of companies to drive us to be more like everyone else or to react like we've reacted before, as it makes it easier to predict where we'll focus our attention and what we'll do next. Therefore, avoid relying too much on the suggested emojis or default reactions of your operating system, and come up with your own instead. Applying some creativity to how we express our emotions, rather than falling back on system shortcuts, is a great start.

* * *

We now spend more time trying to perform emotion than actually experiencing it. So defy internet convention. Don't be afraid to be authentic-even vulnerable. Given that emotions are contagious, on the internet and off, a little sincerity may go a long way.

Like it or not, technology will be a part of our emotional evolution. In order to develop human emotional intelligence, and not just the rote emotional intelligence machines want us to have, we need to give more thought, more words, and maybe more 😘 to our emotional lives online.
You can follow Pam on Twitter. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Emojis are making us feel less of the feels

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Every day we rely on a mix of emojis, emoticons, and gifs in our messages to help our friends and colleagues understand what we're trying to say-and how we're trying to say it. We heart and like our way through our feeds, providing support or adding a dash of color to our posts.

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Selfie addict took TWO HUNDRED a day - and tried to kill himself when he couldn't take perfect photo

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Selfie addict took TWO HUNDRED a day - and tried to kill himself when he couldn't take perfect photo

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A teenager became so obsessed with taking the perfect selfie he tried to kill himself when he failed to do it.

Danny Bowman, 19, spent 10 HOURS a day taking up to 200 snaps of himself on his iPhone.

He dropped out of school, didn't leave his house in six months, lost two stone trying to make himself look better for the camera and became aggressive with his parents when they tried to stop him.

Finally, in a drastic attempt to escape his obsession, Danny took an overdose - but was saved by his mum Penny.

Now the lad, believed to be Britain's first selfie addict, is battling back towards a normal life after intensive hospital therapy to treat his technology addiction, OCD and Body Dysmorphic Disorder - an excessive anxiety about personal appearance.

Danny says: "I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie and when I realised I couldn't I wanted to die. I lost my friends, my education, my health and almost my life."

But Danny is not some bizarre one-off case in a world where smartphone and social media obsession is spiralling upwards. The top psychiatrist at the clinic where Danny was treated revealed addiction to taking selfies is becoming so widespread it is now is a recognised mental illness.

"Danny's case is particularly extreme," said Dr David Veal who's clinic has weaned the teen off his iPhone. "But this is a serious problem. It's not a vanity issue. It's a mental health one which has an extremely high suicide rate."

The selfie craze has swept social media over the past five years, with stars, politicians and even Pope Francis posting shots online. Last year, the Oxford English Dictionary named it word of the year after research showed its frequency of use had soared 17,000 per cent in 12 months.

Danny is one of millions caught up by the craze - only for it to prey on his vulnerabilities.

He says: "The only thing I cared about was having my phone with me so I could satisfy the urge to capture a picture of myself at any time of the day.

"I finally realised I was never going to take a picture that made the craving go away and that was when I hit rock bottom.

"People don't realise when they post a picture of themselves on Facebook or Twitter it can so quickly spiral out of control. It becomes a mission to get approval and it can destroy anyone.

"It's a real problem like drugs, alcohol or gambling. I don't want anyone to go through what I've been through."

He first posted selfies on Facebook when he was 15. Danny says: "People would comment on them, but children can be cruel. One told me my nose was too big for my face and another picked on my skin. I started taking more and more to try to get the approval of my friends.

"I would be so high when someone wrote something nice but gutted when they wrote something unkind."

His ambition was to be a male model, but a casting session at an agency in 2011 sent him and his selfie-taking into turmoil.

Danny recalls: "They told me that my body was the wrong shape to be a model and that my skin wasn't up to scratch. I was mortified.

"When I got home that night I stood in front of the mirror and took a photo of myself. I didn't like it so I took another. Then before I knew it I had taken about 30, discarding each one."

It was the beginning of his two-year addiction. Within a fortnight he was taking up to 80 selfies before he even left the house for school.

He says: "My alarm went off and I would take 10 pictures before I had washed. Then I would take another 10 after showering and another 10 after moisturising.

"I swiped through them on my phone. I would change the lighting and take another 10, or go into another room and take another 20.

"Then I would spend hours looking at them, scrutinising my features and skin. I took selfies in bed, in the bathroom, and all day into the early hours.

"I would pore over pictures of my idol, Leonardo DiCaprio, and then take selfies in different poses, trying to look like him. But I felt so ugly."

Soon, Danny started sneaking out of lessons three times an hour to take pictures in the toilet.

He says: "I would become really anxious and need to know what I looked like. I'd take pictures in the toilets mirror then lock myself in a cubicle to look at them until a teacher came to find me.

"I'd never been in trouble in my life but suddenly I found myself in the headmaster's office every day. Taking selfies was making me late for school all the time."

Danny dropped out of school at 16 so he could stay at home indulging his addiction. And he was desperately losing weight in search of the perfect snap.

He says: "I would limit myself to an apple and a bowl of couscous a day in a bid to be thinner and improve my skin. I had dropped from 9 stone to 7 stone but I still saw an overweight monster in the pictures."

His worried parents Robert and Penny - who are both mental health nurses - tried to confiscate his phone. All it did was make their usually placid boy aggressive.

But no matter how many shots he took, Danny never liked any of them. And after a heavy selfie-binge in December 2012 he took an overdose at his home in Newcastle upon Tyne.

"I'd taken over 200 pictures that day and looked at them over and over," he says. "I couldn't see any that I liked. I couldn't take any more and just started popping the pills."

Luckily Penny found him and he was rushed to hospital.

Danny says: "I woke feeling groggy, in pain, with my parents devastated at what I had done. All I could think about was what I would look like in my next picture. I needed help."

He was referred to London's Maudsley Hospital. Danny says: "At first they would take my phone from me for 10 minutes, then half an hour, then an hour.

"It was excruciating to begin with but I knew I had to do it if I wanted to go on living.

"They made me scruff up my hair and walk down the street without my phone and no way to see what I looked like. Gradually I realised everyone wasn't looking at me. I didn't need to check my appearance the whole time."

Selfie addiction is so new there are, as yet, no statistics on it.

But expert Dr Veal says: "The common treatment is where a patient gradually learns to go for longer periods of time without satisfying the urge to take a photograph, along with therapy to address the root cause of the problem.

"This can be anything from low self esteem to problems with bullying in the past."

Danny's relieved dad Robert says: "It was the most difficult time of our lives to see Dan go through this illness.

"We are both qualified mental health nurses and this was always our worst nightmare. There is a huge lack of understanding about the dangers social networking and mobile technology can pose if a young person already has any insecurities - which most do.

"It's important parents are aware of the dangers and keep a close eye on their children's behaviour and seek help if they feel it is needed."

Now Danny has not taken a selfie for seven months.

He says: "It sounds trivial and harmless but that's the very thing that makes it so dangerous. It almost took my life, but I survived and I am determined never to get into that position again."

Danny is now working with charity Fixers to raise awareness of mentalhealth issues in young people. Visit http://www.fixers.org.uk/ for more information.

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Selfie addict took TWO HUNDRED a day - and tried to kill himself when he couldn't take perfect photo

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A teenager became so obsessed with taking the perfect selfie he tried to kill himself when he failed to do it. Danny Bowman, 19, spent 10 HOURS a day taking up to 200 snaps of himself on his iPhone.

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sometimes “branded” themselves with family colours in portraits and coats of arms.

Just as social media users today are performing for the public and posturing themselves in a variety of ways—whether they’re aware of it or not— portraiture has long incorporated symbols and other design elements to help define and express identity, while also associating its subjects with particular causes or traditions.

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In her 1967 film Kusama's Self-Obliteration, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama covered animals, people, and plants with polka dots-her trademark. Kusama said that the tablecloth-esque pattern, which she saw as covering not only a room but the entire universe, made her feel that she'd begun to "self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness."

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The 86-year-old artist, who's voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital since 1977, doesn't appear to be on Facebook. But her aesthetic conception of self-obliteration provides a telling template with which to examine many Facebook users' decisions to superimpose rainbow filters on their profile pictures in solidarity with the recent Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage.

Like their predecessors who swapped profile pictures for the Human Rights Campaign's logo or shared the color of their underwear to promote breast cancer awareness, a large number of the site's users obscured their faces with the rainbow flag that's become synonymous with the gay-rights cause. This identification with a larger community at the expense of individual identities comes with a particular contemporary digital flavor, but it also builds upon a long history, which dates back at least to the Middle Ages. Just as social media users today are performing for the public and posturing themselves in a variety of ways-whether they're aware of it or not- portraiture has long incorporated symbols and other design elements to help define and express identity, while also associating its subjects with particular causes or traditions.

Medieval households, for example, sometimes "branded" themselves with family colors in portraits and coats of arms. Jeffrey Cohen, a George Washington University English professor and director of the university's Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, cites a picture from the so-called Luttrell Psalter, an early 14th-century manuscript in the British Library's collection, in which the nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell is depicted upon his warhorse. Everything in the illumination, from Luttrell's horse, armor, weapons, and shield to his daughter's dress, bears the family shade of blue.

"Vividly coloring everything becomes a way of making everything-various humans, animals, objects-belong, declaring their communal identity in a way that's loud to the point of being deafening," Cohen says. "Maybe that's how such moments work: Use as much vibrant color as possible to create the visual equivalent of a shout. It's like a crowd screaming, 'We belong.'"

Cohen points out that there's also a "corporate" aspect to both medieval and Facebook branding. "Facebook offers the service through a website that lives and dies via audience engagement," he says. "Facebook users rainbowed themselves to signal their belonging to a special group, but it's a sponsored community rather than an organic one." That's pretty similar to what Luttrell aimed for in his own branding: To prove that his family and belongings are all part of a larger entity. The difference, Cohen says, lies in what both stand to gain; Luttrell gets social capital, while Facebook earns real capital, in the form of clicks, and user information that can then be used to sell targeted advertisements.

Sam Redman, an assistant professor of history and culture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, points out that Facebook's rainbow filters are part of a strong tradition of associating social movements with colors and symbols. Historically, yellow was used in ribbons and flag trimmings to symbolize the suffrage movement. "In many parts of the country it was a very contentious issue and something that might have divided families on one side or another, not unlike the gay-marriage debate today," he says.

The same, he says, became true of buttons and pins during the 20th century, as those items became easier to mass produce and thus more affordable. "We think of pins as something associated with political elections," Redman says. "You might go into an antiques store and find pins for Nixon or 'I like Ike,' or things like that. But they're also heavily associated with social movements." But where one would have had to seek out an actual suffrage or AIDS ribbon, the decision to click on a single button-without even knowing how to use Photoshop-to add a rainbow filter to one's Facebook profile picture is comparatively easy.

"The cynic could say it brings in all of the people who aren't truly passionate," Redman says. But he chooses to look at things a bit differently. First, the phenomenon of something being trendy is in no way unique to modern society, he says. "It isn't until social movements make something really mainstream that they're sort of a tipping point in American society."

In many ways, there are strong connections between people trumpeting their political views over Facebook and the practice of doing the same via a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. Both are highly visual and symbolic ways of both expressing personal opinions and affiliating oneself with a particular ideology or group. "All of it goes to show how much we humans operate symbolically," says S. Brent Plate, a visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. "Symbols are intimately tied to our individual and collective identities. They aren't merely some second order of identity-that is, an external dress for an interior reality-but they actually construct the very identities of people."

Sometimes, individuals construct their identities by situating themselves in close proximity to a symbol, or a symbol-bearer. Medieval patrons often commissioned works in which they were depicted alongside saints or biblical figures. Some even insisted on being inserted into tableaux of saints who are being tortured, says Elizabeth Losh, the director of the culture, art, and technology program at University of California, San Diego. The Renaissance ushered in a different sort of representation, however. Self-representation, as in Parmigianino's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523/24), began to emphasize "the combination of seeing and being seen," according to Losh.

"The selfie is never entirely about the self," she says. "It's a performance for those in one's social networks, and it's also a performance in relationship to structures of power around gender, race, class, and sexuality."

That performance often occurs with an instinctive click, which may not be the product of deep investigation or introspection on what it means to filter one's Facebook profile picture. But just because a click is easy, doesn't mean that it's necessarily a superficial decision without meaning.

"In my circle of friends, I see it play it out. Every once in a while someone will change their profile picture. And someone will say, 'Your auntie is proud to be an American today.' And someone will say, 'Well your grandfather is not,'" says Redman. "You're denoting amongst your wider circle of friends that you're connected with on social media ... which side you're on of this debate."

That, according to Redman, isn't that far off from the ways that one would have declared oneself either a prohibitionist or an anti-prohibitionist, a supporter of suffrage or anti-suffrage. "It's political relations making social relations uncomfortable," he says. "I think the speed at which this happens is pretty remarkable. It's new, but it echoes a lot of similar debates about social movements in American history."

Clicking on a tool to instantly alter one's Facebook profile picture is certainly a good deal safer and easier than any number of other activist efforts, symbolic or otherwise. But to focus too much on the ease of the decision to identify with one community, or to distance oneself from another group, misses the broader significance of what it means to identify with a certain social or political cause.

The history of portraiture almost inevitably involves a study of all sorts of layering. Just as people are multidimensional, portraits-and certainly self-portraits-are often very complex. Dismissing a blue palette as mere decoration, or just a favorite color of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell's, misses a vital layer of the manuscript illumination. Details in portraits throughout the ages have suggested patrons' wealth, religious views, political allegiances, family ties, or a variety of other positions that identified them with larger communities. (There is, however, the important caveat that for much of history only the wealthiest could afford to commission artists to represent them.)

In her Self-Portrait (c. 1630), now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Dutch painter Judith Leyster represented herself facing the viewer, as a smiling violinist appears poised to leap off a canvas on her easel. (Infrared studies have revealed that Leyster initially intended to show herself painting a self-portrait, but later covered the painting-within-a-painting with the musician.) The abundance of brushes in her hand underscores her confidence as an artist, and she's dressed in attire that appears impractically costly for a painting session. But the work broadcasted to the public that her practice was open for business, and, as the National Gallery puts it, distinguished her "from less sophisticated artisans."

Particularly given the cost of blue pigment in the Middle Ages, it would quite literally have cost Luttrell more to make his political statement than it does a Facebook user today who adds a rainbow filter. The same goes for Leyster, who surely spent considerable time building the painting up layer by layer. But the human desire, or need, to construct multi-layered identities that simultaneously obstruct the self while relating it within broader contexts, is the same. Sometimes it occurs with many dabs of the brush over several months, and at others with an instantaneous click on a social-media app. But don't let the pace fool you; there's a lot of history irrevocably tied up in that social-media moment.

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The Selfie and the Self: How Facebook's Rainbow Filters Relate to Art History

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In her 1967 film Kusama's Self-Obliteration , the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama covered animals, people, and plants with polka dots-her trademark. Kusama said that the tablecloth-esque pattern, which she saw as covering not only a room but the entire universe, made her feel that she'd begun to "self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness."

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what is social media and how did it grow so quickly?

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what is social media and how did it grow so quickly?

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telegraph

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You're more likely than not to have used social media recently, and it's also likely that the time you've spent on the platforms has clocked up at least several hours a month. For instance, 99 per cent of people aged 16-24 in the UK in 2016 said they had used social media within the past week, while they spent close to an hour a day using it to communicate.

The popular social media platforms are obvious to most people - Facebook has a UK audience of some 40 million, LinkedIn and Twitter both exceed 20 million, and Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat have close to 10 million each. The reach of these platforms makes it clear that social media is now ubiquitous. But for all the big name players, what is the definition of social media? Where did it come from? And how did it gain such an important role in our lives so quickly?

What is social media?

If we take the words "social media" at their basic level, it is media that allows people to connect with each other. Email allows you to connect and interact with other people, so it is "social". But given most email is just text based messaging and delivered and received on a one-to-one basis, it's a communication tool rather than media.

The Oxford Living Dictionaries website defines it as "Websites and applications to create and share content or to participate in social networking". Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter fit neatly within this definition.

All of these sites allow users to create and share content with an audience - the essential media element that email is missing. On all sites, there are methods of connection and building a network: Facebook friends, followers on Twitter and connections on LinkedIn. In many cases, you will not have met all of these connections in real life (although that is less true in the case of Facebook friends), so followers can often represent more of an "audience" than being actual collaborators.

Social media is also closely associated with "Web 2.0" - the concept of the "second stage" of the web popularised by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty. In the first stage of the web, users were limited to passive viewing of content; for example, they would go to a website and be able to access its information, but not be able to interact with it.

With Web 2.0, the Internet is thought of as a platform in itself, where people are essentially building applications within it. The more people collaborating, the better the applications get, and where users are able to interact with the content and create their own.

Where did social media come from?

While interactive chat rooms stretch back to before the World Wide Web, social networking as we understand it today really began to evolve in the late 1990s with the launch of multiple instant messaging services. For instance, both MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, along with their Internet chat rooms, both launched in 1999.

Instant messaging isn't comfortably defined as social media, because, similar to email, it's mostly text based and is more of a one-to-one communication tool, although you could participate in small groups. However, messaging is a crucial element of many social networking services today and an important precursor.

The real "Web 2.0" social media, where users could upload and share content, along with networking with other people, began a few years later.

How did social media grow so quickly?

It was really advances in web publishing technology and the idea of inverting access to publishing tools from backend Content Management Systems (CMS) to front-end users that first enabled social media. But there are four other crucial points in its history that led to it becoming ubiquitous.

1. Broadband

Do you remember trying to look at images on a web browser using a 56 k/b dial up connection? In the 1990s, this activity was painfully slow - often prohibitively, and not helped by a lot of the web not adhering to usability standards that we see as the norm today.

Download a low quality film of around 700 MB would take 3-5 days. The creation of broadband infrastructure that began in the early 2000s was the first important step in allowing social media. Faster download and upload times meant that people could download and upload from the new social media tools much more quickly.

2. Cloud computing

In his book Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Thomas L Friedman says 2007 as being one of the seminal years in Internet technology. The Kindle was launched, Google introduced Android, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, AirBnb was conceived to name a few.

Perhaps most importantly was the launch of Hadoop, which enabled the mass storage and analysis of unstructured data. This led to cloud computing, which is one of the key reasons why social networks can store such vast quantities of data.

3. Mobile Internet

The smartphone became a widely owned product around 2009-2010. Previously, people could only access social media from desktops, which limited their time spent and possible interactions.

Credit: KIMBERLY WHITE

With the advent of fully functioning web mobile web browsers, native social media applications, and WiFi and mobile data networks, it was possible to be on social media at almost any time if you wanted to be.

4: In-built 'virality'

A classic story of the early Internet is how the creators of Hotmail were told by an investor to automatically sign off every email with "Get your free email at HoTMaiL" and a link back to their homepage. As people received Hotmail emails, they were tempted to sign up to the service because of the message, and the popularity of the service exploded.

One of YouTube's great viral marketing ploys was to allow anyone to embed the videos on their own website. YouTube embeds soon became a feature of many articles.

Both of these are examples of in-built "virality" - the content within the services may be viral (like chain emails or viral videos being passed on by email) but also the way the networks themselves expanded was viral.

Services like Twitter and Facebook asked new sign ups to email friends on their email lists to get them to join, suggesting the experience will be better if you do. Once signed up, users tend to receive a lot of email notifications from the platforms about almost every interaction (unless you turn them off). The networks are then gamified through the enticement to gain likes, retweets or followers. This keeps people going back and sticking to the network.

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What is social media and how did it grow so quickly?

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You're more likely than not to have used social media recently, and it's also likely that the time you've spent on the platforms has clocked up at least several hours a month.

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Since 2013, when ‘selfie’ was Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, these contemporary self-portraits have become ubiquitous in an age when visibility can be synonymous with political power.

Resistance and protest movements have taken on new forms since then. They’re less about marching with banners or community organising and more about decentralised fluidity or being seen across multiple online platforms.

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The word 'selfie' may bring to mind an adolescent girl making duck faces at an iPhone, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, or a daredevil hanging off a skyscraper moments from death - symptoms of a self-obsessed culture and, some argue, the decline of society - but selfies have much deeper cultural implications that complicate those stereotypes. In her new book, The Selfie Generation, author Alicia Eler breaks with clichés to imagine the selfie as a double-edged sword, at once an empowering and vulnerable phenomenon, characteristic of the digital age.

Was there ever a time when adolescents weren't obsessed with their own image? - Alicia Eler

In opposition to the assumption that selfies are objectifying or narcissistic, selfies have been key for empowering marginalised groups like women, people of colour (POC), the LGBTQ community, migrants and refugees. Mass media at our fingertips created access to all kinds of characters, a new generation of individuals who aren't as afraid to be different or unique, ultimately creating a mirror, says Eler. "Was there ever a time when adolescents weren't obsessed with their own image?" she asks. Young or old, you can't blame people for wanting validation, and now it's just a swipe and a tap away.
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Back in 2013, Eler wrote a piece for Hyperallergic titled The Feminist Politics of #Selfies, focusing on POC women and selfies, in response to an article posted on the women's blog Jezebel that suggested selfies are a cry for help, among a plethora of negative slanting media coverage. "Actually can we talk about what #selfies mean to people who never get a chance to see themselves in mainstream media?" wrote feminist comic book author Mikki Kendall on her Twitter account in November of that year. While posting selfies publicly inherently exposes the person to trolling and hate speech, it also connects them with a global network of potential support. With the rise of the selfie, images of marginalised 'others that were once kept out of the mainstream have become iconic.

Since 2013, when 'selfie' was Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year, these contemporary self-portraits have become ubiquitous in an age when visibility can be synonymous with political power. Resistance and protest movements have taken on new forms since then. They're less about marching with banners or community organising and more about decentralised fluidity or being seen across multiple online platforms.

"They are aimed at gaining visibility through a different logic - by using common images, tactics, hashtags, identity politics and iconic events," writes author Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux.
The flip side
Of course, there's a drawback that has become all too apparent in recent years: surveillance. Despite revelations of spying by the NSA on ordinary American citizens, or the fact that our personal information is mined and sold by large social media corporations, we seem undeterred from posting our most personal moments for all to see. We love to selfie, even if our own images are monetised for the profit of others, our every online action is monitored, and our movements tracked by the very tools that connect us.

Selfies are a way of saying, 'I am here, I'm alive and I'm not afraid."

"The threat is not a digital one so much as it is a personal one," writes Eler. There is a pervasive attitude of 'I have nothing to hide,' but that reality is different for those same activists and artists who may be empowered by the visibility that selfies offer. Working under the constraints of surveillance in an age where visibility translates to political power forces dissident movements to be fluid in their approach because their digital footprint may be used against them, even as today's tech is one of their most important tools. We see this playing out in the citizen journalism movement, whether it's a smartphone video of a white police officer shooting and killing an African-American man or the recorded final messages of citizens in war-torn Syria, this new 'self surveillance' has resulted in some of the most moving documents of political events in history.

Eler cites the Standing Rock protests, where the US company Energy Transfer was due to build a massive oil pipeline but was met with staunch resistance from the Native American community. Lakota Oglala poet and activist Mark Tilsen spent months at Standing Rock, and he told Eler about the constant surveillance happening there at the hands of the Tigerswan 'counterterrorism' contractor hired by Energy Transfer. When calls did go through, heavy breathing could sometimes be heard in the background, said Tilsen - their phones had been tapped. When the rumour circulated that law enforcement was using Facebook check-ins to track who was at the protest camp, over a million people across the world 'checked in' at Standing Rock in solidarity with the protestors.

Shares or check-ins can also be understood as more sophisticated selfies

I'm reminded of a recent Instagram post by artist Glenn Ligon: in a screen grab from his iPhone we see the image of the wireless network menu, and the first network reads "FBI Surveillance Van #9013C." Was there really an FBI surveillance van nearby? We don't know. But those shares or check-ins can also be understood as more sophisticated selfies, argues Eler. Under surveillance and perhaps even in physical danger, selfies are a way to declare, "I am here, I'm alive and I'm not afraid."

How can selfies and online activism make a difference? In his December 2017 interview with Prince Harry for BBC Radio 4, former US President Barack Obama said that in order for online movements to have an impact in the real world communities need to "move offline". It's easy to be a hateful troll or an outspoken political opponent veiled by the anonymity of the internet, Obama told the prince, but when you sit down with someone over a pint the complexities of their being are more apparent, and you might be able to connect with someone unexpected. If not, our ideas are only reinforced by the feedback loop of social media.
Selfie-portrait
Artists were quick to adopt the selfie as a rich subject matter and material. In 2003 Ryan McGinley was launched to stardom with his first solo show, The Kids Are Alright, at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the youngest artists to ever be featured by the prestigious institution. Many recoiled from the works' controversial subject matter, many more rejoiced over its rawness, which painted a portrait of a somewhat dystopian youth culture in New York and in the US. Beyond uncensored documents, McGinley also turned the camera on himself for deeply intimate self-portraits in the style of what would later become known as 'selfies'.

It wasn't until 2006 that Paris Hilton claimed to invent the selfie posing alongside Britney Spears, according to The New York Times. More recently, controversy surrounding artist Richard Prince's Instagram selfie appropriations, which were printed and sold for six-figure sums as contemporary art in the Gagosian Gallery, reached a fever pitch when he was sued for copyright infringement by photographer Donald Graham. The case is ongoing. Though, to be sure, both photographers benefited from the visibility as a result of the controversy, which gets at the age-old question of what can or cannot be considered art.

Beyond controversy, younger artists are taking a more nuanced approach to the selfie. In The Selfie Generation, Eler refers to an up-and-coming generation of artists like Peregrine Honig, who created an exhibition of paintings specifically for the purpose of taking selfies, and Brannon Rockwell-Charland, who uses selfies to create her artist persona online. "Selfies give me a sense of control in the face of the always-impending fetishisation of black women's bodies," says Rockwell-Charland. For her project 400 Nudes, artist Jillian Mayer searched the internet for nude selfies and posted her own face onto the bodies.

The selfie serves as a metaphor for a unique moment when, as Francisco de Goya claimed in his series The Disasters of War (1814), "the truth has died." Selfies and internet culture call into question the basic premise of authenticity, as reflected in arts and politics today. 'Post-truth' and 'fake news' are not new concepts, and tools like selfies, social media or big data can't be blamed for our weird reality. But maybe they can help us understand it.

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Why selfies can be a force for social good

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The word 'selfie' may bring to mind an adolescent girl making duck faces at an iPhone, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings, or a daredevil hanging off a skyscraper moments from death - symptoms of a self-obsessed culture and, some argue, the decline of society - but selfies have much deeper cultural implications that complicate those stereotypes.

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The duck face, the fish gape, the smize -these are just a few of the time-honored poses that celebrities, influencers, and the Instagram-happy masses have relied upon to create perfect selfies. But a lot has changed since the early aughts, when people first started training their smartphone lenses on themselves. Today, selfie-takers can achieve poreless, doll-like symmetry through feature enhancing apps like FaceTune, or they can hire on-demand photographers through ElsiePic to capture their adventures for them so they can remain "in the moment."

But is a selfie still a selfie if someone else is taking it for you? Is intimacy lost when your look is digitally modified, or is that just better living through technology? Somehow paying a photographer to art direct your life feels antithetical to the spontaneity that was once associated with #iwokeuplikethis or even the much-maligned bathroom mirror pic. Could it be the selfie has come to an end? Kim Kardashian West seems to think so. Yes, the woman who once released a coffee table book of selfies, has concluded that, in her professional opinion, the trend is basically over. Data from Google Trends has also shown a steady decline in the keyword since it was added to the dictionary in 2013.

Want further proof that the selfie is a thing of the past? The artform, like so many relics of antiquity, is now in a museum. The Museum of Selfies, currently on view in Glendale, California, is an interactive exhibit documenting the rise of the selfie and perhaps its ultimate demise. But Tommy Honton, co-curator of the museum, thinks that despite Kardashian West's proclamation, the selfie is still alive and well. "Selfies are just another form of self-portraiture, so saying the selfie dead is like saying the era of photography is over," Honton says. And his exhibit is proof of that, inviting visitors to look beyond the assumption that the selfie is a symbol of narcissism and instead see it as a form of artistic expression.

Cultural critic Negar Mottahedeh takes it a step further, saying that even more than a bit of digital vanity, the selfie is "a networked object that connects us with others beyond our physical environment through an online collective." She should know; Mottahedeh teaches a class on the subject at Duke University that focuses on the global history of portraiture since the 19th century as well as our desire to document the ordinary. And in addition to making a record of the everyday, she notes the selfie has played an integral role in citizen journalism during events like the 2009 elections in Iran and the protests that gave rise to the Arab Spring.

Mottahedeh, who is also a member of the Selfie Research Network, explains that as corporate influence weakens social media's capacity to create networks of resistance or solidarity amongst people, its power as a useful tool for popular politics is diminished. For her, that means the power of the selfie is dwindling too. "In the early days of the selfie it appeared as if two forms of representation were being democratized, that of the portrait and that of the proxy. I don't find that it carries that possibility anymore," Mottahedeh says. She hopes that Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal will bring attention to the forces behind our newsfeeds. "We need to be very aware that each click, like, and comment we make is a signal to those in power, be it corporate or governmental," she explains.

Mottahedeh sees the younger generation embracing meme culture as the political intervention of the moment, recontextualizing politics through viral images and bringing them into the real world through the protest posters of marches and demonstrations. Conversely, those images are photographed by citizen journalists and then redistributed across social media platforms.

This is where Honton believes the selfie still has value, that it's still the most accessible way to capture the immediacy and intimacy of the individual's everyday experience. The goal of his temporary museum, which runs through May, is not only to include the selfie in the history of photography, but to subvert the idea that we're just living life through the interface of our phones. "Selfies are powerful because they let us author our own stories," Honton says. As for the future of digital self-portraiture, he believes the selfie will live on. For Honton, "even when we're living as virtual avatars of ourselves a la Ready Player One, we're probably still going to want to take a selfie of that experience as our virtual selves."

The selfie may be over, but it will never truly die.

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The duck face, the fish gape, the smize -these are just a few of the time-honored poses that celebrities, influencers, and the Instagram-happy masses have relied upon to create perfect selfies. But a lot has changed since the early aughts, when people first started training their smartphone lenses on themselves.

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nytimes

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What do you see when you look in the mirror?

My grandmother loved to ask me that question. She was, by any measure, an entertaining woman; one of her standard party tricks was asking me, at the height of an evening's hilarity, if she had "ever told the story of the night your father was conceived."

Which, of course, she had. I would recount the details for you now, in fact, except that even in the age of Trump, there are some stories that cannot be told in print.

But she had a serious side as well. I remember her standing me on top of a stool before the bathroom mirror when I was 10 or so, and asking me, "What do you see?" And before I could even reply with the obvious, "Myself," she'd cut me off with a firm declaration - "That's not you!"

"It's not?" I asked, and she pointed to herself. "And that's not me!"

Then she pointed to her heart. "The real you is in here!" she said. And then, as if I had somehow missed her meaning, she said, "In your bosom!"

I thought about this story a couple of months ago as I was driving back from Rochester after spending a night at the university there, observing my son Sean's improv troupe. As I pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike to take five at a rest stop, I noticed a woman at the Burger King counter wearing a lovely formal dress, her hair meticulously styled; she wore heels and a pair of stockings with seams running up the back.

In one hand she carried a long white cane. Because she was blind.

As I looked at her, I thought what in retrospect is something I'm ashamed of: If I were blind, I wouldn't be wearing all that crap.

I didn't even have time to tell myself that what I was thinking was wrongheaded before the woman raised her cellphone and, to complete my astonishment, took a selfie.

As I watched her, I wondered about that question again: Who is it we see when we look in the mirror? And when we share selfies - and I post photos of myself all day long, I admit - what version of ourselves is it we are sharing? In the stranger's case, a selfie represented, more than anything else, a work of the imagination.

Two weeks ago I took part in a meditation practice pioneered by a colleague at Barnard, Tara Well, called "mirror meditation," which is pretty much what it sounds like: You sit before a mirror with your face (and body) at rest, with the deceptively simple goal of "being in the present moment with open awareness and having a kind intention toward yourself."

When I first embarked on this practice I feared it would be too - well, I believe the technical term is "woo-woo." But it was a revelation. There before me was my 59-year-old face: a vertical line on my forehead, marionette lines around my mouth, small creases lining my lips. At first I thought, ugh: This is not the face of a young person.

But then, as the session continued, I thought - well, it's not a young face, but it's mine. The lines on my forehead are a result, in part, of contemplation; the ones around my eyes are from laughter; the ones around my mouth from my incessant habit of whistling. All those lines have made me myself, and mostly, as I looked at them, I felt grateful for all the years that have left their marks upon my face.

"You're lucky - that's not the response most women have," Dr. Well told me later. "We typically use the mirror to take an observer's perspective (what psychologists call self-objectification). We focus on how we look and often disregard how we feel."

Her words put me in mind of that blind woman I saw at the rest stop. There she was, in her dark, stylish world, eating her Whopper Jr. Who was it she imagined she had photographed when she raised her camera in the air?

My grandmother's voice haunts me still: "That's not you! And that's not me!"

I got home after my long drive that night and crawled into bed. I thought about my son Sean and the world that awaits him when he graduates this spring. I thought about the person I had been when I was his age and the person I have since become, these many decades later.

What did I see when I turned out the light?

I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.

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What do you see when you look in the mirror? My grandmother loved to ask me that question. She was, by any measure, an entertaining woman; one of her standard party tricks was asking me, at the height of an evening's hilarity, if she had "ever told the story of the night your father was conceived."

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Self concept, self identity, and social identity | Individuals and Society | MCAT | Khan Academy

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“Psychology of Selfies” talks about the art of the selfie as a means of self-discovery, reflection and effortful self-engagement. There’s more behind a selfie than just a picture.

也就是说，selfie能建立和自我的关系，也就是自认为的identity。“我怎么看我自己”，另一方面就是in community， 别人怎么看我。

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Psychology of selfies | Charisse L'Pree | TEDxSyracuseUniversity

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Altered faces are dominating China's selfie industry

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Altered faces are dominating China's selfie industry

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The face of China is changing, thanks in part to the massive business of selfie-enhancing smartphone apps.

These ultra-popular programs allow users to edit their appearance by enlarging the eyes, reducing the size of the face, smoothing the skin and highlighting desirable facial features.

Meitu, a Chinese company that owns a lineup of these beautifying apps, claims to have 454 million active users each month, and at last count processed more than 68 billion images a year.
Video by Runze Yu.
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our page or message us on .
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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Altered faces are dominating China's selfie industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The face of China is changing, thanks in part to the massive business of selfie-enhancing smartphone apps. These ultra-popular programs allow users to edit their appearance by enlarging the eyes, reducing the size of the face, smoothing the skin and highlighting desirable facial features.

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Launched by the media theorist Lev Manovich and digital analyst Daniel Goddemeyer, the site selfiecity.net analysed Instagram selfie patterns around the world, finding that the average age of the selfie-taker is 23.7.

As anyone with an Instagram account can attest, the power to (re)brand yourself and curate your own visual journal is in turn intoxicating, addictive, exhilarating and emotionally exhausting. “Selfies are part of modern life,” says psychologist Jessamy Hibberd, author of This Book Will Make You Confident. “It’s how you use them that determines whether they have a positive or negative impact on your wellbeing.”

But we certainly aren’t passive victims of the selfie age, being swept along by a tide of narcissism; we’re all in control of how we selfie. “The more we recognise selfies as visual journals, the sooner people will realise that they do not represent the decline of civilisation or a narcissistic generation,” says Hibberd. “It’s healthy to mark significant occasions and revel in a success, and selfies help punctuate these moments in our lives. Celebratory selfies, such as toasting a promotion, can combat our natural tendency to play down our successes.”

We also use selfies as a networking tool, a branding device. Reputations were once built on a CV and references, while a privileged few had access to publicists and agents. Today, the image we present to the world is in our hands; as individuals we’re able to control our own image, to curate a selfhood, to build a personal brand.

“One of the critical ways in which the brain constructs the sense of our self is by observing other people’s reactions to us,” says Will Storr, author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing To Us. “The famous quote from psychological literature is: ‘We are what we think other people think we are.’ If we think other people think we’re beautiful and special, for example, we’re likely to think that too. So you see how the comments underneath the selfies we post can have potentially powerful effects on our sense of self.”

In fact, being slightly selfie-obsessed is a trait that could once have been advantageous in evolutionary terms. “Being overly concerned about pictures of yourself doesn’t make you a narcissist,” says Dr Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and the author of The Willpower Instinct. “It’s entirely normal, and from a survival perspective helpful, to be obsessed with gossip about yourself, pictures of yourself or responses to you online. Status anxiety is part and parcel of being in a society.” We are interested in what friends and family are doing, saying, thinking and feeling – particularly if it’s a response to us. This is how we establish our place in society and form supportive relationships with likeminded people.

“Social historians see selfies as part of a long tradition stretching back to self portraits, as a means of exploring ourselves and experimenting with our identity,” says Hall. “All that’s changed is the technology.”

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In 2013, the word 'selfie' was named Oxford Dictionary's word of the year; but how exactly does selfie culture tie into the body positive movement?

NPR called the selfie, "A whole new genre of cultural expression." Whether or not that kind of expression is positive or negative has been very much up for debate.

There is an overwhelming amount of literature on photography and being photographed and the benefits they have on self-esteem; but the conversation drastically changes when it comes to photographing oneself.

Suddenly, words like ' narcissism' and ' disingenuous ' enter into the dialogue. That being said, members of the body positive community tend to respond to those opinions with pro-selfie rhetoric.

During a discussion about the phenomenon that is the selfie, 23-year-old Kylie Stevens from New York brought a quote by John Berger to my attention.

In his book, Ways of Seeing, Berger writes, "You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting, 'Vanity,' thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure."

Why is it that society can look at others and enjoy their physical appearances, but when it comes to looking inward in appreciation, negative judgments ensue?

A Pro's Opinion

Professional photographers and BoPo advocates alike seem to agree that this particular form of expression is ultimately, a positive one.

Yellow Brick Collective was established by photographer, Agnes Fohn as, "A place for women to declare and liberate their beauty."

According to the website, Agnes has been photographing women in NYC and beyond for over 14 years. As she puts it, she is all for selfies.

"As a photographer, I know that existing in photographs is so important," Agnes says. "I shoot mostly boudoir and I know how transformative a gorgeous image can be for a client."

Agnes expressed seeing countless clients come to her feeling shy and lacking confidence. Only after they've seen themselves captured in a photograph do they come out of their shells and ultimately walk out transformed. Actually, according to Agnes, they strut out of the studio.

"It's powerful what a little appreciation for yourself can do!" says Agnes.

So What Does Google Say?

I went through a lot of articles about whether or not selfie culture is beneficial or detrimental to society; believe me when I say it was A LOT.

Perhaps the most shocking thing - which was also rather insulting - was the utter disdain for selfie takers nearly every article was written with.

Flooding the internet are titles like:

"Science Confirms That Selfies Are the Worst"

"Selfies: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Irritating,"

"13 Reasons You Need To Stop Taking So Many Selfies."

The conclusion I came to during my research was that all of these articles must have been written for the sole purpose of making people feel bad about themselves.

In fact, that last article's first reason is, "No one cares."

In the words of Stephanie Tanner from Full House, " How rude! "

Even articles that are supposedly meant to promote the benefits of taking selfies start with sentences like, "It's easy to dismiss the selfie as a vapid emblem of youth and celebrity culture..."

I don't know about you, but I don't keep 'vapid' in my pile of flattering adjectives.

The other, and perhaps most important thing I found to be true, was a stark contrast in reasoning behind the articles written either for or against selfie taking.

Articles written in order to discourage people from taking selfies focused their rationale on what you'll look like to OTHER people.

The articles written with the intention of encouragement are all about how selfies make YOU feel.

Because of this pattern, in my opinion, whether or not you feel selfies are good or bad depends on what you place more importance on.

Asking Our Community

The body positive movement's purpose is to encourage all people to accept themselves in all shapes, sizes, colors, etc.

Because of this mission, members of the body positive community have perhaps done more self-analysis than any other group of people out there.
Body positive advocates work hard to recognize what helps and what hurts, what inspires them and what holds them back.
Selfies have had an overwhelmingly positive impact on BoPo supporters everywhere.

"They have given me confidence and they make me feel beautiful," said community member, Ena Dumais from Oshawa, Ontario. "I love seeing selfies of beautiful, brave, strong, and talented women! It makes me hope for a future when beauty in every shape, size, and color will be appreciated and celebrated! "

Another community member of ours, Kim Bell, is known to her friends as 'The Selfie Queen.' "I love a good selfie," she says. "Makeup or no makeup, looking pretty or not so cute, I'm me no matter what. "

Ena and Kim weren't the only community members weighing in. In fact, not only has taking selfies helped to boost BoPo advocates' confidence, but it's even helped on people's road to recovery.

"At first, selfies terrified me," admitted Tricia 'CookieKitty' Spence, from Virginia. "Once I realized how small I was, I thought I looked horrendous. It's crazy to reflect on now because the more weight I gained, the better I felt about myself. Looking at other people's selfies helped . I saw other girls who were perfectly confident and I thought, 'I want to be confident just like them!' Honestly, I think recovery would've been a lot harder if I hadn't seen those amazing girls post their photos. "

Perhaps other people struggling and working through recovery can see the beauty in Tricia's selfies the way she saw the beauty in others.

Community member Fanele Ella Mpanza expressed the joy she feels when she spots someone taking a selfie. "I cheer them on in my head!" she said. "I think, in the body positive community, selfies and their captions have helped us draw strength and confidence from each other. They help us all to love ourselves a little more, no matter how we look or where we are from. I love that!"

According to these community members, selfies are positive and deserve their place in the list of body positive inspiration.

Self-Love or Conceit?

So how do people respond to those whose opinions lean on the side of narcissism?

"I feel like I see a lot of moralizing about selfie culture and how it's proof of our generation's narcissism which is a perspective that I find kind of annoying," said 27-year-old Frank Stabile from Staten Island.

Frank's observation is in line with the aforementioned 'selfies are bad' articles.

He does admit to not having looked up any studies and keeps an open mind on the matter. That being said, Frank feels that comments accusing selfie takers of narcissism usually come with a sense of condescension.

" The selfie generation probably isn't any more or less narcissistic than other generations," Frank said. "We just do it with selfies instead of buying convertibles or big houses because... well, in general we can't afford those things."

While I'm sure my fellow millennials can agree with and relate to Frank's statement, perhaps Agnes Fohn addressed the topic of narcissism best.

" Capturing your life is not narcissistic," she said. "Taking an image to savor and remember a beautiful day, an exciting achievement, or perhaps a romantic moment, is so precious. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug. Those images that you take as your life is whirling by will always be so valuable. "

Finding A Balance

I think it's important to remember, whatever side of the selfie argument you're on, that - like almost everything else - it's okay in moderation.

"If it gets obsessive or makes you try to perfect everything about yourself, it can get bad," says 23-year-old pro-selfie Neyra Madiou from Jamaica, New York. " There is loving yourself for good, and beating yourself up to be perfect. "

Some have admitted to placing too much importance on selfies. More specifically, they focus on the reactions to them they may or may not receive.

" My selfies are completely linked with my self-worth," admits 24-year-old Natalie DeGennaro, from Booklyn, New York. "When taking a selfie, if I feel I'm attractive in it, my confidence will boost way up, but only temporarily and if it gets lots of likes."

To Natalie and anyone else that may value him/herself based on 'double-taps' and 'thumbs up,' I say, to Hell with the likes and comments.

If you've captured your authentic self and chosen to share that image with your social media followers and the world, it's a beautiful thing.

"Selfie away!" Agnes Fohn encourages. "Don't ever let anyone tell you your memories aren't important. In the end, it will be all that really matters."

Selfie Culture and The BoPo Community

So, as I asked in the beginning of this article, how does selfie culture tie into the body positive movement?

The answer to this question is that there really is no answer. This is because everyone's story is different and while it may help someone with a self-esteem boost, it may make someone else obsess or feel completely indifferent about it.

We are all unique and we are beautiful BECAUSE of that uniqueness, not in spite of it.

Rarely will anyone ever force you to take a selfie. There is no social media law stating a selfie requirement.

The most important thing to realize is that if you like taking selfies, you should go for it. If you can't stand them, don't take them.

As is customary in the body positive community, don't judge another person because they may not agree with you.

There's no room for eye rolling at another person's selfie, just like there's no room for pressuring others to take them.

Fill your camera roll with selfies, or don't.

Whatever you choose, just be sure it's what helps you on your journey; and don't forget that all of our journeys are unique and valuable.

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Selfie Culture and The Body Positive Community - BodyPositivity.com

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In 2013, the word 'selfie' was named Oxford Dictionary's word of the year; but how exactly does selfie culture tie into the body positive movement? NPR called the selfie, "A whole new genre of cultural expression." Whether or not that kind of expression is positive or negative has been very much up for debate.

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Why We Post – Why people use social media around the world

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Why We Post – Why people use social media around the world

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Nine anthropologists from University College London simultaneously spent 15 months in Brazil, Italy, India, China, Trinidad, Turkey, England and Chile to study how people around the world use social media. Alicia Blum-Ross takes a closer look at the Why We Post project and finds that it demonstrates that what young people do online has meaning, and is consequential to themselves and to others. Alicia is a researcher at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications. She is interested in youth media production and is part of the Parenting for a Digital Future research project. [Header image credit: J. Morris, CC BY-ND 2.0]
There's no such thing as Facebook.

While that might be surprising for many parents to hear, that was the contention of anthropologist Daniel Miller's previous work on social media. His work was based on long-term ethnography, including a focus on young people in Trinidad, and demonstrated that social media are altered and made anew (over and over again) in diverse places around the world. So there is no one singular form of Facebook, there are as many Facebooks as there are users and cultures of use. And now, when young people are not even on Facebook any more, the same can be said of Instagram or Snapchat or WeChat or... you name it.

This premise has been the basis for a hugely ambitious project called Why We Post, led by Miller and a team of nine anthropologists at University College London. For 15 months, the nine anthropologists conducted simultaneous fieldwork in global sites in Brazil, Italy, India, China (a rural and a factory town), Trinidad, Turkey, England and Chile. This week, the project has culminated in the start of an online course and the launch of three of the books, which are open-access and translated into multiple languages. For those teaching about families, youth and social media (or parents wanting some interesting clips to discuss with your children!) the project has also set up a YouTube channel with hundreds of videos illustrating their findings.

The contribution of the series of books is an even-more nuanced picture of how social media are used around the world. There are some similarities across the fieldsites - for example that the many more public-facing social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo) ultimately work to conserve traditional hierarchies rather than creating the egalitarian societies sometimes imagined. This has also been discussed by contributors to our blog in relationship to gender in Pakistan and age in the Congo.

However their research also shows how people select the form of communication appropriate to what they particularly want to accomplish (Miller describes this as the 'Goldilocks effect' - finding the right form of media that's not 'too hot' or 'too cold' for the intimacy you want to create). So more private forms of social media like WhatsApp can be used to circumvent hierarchies or accepted social norms, for example by enabling women to start small businesses (described here in the Sudan). Romantic relationships and youth culture in Turkey, demonstrated Elisabetta Costa of the UCL project, can be played out on WhatsApp away from the prying eyes of parents and relatives.

Their project underlines that concerns about privacy are often about a known public, especially family and friends, rather than worries about government or commercial surveillance. However, Costa's work in Turkey, along with that of Xinyuan Wang in China, notably shows the absence of political 'speech' on social media in favour of personalized politics and identity-work that can be read as political. Wang (in a forthcoming book) talks about how factory workers construct elaborate fantasy lives online, in contrast to life in squalid factory housing. One of the main theoretical contributions of this work is to describe social media as a form of 'scalable sociality' - as people use these platforms to negotiate between what they want to be public/private or accessible to a small group/large group. For example, Miller showed a short clip of a man in England who used Facebook as a means of announcing to his wider community about his battle with cancer. He had been diagnosed previously and close friends and family knew of his struggle, but at some point he made a judgement about the right moment, platform and means through which he wanted to include his known public in his life.

For those interested in parenting, children and young people there is much relevant here. Each book has the same chapter structure so each, including the jointly written comparative book, has a chapter on 'Education' which includes both debates over the role of social media in schools, how parents view social media as a force for learning (or not) and how social media influence peer relationships for young people. Tom MacDonald from the UCL project summarized this on our blog in relationship to rural Chinese parents ' conceptions of social media as in competition with exam-preparation and achievement.

But others, in particular in Shriram Venkatraman's fieldsite in India, show how low-income parents see the networking and informational possibilities of social media as key to their children's future success (we posted a similar discussion about parents in Mexic o). Findings about negotiating 'online vs. offline' relationships (hint: there's no such dichotomy any longer say the authors), negotiating the world of work, on the different genres of selfies (why do people post 'footies' in Chile and 'uglies' in England?) and more will be relevant to parents and others interested in the lives of children and young people.

Ultimately, the project demonstrates that what young people do online has meaning, and is consequential to themselves and to others. The hours that Italian young people spend preparing themselves to look good in selfies or game playing in Turkey or in Trinidad are not, as parents often fear, indicative of a descent into narcissism or social isolation. Instead social media are a central way for young people (and adults) participate in and build their communities. Parents would do well to understand the meanings behind these activities before they try to police them.

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Why We Post - Why people use social media around the world

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Nine anthropologists from University College London simultaneously spent 15 months in Brazil, Italy, India, China, Trinidad, Turkey, England and Chile to study how people around the world use social media. Alicia Blum-Ross takes a closer look at the Why We Post project and finds that it demonstrates that what young people do online has meaning, and is consequential to themselves and to others.

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Fraud continues to be a major threat to UK business, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers Economic Crime survey, which found that more than half of businesses have been victims of economic crime. The nature of such crime, however, is changing.

With increasing levels of online business activity and a greater dependency on IT, the business world now must brace itself to deal with increasingly sophisticated kinds of fraud.

The proliferation of the internet, and more sophisticated every-day electronic items such as mobile phones with memory cards and iPods, has added a new dimension to the nature of corporate fraud. With more than 90% of all business records now created and stored electronically, new forensic technologies are constantly being updated to respond to the ever-growing and evolving nature of this threat.

Although the developing face of forensic technology makes it easier to detect fraud, in 2006, PwC's Forensic Technology Solutions team saw a 25% rise in the number of cases it handled in comparison to the previous year. Evidence also suggests that small- and medium-sized companies are most at risk as they often fail to anticipate and instil a long-term vision in regard to the security in their IT strategy.

According to PwC's research, investment in IT security systems continues to rise, as technology becomes more effective at tackling such crime. However, this investment by companies must be supported by better levels of risk awareness across the organisation. Here, we outline some of the precautions that companies should consider:

Companies must endeavour to carry out proactive rather than reactive health checks. Companies and their directors must be aware of their responsibilities as a heightened awareness of both personal and collective liability of non-compliance takes root.

Companies should work to make fraud security a 'business as usual' process by training staff and implementing a clear, security policy. Companies should also aim to embed a security-aware culture throughout the business.

Companies should use risk assessment strategies to ensure their investment is targeted towards those security controls that offer the greatest business benefit.

Companies should ensure they understand their legal rights and responsibilities in relation to digital fraud, and aim to implement internationally-recognised standards of best practice.

Companies should put in place contingency plans to ensure that, should an incident occur, it is in a position to respond swiftly and efficiently to minimise any disruption to the business.

Companies should ensure that their security defences are integrated and adequately up to date to respond to the ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated technologies being utilised in such crime. These technologies might include Spyware, instant messaging and voiceover IP. However, companies should also bear in mind that hi-tech solutions should sit alongside traditional techniques and processes for tackling crime.

PricewaterhouseCoopers' Forensic Technology Solutions team is made up of specialists trained in the forensic acquisition and analysis of electronic evidence and document management. Using our proprietary tools and forensic laboratories worldwide we provide clients with a highly professional approach to their electronic discovery needs.

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Fraud continues to be a major threat to UK business, according to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers Economic Crime survey, which found that more than half of businesses have been victims of economic crime. The nature of such crime, however, is changing.

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Many investors use the Internet and social media to help them with investment decisions. While these online tools can provide many benefits for investors, these same tools can make attractive targets for criminals. Criminals are quick to adapt to new technologies - and the Internet is no exception.

The Internet is a useful way to reach a mass audience without spending a lot of time or money. A website, online message, or social media site can reach large numbers with minimum effort. It's easy for fraudsters to make their messages look real and credible and sometimes hard for investors to tell the difference between fact and fiction. That's why you should think twice before you invest your money in any opportunity you find online.

The key to avoiding investment fraud on social media sites or elsewhere on the Internet is to be an educated investor. To learn specific steps you can take, see What You Can Do to Avoid Investment Fraud. Below, we tell you where various types of fraud may show up online such as Social media, Online investment newsletters, Online bulletin boards and chat rooms and Spam.

Social media

Social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have become key tools for U.S. investors. Whether they are seeking research on particular stocks, background information on a broker-dealer or investment adviser, guidance on an overall investment strategy, up to date news or to simply want to discuss the markets with others, investors turn to social media. Social media also offers a number of features that criminals may find attractive. Fraudsters can use social media in their efforts to appear legitimate, to hide behind anonymity, and to reach many people at low cost. For additional information, see these Investor Alerts and Bulletins:
Investor Alert: Social Media and Investing - Avoiding Fraud
Investor Bulletin: Social Media and Investing - Understanding Your Accounts
Investor Bulletin: Social Media and Investing - Tips for Seniors
Always be wary of unsolicited offers to invest. Unsolicited sales pitches may be part of a fraudulent investment scheme. If you receive an unsolicited message from someone you don't know containing a "can't miss" investment, your best move maybe to pass up the "opportunity" and report it to the SEC Complaint Center.

Online investment newsletters

While legitimate online newsletters contain valuable information, others are tools for fraud. Some companies pay online newsletters to "tout" or recommend their stocks. Touting isn't illegal as long as the newsletters disclose who paid them, how much they're getting paid, and the form of the payment, usually cash or stock. But fraudsters often lie about the payments they receive and their track records.

Fraudulent promoters may claim to offer independent, unbiased recommendations in newsletters when they stand to profit from convincing others to buy or sell certain stocks. They may spread false information to promote worthless stocks.

The fact that these so-called "newsletters" may be advertised on legitimate websites, including on the online financial pages of news organizations, does not mean that they are not fraudulent. To learn more, read our tips for checking out newsletters.

Online bulletin boards and chat rooms

Online bulletin boards, chat rooms and social media sites are a way for investors to share information. While some messages may be true, many turn out to be bogus - or even scams. Fraudsters may use online discussions to pump up a company or pretend to reveal "inside" information about upcoming announcements, new products, or lucrative contracts.

You never know for certain who you're dealing with, or whether they're credible, because many sites allow users to hide their identity behind multiple aliases. People claiming to be unbiased observers may actually be insiders, large shareholders, or paid promoters. One person can easily create the illusion of widespread interest in a small, thinly traded stock by posting numerous messages under various aliases.

Other online offerings may not be fraudulent per se, but may nonetheless fail to comply with the applicable registration provisions of the federal securities laws. While the federal securities laws require the registration of solicitations or "offerings," some offerings are exempt. Always determine if a securities offering is registered with the SEC or a state, or is otherwise exempt from registration, before investing.

Spam

"Spam" - junk e-mail - often is used to promote bogus investment schemes or to spread false information about a company. With a bulk e-mail program, spammers can send personalized messages to millions of people at once for much less than the cost of cold calling or traditional mail. Many scams, including advance fee frauds, use spam to reach potential victims.

Many of the frauds that show up on social media are not unique to the Internet. These frauds range from "pump and dump" schemes to promises of "guaranteed returns," from "High Yield Investment Programs" to affinity fraud. To learn more about these frauds, see Types of Fraud.

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Many investors use the Internet and social media to help them with investment decisions. While these online tools can provide many benefits for investors, these same tools can make attractive targets for criminals. Criminals are quick to adapt to new technologies - and the Internet is no exception.

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Information and communication technology has changed rapidly over the past 20 years, with a key development being the emergence of social media.

The pace of change is accelerating. For example, the development of mobile technology has played an essential role in shaping the impact of social media. Across the globe, mobile devices dominate in terms of total minutes spent online. They put the means to connect anywhere, at any time on any device in everyone's hands.

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A fascinating study by the New York Times Consumer Insight Group revealed the motivations that participants cited for sharing information on social media. These include a desire to reveal valuable and entertaining content to others; to define themselves; to grow and nourish relationships and to get the word out about brands and causes they like or support.
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These factors have caused social networks to evolve from being a handy means for keeping in touch with friends and family to being used in ways that have a real impact on society.

The Influence of Social media is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.

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1. The Impact of Social Media on Politics

A new study from Pew Research claims that about one in five U.S. adults gets their political news primarily through social media. The study also finds that those who do get their political news primarily through social media tend to be less well-informed and more likely to be exposed to unproven claims that people who get their news from traditional sources.

In comparison to other media, the influence of social media in political campaigns has increased tremendously. Social networks play an increasingly important role in electoral politics - first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008, and again in the Twitter-driven campaign of Donald Trump.

The New York Times reports that "The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society." Because social media allows people to communicate more freely, they are helping to create surprisingly influential social organizations among once-marginalized groups.

2. The Impact of Social Media on Society

Almost a quarter of the world's population is now on Facebook. In the U.S., nearly 80% of all internet users are on this platform. Because social networks feed off interactions among people, they become more powerful as they grow.

Thanks to the internet, each person with marginal views can see that he's not alone. And when these people find one another via social media, they can do things - create memes, publications, and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream.

Without social media, social, ethical, environmental, and political ills would have minimal visibility. Increased visibility of issues has shifted the balance of power from the hands of a few to the masses.

The flipside: Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with 'slacktivism'

While social media activism brings an increased awareness about societal issues, questions remain as to whether this awareness is translating into real change. Some argue that social sharing has encouraged people to use computers and mobile phones to express their concerns on social issues without actually having to engage actively with campaigns in real life. Their support is limited to pressing the 'Like' button or sharing content.

This passivity is a very human reaction when people are given options that absolve them from the responsibility to act. A 2013 study by the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business found that when people are presented with the option of 'liking' a social cause, they use this to opt-out of actually committing time and money to a charitable cause. On the other hand, when people are allowed to show support in private, they are more likely to offer meaningful support by making a financial contribution.

The researchers found that a public endorsement is meant to satisfy others' opinions, whereas people who give in private do so because the cause is aligned to their values. This peer pressure may be a factor in the recent trend of political polls in the U.S. to misread voter intentions: people who respond to the polls may be answering how they think the pollsters expect or the way they think will please their peers, but in the privacy of the voting booth (or at home with a mail-in ballot), they vote according to their true preferences.

3. The Impact of Social Media on Commerce

The rise of social media means it's unusual to find an organization that does not reach its customers and prospects through one social media platform or another. Companies see the importance of using social media to connect with customers and build revenue.

Businesses have realized they can use social media to generate insights, stimulate demand, and create targeted product offerings. These functions are important in traditional brick-and-motor businesses and, obviously, in the world of e-commerce.

[Related reading: 9 Social Media Marketing Skills You Need Right Now]

Many studies suggest implementing social networks within the workplace can strengthen knowledge sharing. The result is to improve project management activities and enable the spread of specialized knowledge. Fully implementing social technologies in the workplace removes boundaries, eliminates silos, and can raise interaction and help create more highly skilled and knowledgeable workers.

The flipside: A low number of social 'shares' can lead to negative social proof and destroy business credibility

Interestingly, although social sharing has become the norm rather than the exception in business, some companies, after experiencing first-hand some adverse effects of social media, have decided to go against the grain and remove the social sharing buttons from their websites.

A case study of Taloon.com, an e-commerce retailer from Finland, found that conversions rose by 11.9% when they removed share buttons from their product pages.

These results highlight the double-edged nature of the impact of social media. When products attract a lot of shares, it can reinforce sales. But when the reverse is true, customers begin to distrust the product and the company. This effect is what Dr. Paul Marsden, psychologist and author of 'The Social Commerce Handbook,' referred to as 'social proof.'

4. The Impact of Social Media on the World of Work

Social media has had a profound effect on recruitment and hiring. Professional social networks such as LinkedIn are important social media platforms for anyone looking to stand out in their profession. They allow people to create and market a personal brand.

Nineteen percent of hiring managers make their hiring decisions based on information found on social media. According to CareerBuilder's 2018 social media recruitment survey, 70 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates.

Also Read: Personal Branding Vs. Business Branding

5. The Impact of Social Media on Training and Development

Job candidates who develop skills in the latest and most advanced social media techniques are far more employable.

A 2020 survey by OnePoll on behalf of Pearson and Connections Academy asked 2,000 U.S. parents and their high-school aged children about the "new normal" of high school. Sixty-eight percent of students and 65% of their parents believe that social media will be a useful tool and part of the new high school normal.

Blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and podcasts are now common tools for learning in many educational institutions. Social media has contributed to the increase in long-distance online learning.

Despite issues of lack of privacy and some instances of cheating among long-distance learners, this has not deterred social platforms from being used in education.

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6. Negative Impact of Social Media

Social Media is relatively a newer technology, hence, it is a little difficult to establish its long-term good and bad consequences. However, multiple researchers have concluded a strong relationship between heavy use of social media platforms with an increase in risk of depression, self-harm, anxiety, and loneliness.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Long-use of social media platforms make you addicted to checking out what other people are doing. FOMO is an exacerbated feeling that other people are living better lives or having more fun compared with you. This feeling makes you check your notification every second, just to make yourself feel better.

Cyberbullying

Teenagers need to fit in, to be popular, and to outdo others. This process was challenging long before the advent of social media. Add Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram into the mix, and you suddenly have teenagers subjected to feeling pressure to grow up too fast in an online world.

The Cyberbullying Institute's 2019 survey of U.S. middle and high school students found that over 36 percent report having been cyberbullied at some point in their life, with 30 percent having been victimized twice or more. It also found that almost 15 percent admitted to having cyberbullied someone at least once, and nearly 11 percent admitting to doing it two or more times. Teenagers can misuse social media platforms to spread rumors, share videos aimed at destroying reputations, and to blackmail others.

Lack of Privacy

Stalking, identity theft, personal attacks, and misuse of information are some of the threats faced by social media users. Most of the time, the users themselves are to blame as they share content that should not be in the public eye. The confusion arises from a lack of understanding of how the private and public elements of an online profile actually work.

Unfortunately, by the time private content is deleted, it's usually too late. and the content can cause problems in people's personal and professional lives.

7. The Impact of Social Media on Relationships

One of the effects of social media is encouraging people to form and cherish "social media friendships" over actual friendships. The term 'friend' as used on social media is a weak shadow of traditional friendship. Real friends actually know each other, frequently interact face to face, and have a personal bond.

If the internet is an unmissable part of contemporary life, social media is integral for communication - an unavoidable element, especially for those who lead hectic lifestyles and depend on it for even the smallest updates. People can communicate with friends, speak with family, and stay updated on global happenings via numerous platforms. One of the most common online activities is using social media, and in 2021, 82% of Americans had a profile on one or more social networking sites, up 2% from the usage rate of 80% the year before. That comes to about 223 million social media users in the United States in 2020.

Over the past ten years, social media has grown astronomically. There was minimal participation in the industry in 2005. At the time, most of them were unaware, and among those who knew, having the opportunity to establish a MySpace page typically meant elaborate backgrounds and unique playlists rather than a direct connection. If people were to spring back a little bit, the real taste of social media emerged from blogging, where accounts were created sometime in the 1980s. After that, the evolution of free platforms and chat rooms created newer social opportunities. Later Facebook, Twitter, and others revolutionized it.

Advantages of Social Media

Connectivity

Connectivity is among the most significant benefits of social media. It can link countless users at any time, everywhere. Information could be spread globally through social media and its connectedness, making it simple for people to interact with one another. It results in global relationships.

Education

The use of social media in education is commendable. Learners and educators can enroll in global collaborative platforms to facilitate constructive learning. It also aids in skill improvement by fostering knowledge and creativity.

Information and Updates

Stay informed about events happening across the globe or in other people's lives using social media. In contrast to television, radio, or newspapers, social media lets everyone convey information accurately by presenting the real picture. It aids in showcasing real-world news across the globe.

Awareness

People have become more conscious thanks to social media. It serves as a channel for information, thus paving the way to innovation and success via developing their knowledge and abilities. Social media well-covers global events, making people more aware of their surroundings.

Share Anything With Others

Social media is the best platform to convey feelings and opinions - a song, a poem, a work of art, a decadent dessert, or anything else. Anyone can let their creativity shine through the platform for it to be shared by millions of others. Sharing the artistic works with others could open the door to achievement and several milestones.

Helps in Building Communities

Live in a diverse world where individuals from different cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds exist. Social media brings these people together by linking them on a common platform. Thus, fostering a sense of unity facilitates the development of community links. For instance, food lovers can join the community of food bloggers, while gamers can join communities focused on gaming, etc.

Noble Cause

Noble deeds can be promoted on social media. It is the ideal tool for endorsing causes like giving donations to those with cancer, for instance, to those who need money for treatment. While everyone can use social media to assist others in finance, it is also the simplest and fastest way to advance any worthwhile cause.

Mental Health

Social media serves as an excellent stress reliever. Several groups can support people battling against stress, depression, and loneliness. By creating a feeling of elation, these communities can bestow a brighter attitude while also helping develop healthy relationships with others, thus enhancing mental health.

Brand Reputation

Social media improves company relationships by fostering goodwill among users; its promotion increases sales, which in turn increases profitability. The comments and feedback left by customers are a fantastic resource for businesses. Due to the user likes garnered, companies can experience enhanced popularity and a boost in revenue.

Brand Awareness

Networking platforms contribute to greater brand recognition. Visually appealing products and information capture users' attention, which increases brand visibility and raises customer knowledge about certain goods and services.

Customer Interaction

Social media enhances customer engagement by providing goods and services and soliciting comments on them. Users from across communities leave various feedback and suggestions, which can assist in improving areas of focus and satisfy them.

Promotion

Social media is a great supporter of internet commerce and marketing. Posts and promotions facilitate effective user connections and contribute to the profitability of a business. It fosters user relationships and endorses customer loyalty, which is crucial for any company's expansion.

Disadvantages of Social Media

Affects Social-Emotional Connection

Social media hampers emotional bonds. Everything is conveyed through texts digitally, which can stunt expressions. Ingenuity is lost when people who would ideally visit one another to convey greetings only send text messages instead of hugs.

Decreases Quick-witted Skill

With the decrease in real face-to-face conversations and in-person chats, quick-wittedness is rare. Sense of humor and sporty tête-à-têtes have been compromised - the sense of love, friendship, fun, and enjoyment have all disappeared due to the effects of social media on human mental health.

Causing Distress to Someone's Feelings

People who use social media to communicate lack empathy and do not wink an eyelid when they have to hurt someone. The latest trolls, negative comments, and feedback are all witnesses to the hard-heartedness that has evolved due to the invisible nature of social media.

Present Physically Not Mentally

Spending time with each other is about being 'present' and in the moment. As friends and family gather, create memories by speaking to one another about times past, present and future. Unfortunately, today with social media being made available on the mobile phone, people spend time with each other 'scrolling' through posts.

Lacking Understanding and Thoughtfulness

Feelings are conveyed through word and voice - but to do this, there is a need to be physically present in front of the other person to communicate feelings effectively. However, social media gives it a different hue when anyone puts them into a text, thus masking the real meaning.

Lack of Quality Family Time

Social media has been the cause of many disrupted relationships simply because families cannot spend quality time with each other. Family time has taken a hit with 'me' and privacy taking precedence (due to the quality of texts that appear on social media).

Cyberbullying

People, particularly children, have been victims of cyberbullying where threats, cons, and other negative activities easily ensnare them. Fake news and rumors spread effortlessly, leading to depression and suicide.

Hacking

The vulnerability of social media has also thrown light on how easy it is to gather a person's data. Privacy settings must be constantly updated and profile locked to avoid such situations.

Distracted Mind

Social media is impulsive. New messages, notifications, and updates are the impetus to constantly checking the phone, resulting in distraction. The individual wastes time even ignoring important work to only look at the menial update.

Facilitates Laziness

Spending hours on the couch glued to our smartphones results in several health problems such as obesity, stress, and high blood pressure. Technology and accompanying social media have led to a rise in laziness among people due to no physical activity or exercise.

Addiction

A serious issue among youth social media addiction has led to disastrous consequences. While checking social media and using the smartphone in moderation is not bad, productive time and energy are wasted due to overuse.

Cheating and Relationship Issues

Individuals are now using social media as a platform for dating and marriage. However, chances are that the information provided on the profile is false, eventually leading to a toxic relationship or even divorce.

The Bottom Line

It's been said that information is power. Without a means of distributing information, people cannot harness its power. One positive impact of social media is in the distribution of information in today's world. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others have made it possible to access information at the click of a button.

Research conducted by parse.ly shows that the life expectancy of a story posted on the web is 2.6 days, compared to 3.2 days when a story is shared on social media. That's a difference of 23%, which is significant when you consider that billions of people use the internet daily.

The lifespan of an article is different from the active lifespan of a social media post itself. Green Umbrella estimates that a Facebook post has an average lifespan of 6 hours, an Instagram post or LinkedIn post of 48 hours, and a tweet on Twitter a mere 18 minutes. The longer social media users actively access the information, the more discussion it generates and the greater the social media impact. The shorter the active lifespan, the more frequently one must post to that channel to maintain engagement (recognizing that posting too frequently can cause reader burnout).

While the world would be a much slower place without social media, it's caused harm as well as good. However, the positive impact of social media is astronomical and far surpasses the ills associated with sharing.

Ultimately, sharing is about getting people to see and respond to content. As long as the content is still relevant and the need for information still exists, it's always worthwhile for any organization to use social media to keep publishing.

FAQs

Q1. What is the main impact of social media on society?

Social media has changed the way we live our lives. It has redefined the way we imagine our surroundings. Who could have imagined that community networking sites would become a major platform for brands to find potential customers! There are both positive and negative impacts of social media on society as well as businesses.

Q2.What is the impact of social media in our daily lives?

Social media can impact you both positively and negatively. If you are a brand manager, or small business owner, then social media is a great platform for you to meet your customers. However, for individuals, social media is more like an addiction which may cause discomfort if not addressed properly.

Q3. What is the impact of social media in the modern world?

Social media in the modern world is used to connect with your friends and see what they are up-to without even calling them. It provides us a comfortable solution to connecting with our dear ones. For brands and businesses, social media is more like an advertising platform.

Q4. What are the five main benefits of social media?

Social media is a great innovation that has changed the way we communicate and interact with each other. Here are 5 main benefits of social media -

1. Stay updated with all the new things in the world

2. Communicate anytime, anywhere from the comfort of your home

3. Advertising platforms for brands to find their right-set of consumers

4. Easy to build relationships and connecting with like-minded people

5. Easy access to desired information, products and services.

A fascinating study by the New York Times Consumer Insight Group revealed the motivations that participants cited for sharing information on social media. These include a desire to reveal valuable and entertaining content to others; to define themselves; to grow and nourish relationships and to get the word out about brands and causes they like or support.
Source
These factors have caused social networks to evolve from being a handy means for keeping in touch with friends and family to being used in ways that have a real impact on society.

The Influence of Social media is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.

Master SEO, social media, pay-per-click, conversion optimization, digital analytics, content, mobile, & email marketing in just 12 months. Enroll for our Digital Marketing Masters Program!

1. The Impact of Social Media on Politics

A new study from Pew Research claims that about one in five U.S. adults gets their political news primarily through social media. The study also finds that those who do get their political news primarily through social media tend to be less well-informed and more likely to be exposed to unproven claims that people who get their news from traditional sources.

In comparison to other media, the influence of social media in political campaigns has increased tremendously. Social networks play an increasingly important role in electoral politics - first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008, and again in the Twitter-driven campaign of Donald Trump.

The New York Times reports that "The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society." Because social media allows people to communicate more freely, they are helping to create surprisingly influential social organizations among once-marginalized groups.

2. The Impact of Social Media on Society

Almost a quarter of the world's population is now on Facebook. In the U.S., nearly 80% of all internet users are on this platform. Because social networks feed off interactions among people, they become more powerful as they grow.

Thanks to the internet, each person with marginal views can see that he's not alone. And when these people find one another via social media, they can do things - create memes, publications, and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream.

Without social media, social, ethical, environmental, and political ills would have minimal visibility. Increased visibility of issues has shifted the balance of power from the hands of a few to the masses.

The flipside: Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with 'slacktivism'

While social media activism brings an increased awareness about societal issues, questions remain as to whether this awareness is translating into real change. Some argue that social sharing has encouraged people to use computers and mobile phones to express their concerns on social issues without actually having to engage actively with campaigns in real life. Their support is limited to pressing the 'Like' button or sharing content.

This passivity is a very human reaction when people are given options that absolve them from the responsibility to act. A 2013 study by the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business found that when people are presented with the option of 'liking' a social cause, they use this to opt-out of actually committing time and money to a charitable cause. On the other hand, when people are allowed to show support in private, they are more likely to offer meaningful support by making a financial contribution.

The researchers found that a public endorsement is meant to satisfy others' opinions, whereas people who give in private do so because the cause is aligned to their values. This peer pressure may be a factor in the recent trend of political polls in the U.S. to misread voter intentions: people who respond to the polls may be answering how they think the pollsters expect or the way they think will please their peers, but in the privacy of the voting booth (or at home with a mail-in ballot), they vote according to their true preferences.

3. The Impact of Social Media on Commerce

The rise of social media means it's unusual to find an organization that does not reach its customers and prospects through one social media platform or another. Companies see the importance of using social media to connect with customers and build revenue.

Businesses have realized they can use social media to generate insights, stimulate demand, and create targeted product offerings. These functions are important in traditional brick-and-motor businesses and, obviously, in the world of e-commerce.

[Related reading: 9 Social Media Marketing Skills You Need Right Now]

Many studies suggest implementing social networks within the workplace can strengthen knowledge sharing. The result is to improve project management activities and enable the spread of specialized knowledge. Fully implementing social technologies in the workplace removes boundaries, eliminates silos, and can raise interaction and help create more highly skilled and knowledgeable workers.

The flipside: A low number of social 'shares' can lead to negative social proof and destroy business credibility

Interestingly, although social sharing has become the norm rather than the exception in business, some companies, after experiencing first-hand some adverse effects of social media, have decided to go against the grain and remove the social sharing buttons from their websites.

A case study of Taloon.com, an e-commerce retailer from Finland, found that conversions rose by 11.9% when they removed share buttons from their product pages.

These results highlight the double-edged nature of the impact of social media. When products attract a lot of shares, it can reinforce sales. But when the reverse is true, customers begin to distrust the product and the company. This effect is what Dr. Paul Marsden, psychologist and author of 'The Social Commerce Handbook,' referred to as 'social proof.'

4. The Impact of Social Media on the World of Work

Social media has had a profound effect on recruitment and hiring. Professional social networks such as LinkedIn are important social media platforms for anyone looking to stand out in their profession. They allow people to create and market a personal brand.

Nineteen percent of hiring managers make their hiring decisions based on information found on social media. According to CareerBuilder's 2018 social media recruitment survey, 70 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates.

Also Read: Personal Branding Vs. Business Branding

5. The Impact of Social Media on Training and Development

Job candidates who develop skills in the latest and most advanced social media techniques are far more employable.

A 2020 survey by OnePoll on behalf of Pearson and Connections Academy asked 2,000 U.S. parents and their high-school aged children about the "new normal" of high school. Sixty-eight percent of students and 65% of their parents believe that social media will be a useful tool and part of the new high school normal.

Blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and podcasts are now common tools for learning in many educational institutions. Social media has contributed to the increase in long-distance online learning.

Despite issues of lack of privacy and some instances of cheating among long-distance learners, this has not deterred social platforms from being used in education.

Become a certified digital marketer and reach new career heights with our IMT Ghaziabad Digital Marketing Program. Enroll today!

6. Negative Impact of Social Media

Social Media is relatively a newer technology, hence, it is a little difficult to establish its long-term good and bad consequences. However, multiple researchers have concluded a strong relationship between heavy use of social media platforms with an increase in risk of depression, self-harm, anxiety, and loneliness.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

Long-use of social media platforms make you addicted to checking out what other people are doing. FOMO is an exacerbated feeling that other people are living better lives or having more fun compared with you. This feeling makes you check your notification every second, just to make yourself feel better.

Cyberbullying

Teenagers need to fit in, to be popular, and to outdo others. This process was challenging long before the advent of social media. Add Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram into the mix, and you suddenly have teenagers subjected to feeling pressure to grow up too fast in an online world.

The Cyberbullying Institute's 2019 survey of U.S. middle and high school students found that over 36 percent report having been cyberbullied at some point in their life, with 30 percent having been victimized twice or more. It also found that almost 15 percent admitted to having cyberbullied someone at least once, and nearly 11 percent admitting to doing it two or more times. Teenagers can misuse social media platforms to spread rumors, share videos aimed at destroying reputations, and to blackmail others.

Lack of Privacy

Stalking, identity theft, personal attacks, and misuse of information are some of the threats faced by social media users. Most of the time, the users themselves are to blame as they share content that should not be in the public eye. The confusion arises from a lack of understanding of how the private and public elements of an online profile actually work.

Unfortunately, by the time private content is deleted, it's usually too late. and the content can cause problems in people's personal and professional lives.

7. The Impact of Social Media on Relationships

One of the effects of social media is encouraging people to form and cherish "social media friendships" over actual friendships. The term 'friend' as used on social media is a weak shadow of traditional friendship. Real friends actually know each other, frequently interact face to face, and have a personal bond.

If the internet is an unmissable part of contemporary life, social media is integral for communication - an unavoidable element, especially for those who lead hectic lifestyles and depend on it for even the smallest updates. People can communicate with friends, speak with family, and stay updated on global happenings via numerous platforms. One of the most common online activities is using social media, and in 2021, 82% of Americans had a profile on one or more social networking sites, up 2% from the usage rate of 80% the year before. That comes to about 223 million social media users in the United States in 2020.

Over the past ten years, social media has grown astronomically. There was minimal participation in the industry in 2005. At the time, most of them were unaware, and among those who knew, having the opportunity to establish a MySpace page typically meant elaborate backgrounds and unique playlists rather than a direct connection. If people were to spring back a little bit, the real taste of social media emerged from blogging, where accounts were created sometime in the 1980s. After that, the evolution of free platforms and chat rooms created newer social opportunities. Later Facebook, Twitter, and others revolutionized it.

Advantages of Social Media

Connectivity

Connectivity is among the most significant benefits of social media. It can link countless users at any time, everywhere. Information could be spread globally through social media and its connectedness, making it simple for people to interact with one another. It results in global relationships.

Education

The use of social media in education is commendable. Learners and educators can enroll in global collaborative platforms to facilitate constructive learning. It also aids in skill improvement by fostering knowledge and creativity.

Information and Updates

Stay informed about events happening across the globe or in other people's lives using social media. In contrast to television, radio, or newspapers, social media lets everyone convey information accurately by presenting the real picture. It aids in showcasing real-world news across the globe.

Awareness

People have become more conscious thanks to social media. It serves as a channel for information, thus paving the way to innovation and success via developing their knowledge and abilities. Social media well-covers global events, making people more aware of their surroundings.

Share Anything With Others

Social media is the best platform to convey feelings and opinions - a song, a poem, a work of art, a decadent dessert, or anything else. Anyone can let their creativity shine through the platform for it to be shared by millions of others. Sharing the artistic works with others could open the door to achievement and several milestones.

Helps in Building Communities

Live in a diverse world where individuals from different cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds exist. Social media brings these people together by linking them on a common platform. Thus, fostering a sense of unity facilitates the development of community links. For instance, food lovers can join the community of food bloggers, while gamers can join communities focused on gaming, etc.

Noble Cause

Noble deeds can be promoted on social media. It is the ideal tool for endorsing causes like giving donations to those with cancer, for instance, to those who need money for treatment. While everyone can use social media to assist others in finance, it is also the simplest and fastest way to advance any worthwhile cause.

Mental Health

Social media serves as an excellent stress reliever. Several groups can support people battling against stress, depression, and loneliness. By creating a feeling of elation, these communities can bestow a brighter attitude while also helping develop healthy relationships with others, thus enhancing mental health.

Brand Reputation

Social media improves company relationships by fostering goodwill among users; its promotion increases sales, which in turn increases profitability. The comments and feedback left by customers are a fantastic resource for businesses. Due to the user likes garnered, companies can experience enhanced popularity and a boost in revenue.

Brand Awareness

Networking platforms contribute to greater brand recognition. Visually appealing products and information capture users' attention, which increases brand visibility and raises customer knowledge about certain goods and services.

Customer Interaction

Social media enhances customer engagement by providing goods and services and soliciting comments on them. Users from across communities leave various feedback and suggestions, which can assist in improving areas of focus and satisfy them.

Promotion

Social media is a great supporter of internet commerce and marketing. Posts and promotions facilitate effective user connections and contribute to the profitability of a business. It fosters user relationships and endorses customer loyalty, which is crucial for any company's expansion.

Disadvantages of Social Media

Affects Social-Emotional Connection

Social media hampers emotional bonds. Everything is conveyed through texts digitally, which can stunt expressions. Ingenuity is lost when people who would ideally visit one another to convey greetings only send text messages instead of hugs.

Decreases Quick-witted Skill

With the decrease in real face-to-face conversations and in-person chats, quick-wittedness is rare. Sense of humor and sporty tête-à-têtes have been compromised - the sense of love, friendship, fun, and enjoyment have all disappeared due to the effects of social media on human mental health.

Causing Distress to Someone's Feelings

People who use social media to communicate lack empathy and do not wink an eyelid when they have to hurt someone. The latest trolls, negative comments, and feedback are all witnesses to the hard-heartedness that has evolved due to the invisible nature of social media.

Present Physically Not Mentally

Spending time with each other is about being 'present' and in the moment. As friends and family gather, create memories by speaking to one another about times past, present and future. Unfortunately, today with social media being made available on the mobile phone, people spend time with each other 'scrolling' through posts.

Lacking Understanding and Thoughtfulness

Feelings are conveyed through word and voice - but to do this, there is a need to be physically present in front of the other person to communicate feelings effectively. However, social media gives it a different hue when anyone puts them into a text, thus masking the real meaning.

Lack of Quality Family Time

Social media has been the cause of many disrupted relationships simply because families cannot spend quality time with each other. Family time has taken a hit with 'me' and privacy taking precedence (due to the quality of texts that appear on social media).

Cyberbullying

People, particularly children, have been victims of cyberbullying where threats, cons, and other negative activities easily ensnare them. Fake news and rumors spread effortlessly, leading to depression and suicide.

Hacking

The vulnerability of social media has also thrown light on how easy it is to gather a person's data. Privacy settings must be constantly updated and profile locked to avoid such situations.

Distracted Mind

Social media is impulsive. New messages, notifications, and updates are the impetus to constantly checking the phone, resulting in distraction. The individual wastes time even ignoring important work to only look at the menial update.

Facilitates Laziness

Spending hours on the couch glued to our smartphones results in several health problems such as obesity, stress, and high blood pressure. Technology and accompanying social media have led to a rise in laziness among people due to no physical activity or exercise.

Addiction

A serious issue among youth social media addiction has led to disastrous consequences. While checking social media and using the smartphone in moderation is not bad, productive time and energy are wasted due to overuse.

Cheating and Relationship Issues

Individuals are now using social media as a platform for dating and marriage. However, chances are that the information provided on the profile is false, eventually leading to a toxic relationship or even divorce.

The Bottom Line

It's been said that information is power. Without a means of distributing information, people cannot harness its power. One positive impact of social media is in the distribution of information in today's world. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others have made it possible to access information at the click of a button.

Research conducted by parse.ly shows that the life expectancy of a story posted on the web is 2.6 days, compared to 3.2 days when a story is shared on social media. That's a difference of 23%, which is significant when you consider that billions of people use the internet daily.

The lifespan of an article is different from the active lifespan of a social media post itself. Green Umbrella estimates that a Facebook post has an average lifespan of 6 hours, an Instagram post or LinkedIn post of 48 hours, and a tweet on Twitter a mere 18 minutes. The longer social media users actively access the information, the more discussion it generates and the greater the social media impact. The shorter the active lifespan, the more frequently one must post to that channel to maintain engagement (recognizing that posting too frequently can cause reader burnout).

While the world would be a much slower place without social media, it's caused harm as well as good. However, the positive impact of social media is astronomical and far surpasses the ills associated with sharing.

Ultimately, sharing is about getting people to see and respond to content. As long as the content is still relevant and the need for information still exists, it's always worthwhile for any organization to use social media to keep publishing.

FAQs

Q1. What is the main impact of social media on society?

Social media has changed the way we live our lives. It has redefined the way we imagine our surroundings. Who could have imagined that community networking sites would become a major platform for brands to find potential customers! There are both positive and negative impacts of social media on society as well as businesses.

Q2.What is the impact of social media in our daily lives?

Social media can impact you both positively and negatively. If you are a brand manager, or small business owner, then social media is a great platform for you to meet your customers. However, for individuals, social media is more like an addiction which may cause discomfort if not addressed properly.

Q3. What is the impact of social media in the modern world?

Social media in the modern world is used to connect with your friends and see what they are up-to without even calling them. It provides us a comfortable solution to connecting with our dear ones. For brands and businesses, social media is more like an advertising platform.

Q4. What are the five main benefits of social media?

Social media is a great innovation that has changed the way we communicate and interact with each other. Here are 5 main benefits of social media -

1. Stay updated with all the new things in the world

2. Communicate anytime, anywhere from the comfort of your home

3. Advertising platforms for brands to find their right-set of consumers

4. Easy to build relationships and connecting with like-minded people

5. Easy access to desired information, products and services.

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Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages | Simplilearn

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Social media has revolutionized the way we interact, communicate and consume information. Discover the profound impact of social media on society and individuals.

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one picture every day since 1 November 2001.
2004

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When authenticity and advertising collide on social media

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When authenticity and advertising collide on social media

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Be true to yourself! Embrace the real you! Fundamental philosophical imperatives or contrived marketing slogans?

The answer, of course, is both. And 19-year-old Instagram model Essena O'Neill's very public rejection of the inauthentic nature of social media last week can been read through both lenses.

On the one hand, O'Neill deleted her heavily trafficked Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr accounts, and re-directed her audience to her new blog decrying the artificiality of social media life. She was embraced by many for revealing the inner workings of a poorly understood social media marketplace. Deleting accounts with more half a million followers certainly does make a statement.

On the other hand, O'Neill's actions have also been interpreted as a rebranding effort, shifting away from the world of modelling toward a new online identity as a vegan eco-warrior.

Influencing the influencers

O'Neill was - and largely remains - what is referred to by marketers as an " influencer" or by some academics as a " microcelebrity ".

Given the large numbers of followers, they are very attractive platforms for brands and marketers wanting to reach these "organic" social media audiences. Yet, while these social media channels often depict idyllic lives, O'Neill's dramatic revelations have raised questions about the authenticity of many influencers.

Or, more specifically, questions about exactly what sort of money is changing hands, and how visible sponsored and paid posts ought to be on social media.

Clashes between authenticity and commerce have a long history on social media. A notable example occurred in 2009 when Nestlé courted influential "mommy bloggers", effectively dividing the community between those happy to be flown to a Nestlé retreat and those who argued Nestlé's history of unethical business practices in relation to breastfeeding were unforgivable.

More recently, influential YouTube star and fashion blogger Zoe "Zoella" Sugg faced a backlash following the revelations that her best-selling debut novel, Girl Online, was written at least in part by a ghostwriter.

Anthropologist and social media researcher Crystal Abidin has extensively studied and documented Singaporean influencers, noting a range of different practices, from explicit tags to implicit mentioning of brands, to indicate paid or sponsored posts.

Recognising these various tags and indicators requires a level of Instagram literacy that regular viewers will likely develop, but casual audiences could easily miss. Indeed, as Abidin and Mart Ots have argued, this lack of transparent standards can be understood as "the influencer's dilemma".

As Singaporean influencers have been around for a decade, some have aged sufficiently to shift from their own sponsored posts to endorsements featuring their children, becoming what Abidin describes as micro-microcelebrities.

Australia also has its own infant influencers, the most visible being PR CEO Roxy Jacenko's daughter, four year old Instagram star Pixie Curtis. As a second generation influencers emerge, clear social norms about sponsorship and advertising transparency on Instagram become more pressing.

Leveraging authenticity

Australian newly launched marketing company Tribe has positioned itself as a broker between influencers - "someone with 5000+ real followers" on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - and brands.

As Tribe notes, the ACCC does not currently require individuals on social media to reveal paid posts. However, it does recommend influencers add #spon to sponsored posts to flag identify paid content.

Tribe Group

The difference between a recommendation and a rule aside, while a quick search reveals some 47,000 Instagram images tagged with #spon, many of these are not sponsored posts.

Instagram

Of the top #spon tagged posts on Instagram yesterday (9 November), they feature influencers spruiking tea, videogames, resorts, beer and a mobile service provider along with two pets sponsored by a dog show and, as seems fitting, a dog food company.

An explicit marker like #spon would at least make sponsored posts identifiable, but no such norm currently exists, and even Tribe only "strongly recommends" rather than mandates its use.

See through

In a post ironically titled " How To Make $$$ on Social Media ", Essena O'Neill notes that she was charging A$1,000 to feature a product on her Instagram feed, a fact she did not disclose until her recent rejection of her social media modelling past.

O'Neill's own authenticity might not be helped by the fact that she took to Vimeo - another social media platform - and her own blog, to denounce social media.

This could be read as a clear reminder that social media isn't inherently morally charged: the value of communication platforms depends in large part on what's being communicated.

Moreover, as O'Neill's actions have inspired other Instagram users and influencers to add "honest" captions about the constructedness of their images, if nothing else O'Neill has provoked a very teachable moment, potentially increasing the media literacy of many social media users.

Traditional media industries have long had regulations that ensure advertising and other content are clearly differentiated. While regulating social media is challenging, calling for social media influencers to self-regulate should not be.

Far from damaging their influence, such transparency may just add to what audiences perceive as their authenticity.

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When authenticity and advertising collide on social media

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Be true to yourself! Embrace the real you! Fundamental philosophical imperatives or contrived marketing slogans? The answer, of course, is both. And 19-year-old Instagram model Essena O'Neill's very public rejection of the inauthentic nature of social media last week can been read through both lenses.

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ted- how social media shape our social identity

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ted- how social media shape our social identity

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How Social Media Shapes Identity | Ulrike Schultze | TEDxSMU

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bbc - iplayer- Should we be worried about selfies?

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bbc - iplayer- Should we be worried about selfies?

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Should we be worried about selfies?, Radio 4 in Four - BBC Radio 4

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Michael Buerk asks are selfies harmless fun or is something more sinister going on?

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The evolution of the selfie: how our much-mocked photos have matured

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The evolution of the selfie: how our much-mocked photos have matured

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Few 21st-century trends have been as thoroughly maligned as the selfie, the digital self-portrait snapped at arm's length on a smartphone. But since around 2013, when the word received the seal of approval from Oxford Dictionaries, the debate over what these images reveal about modern life has softened and shifted. It's no longer smart to condemn them as proof that an entire generation are narcissists. Now experts - including art historians and psychologists - argue that selfies perform important social functions.

"When I see a selfie, I see people trying to make connections in an increasingly impersonal world," says art historian James Hall, author of The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History. "They are trying to identify themselves, to reinvent themselves, as self-portraitists throughout history have sought to do."

The selfie too has proved a master of reinvention. The selfie of 2017 looks radically different to the selfie of 2013. In 2017, we're no longer "sparrowfacing", the wide-eyed variation on a pouty "duckface". "Sorority arm", the flattering update on the old hand-on-hip pose, which nips in the waist with your hand and makes the arm look thinner, is now as old-hat as, well, sororities themselves.

In 2017, the big trend has been the "plandid", AKA the planned candid selfie, which does away with selfie sticks, selfie drones and, um, arms altogether and recruits a photographer. Does this still constitute a selfie? Thanks to the glaringly obvious self-orchestrated element of plandids, yes; we're still essentially both the photographer and subject of that particular shot.

When the first phone with a clip-on camera hit shelves back in 2001, technology journalists sneered; the idea that a phone could ever replace a digital camera seemed faintly ridiculous. Today, four out of five Brits own a smartphone - and we are used to upgrading our images as a matter of course.

When the selfie-tweaking app FaceTune first came out it was seen as a Kardashian level of vain, but now with phones such as Google Pixel 2 providing built-in portrait editor tools, the bar for a pro-selfie has been raised forever. We no longer even have to use our fingers, just asking Google Assistant: "Ok Google, take a selfie" is the most modern way of being in charge of your own image. In 2017, it's now accepted that we're all the photographic directors of our own lives.

The "planned candid" is a move away from studiously posed pictures and, some would argue, a backlash against the overly posed, pouty selfie of the past. Yes, the irony of this backlash being so meticulously planned is not lost on us. Meanwhile, psychologists are still hotly debating if the fact that most women on dating sites snap their selfies from above tells us that single women subconsciously assume an aspect of submission to potential mates, or whether the explanation is simpler: it's just a more flattering angle.

Instead of deriding selfies as a psychologically and socially destructive force, academics now seek to glean valuable insights from this rich sociological databank. Launched by the media theorist Lev Manovich and digital analyst Daniel Goddemeyer, the site selfiecity.net analysed Instagram selfie patterns around the world, finding that the average age of the selfie-taker is 23.7.

Among people under 40, women take more selfies than men; over 40, men become the main culprits (perhaps because their female peers are anxious about ageing). Manovich and Goddemeyer also analysed "extreme poses" such as the "head tilt", finding that the female tilt is 50% deeper than the male (12.3 degrees versus 8.2 degrees).

As anyone with an Instagram account can attest, the power to (re)brand yourself and curate your own visual journal is in turn intoxicating, addictive, exhilarating and emotionally exhausting. "Selfies are part of modern life," says psychologist Jessamy Hibberd, author of This Book Will Make You Confident. "It's how you use them that determines whether they have a positive or negative impact on your wellbeing." One US study found teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, which raises the question as to whether selfies are detrimental to self esteem.

But we certainly aren't passive victims of the selfie age, being swept along by a tide of narcissism; we're all in control of how we selfie. "The more we recognise selfies as visual journals, the sooner people will realise that they do not represent the decline of civilisation or a narcissistic generation," says Hibberd. "It's healthy to mark significant occasions and revel in a success, and selfies help punctuate these moments in our lives. Celebratory selfies, such as toasting a promotion, can combat our natural tendency to play down our successes."

We also use selfies as a networking tool, a branding device. Reputations were once built on a CV and references, while a privileged few had access to publicists and agents. Today, the image we present to the world is in our hands; as individuals we're able to control our own image, to curate a selfhood, to build a personal brand.

"One of the critical ways in which the brain constructs the sense of our self is by observing other people's reactions to us," says Will Storr, author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing To Us. "The famous quote from psychological literature is: 'We are what we think other people think we are.' If we think other people think we're beautiful and special, for example, we're likely to think that too. So you see how the comments underneath the selfies we post can have potentially powerful effects on our sense of self."

So perhaps it's time to ditch the guilt about caring about the number of likes we accumulate, or spending a bit of time editing out red-eye in an otherwise perfect holiday snap. "Even if we're consciously aware that many of our commenters are sycophantic, fishing for their own reciprocal compliments or, more often, 'just being nice', their comments still feel good," says Storr. "We still feel bad when we don't get them."

In fact, being slightly selfie-obsessed is a trait that could once have been advantageous in evolutionary terms. "Being overly concerned about pictures of yourself doesn't make you a narcissist," says Dr Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and the author of The Willpower Instinct. "It's entirely normal, and from a survival perspective helpful, to be obsessed with gossip about yourself, pictures of yourself or responses to you online. Status anxiety is part and parcel of being in a society." We are interested in what friends and family are doing, saying, thinking and feeling - particularly if it's a response to us. This is how we establish our place in society and form supportive relationships with likeminded people.

"Social historians see selfies as part of a long tradition stretching back to self portraits, as a means of exploring ourselves and experimenting with our identity," says Hall. "All that's changed is the technology."

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The evolution of the selfie: how our much-mocked photos have matured

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Few 21st-century trends have been as thoroughly maligned as the selfie, the digital self-portrait snapped at arm's length on a smartphone. But since around 2013, when the word received the seal of approval from Oxford Dictionaries, the debate over what these images reveal about modern life has softened and shifted.

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Telegraph   Better   Technology9 ways to start (and stick to) a digital detox

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Telegraph   Better   Technology9 ways to start (and stick to) a digital detox

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From smartphones to sat navs, our lives are full of screens. We wake up to them, we come home to them, and we carry them around in our pockets all day. So perhaps it's unsurprising that experts are warning that this constant exposure could be damaging our health.

"Technology may be incredibly useful and educational and it undoubtedly allows us much creativity, connectivity and enjoyment," says Charlotte Walsh, partner at Digital Detox. "But if it begins to distract you from doing what you should be doing - like your job or your education - or it negatively affects your relationships, or costs you more money than you can afford, then it starts to become dangerous. If it is negatively impacting your life you need to evaluate what you do online, when and with whom."

But how easy is it to start and, more importantly, stick to a much-needed digital detox? "To avoid becoming a slave to your smartphone, you do need a level of self-discipline - and, occasionally, a complete break," explains Walsh.

Here's how to make your digital detox a success:

1. Make a gadget list

"Before you commit to a detox, try making two lists," advises Dr Sally-Ann Law, a psychologist and personal life coach.

"Firstly, list all of your gadgets. This will show you how dependent you are on technology. Secondly, make a list of all the things that you enjoy doing in life, but aren't doing presently."

"This will help you realise that, if you cut down your technology use, you'll gain back hours of time to do things that you find considerably more meaningful than constantly checking Facebook. Some estimates show that we spend the equivalent of three weeks every year on social media and checking emails - time we could be at home or on holiday."

2. Give yourself an allowance

"If you establish a maximum daily time allowance for your devices then you will be more likely to stick to your detox," suggests Dr Richard Graham, a Technology Addiction Specialist at Nightingale Hospital.

"By restricting the time you spend using technology, you can focus on the 'real world' much more, and will be encouraged to enjoy social interactions in person rather than through a screen."

3. Don't set unachievable targets

Although an allowance is important, London-based life coach Carole Ann Rice believes that digital detoxes are something one needs to ease into.

"In order to completely sever your dependency, it would be a good idea to first simply set small limits for each day. Be this during exercise time, your lunch break, or when out shopping, if you slowly eliminate technology from various parts of your day, your detox will be easier to stick at. Habitual rituals help us achieve our targets, but only if they are achievable themselves."

4. Commit to changing one habit at a time

"Choose one technology habit to change at a time," advises Dr Law. "Maybe this would be banning all devices from the dining table, or from the bedroom, or only checking emails every two hours."

But whatever it is, make sure that you stick to it for at least a week no matter what - and then move onto tackling another habit." Keep going like this, eliminating your dependencies incrementally, until you feel more in control," says Dr Law.

5. Ensure you get enough sleep

"Try storing devices in a different room to your bedroom overnight," suggests Dr Graham. "This will stop yourself using them straight before sleep, and first thing in the morning - which is important as sleep issues can sometimes coexist with technology addiction."

Make sure you turn all screens off at least two hours before bed - that means no phone, no laptop, no iPad. "Your bedroom is for sleeping - so don't turn it into a cinema, a shopping centre, a bank or a casino."

6. Make an effort to give others your attention

"You should make the effort to give people your undivided attention," says Rice. "Focus on how rude people will think you are if you're constantly checking your phone or texting away - and this will make your more likely to give them 100 per cent of your attention."

If you're still struggling, take away temptation. "Try timing your emails so they only download to your smartphone every two or three hours. This will mean that your time and energy isn't dissipated by constant distractions, and you can then deal with your day's emails and notifications in a concentrated period of allotted time per day."

"Things are always easier when you team up with someone," says Dr Law, "So why not pair up with a 'detox buddy'? With this support, you can discuss your progress, encourage each other to keep going and spend time together face-to-face rather than messaging through a screen. A detox buddy will keep you honest."

8. Leave your gadgets at home

"We are ever-curious about what others are up to then we compare and despair," says Rice. "So try leaving your gadgets at home, or just going out without your headphones once in a while.

"Rather than thinking life without your iPod is boring, get used to listening to birdsong when out on a run.

"You may find that you miss very little, and will have more time to do more with your life than spending it watching other people's worlds through a screen."

9. Tell everyone what you're doing

"The more people you tell about your detox, the more people will be watching you - and the less you will want to fail," Dr Graham explains.

"Setting an example to friends or family is a great way to motivate yourself. Try leaving phones on silent or switched off during meal times - something which is particularly important for children and young people who learn behaviour from their parents."

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9 ways to start (and stick to) a digital detox

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From smartphones to sat navs, our lives are full of screens. We wake up to them, we come home to them, and we carry them around in our pockets all day. So perhaps it's unsurprising that experts are warning that this constant exposure could be damaging our health.

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Is your identity given or created? | Marcus Lyon | TEDxExeter

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With Some Selfies, the Uglier the BetterImage

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With Some Selfies, the Uglier the BetterImage

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Ruby Karp, 13, of Manhattan grimaces as she takes an ugly selfie, which some teenagers use to challenge conventional beauty standards. Credit Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Thirteen-year-old Ruby Karp was sitting in a dark corner of a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, angling a glowing iPhone underneath her chin. She scrunched up her face and tilted her head downward.

"This is the 'uncomfortable double chin,' " she said, snapping a photo of herself.

She sent the photo to a half-dozen friends, took a sip of her hot chocolate, and by the time her mug hit the table, three new images had flashed onto her screen. The first, from her best friend, was an angled close-up of the girl's cheek, her mouth curled into a crooked grimace (the "weird creep" shot, Ruby said). The second was a young forehead scrunched into lines with an exaggerated frown (the "crying sad man"). The third appeared so quickly there was hardly time to look before it disappeared into the ether of Snapchat.

"What is it about ugly selfies?" Ruby's mother, Marcelle Karp, asked. The two were recently on vacation in California when Ms. Karp took an experimental one on Ruby's phone. She accidentally sent it to 81 middle schoolers on Snapchat.

Ruby laughed. "It's fun," she said "And it's just, like, so much work to make a good-looking selfie."

"Selfie" was the Oxford Dictionary's 2013 word of the year; Justin Bieber and James Franco are masters of the form. Kim Kardashian made news with a selfie of herself in a thonglike bathing suit. There are selfies sent from space and from under water, and 91 percent of teenagers regularly share them, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

But there are also the inevitable worries that come with any Internet trend and teenagers: tales of smeared reputations and half-naked images gone viral, "hot or not" lists and rankings of attractiveness (often from boys). The sexy selfie, for girls, anyway, has become a virtual rite of passage; the "cute" selfie, often involving hours of trial and error to get a single flawless shot, is a modern-day flirtation tool.

Amid the bared midsections and flawless smiles flashed all so often on the screen comes the explosion of the ugly selfie, a sliver of authenticity in an otherwise filtered medium. Take a tour through Selfie.im, the adolescent-dominated selfie-sharing app for the iPhone, and you won't find pouted lips but close-up shots of double chins, insides of mouths, makeup-less pores, exaggerated toothy growls and duck lips zoomed in so close that they look grotesque. (Selfie.im uses something called a " mosquito tone " for pop-up notifications, a high-frequency noise that is supposedly audible only to the teenage ear.)

On Instagram, young women use hashtags like #ugllieselfie to communicate through facial contortions. And a Tumblr blog called "Pretty Girls Making Ugly Faces" presents before-and-after" shots of girls submitting their most exaggerated facial contortions. "You do not have to send a 'pretty' photo," the blog curators write. "HOWEVER. You better make your ugly photo UGLY."

It's no surprise that women have delighted in the wacky emotional displays of Jennifer Lawrence ("Faces of Jennifer Lawrence" is a popular Tumblr site) or the many shades of Claire Danes's now-infamous "cry face." (As The New Yorker put it: "A testament to Danes's knack for self-exposure is her willingness to look ugly.")

At the Sundance Film Festival last month, 18 teenage girls were the subject of a short film, "Selfie," forged out of a one-day workshop in which the girls were asked to capture, in selfies, the physical imperfections they would normally filter out: pimples, freckles, double chins, upper arms. The point, said the filmmaker, Cynthia Wade, was to start a conversation about cultural beauty standards and self-esteem.

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A Tumblr page called "Pretty Girls Making Ugly Faces."

"We spend so much time trying to hide our flaws because the culture has set it up that you have to be ashamed if you're not perfect," Ms. Wade said. "I think girls are tired of it. They're suddenly much more willing to embrace the ugly or ironic."

There is a long history of women using self-portraiture as a form of radical self-expression (think Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman). In fact, it was a teenage girl - a Russian grand duchess - who is believed to have taken the first-ever selfie, with a box camera, in 1913.

And yet modern-day beauty images, those we see reflected in the media, anyway, have maintained a particularly rigid definition: ladylike, small, modest, unthreatening and virtually emotionless, said Nancy Etcoff, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard and an adviser for Dove, which helped fund the "Selfie" film.

It takes little more than a scan of any red carpet to see that idea in action: a sea of toothless smiles, frozen foreheads and hunched shoulders, the uniform that every young woman has learned to mimic. And while this generation may be more tech savvy than any other, that beauty ideal can still be crippling. It's been estimated that girls 11 to 14 are subjected to some 500 advertisements a day; according to a University of Minnesota study, staring at airbrushed images for just one to three minutes can have a negative impact on girls' self-esteem.

"We've created this culture where you're constantly comparing yourself to other people, or images you see in the media or in the movies," said 15-year-old Harper Glantz of Pittsfield, Mass. "I think that's sort of where the pressure comes from, because you're always having to measure up to something that's not of your own invention."

But girls are beginning to see new models: Lorde, the New Zealand pop star, whose video for "Tennis Courts" is a prolonged slow-motion montage of the 16-year-old's expressive face; Cara Delevingne, the rising British model, whose funny faces have inspired many a top-10 list; Lena Dunham, who, despite the Jezebel-induced outcry over her Vogue cover, continues to disrobe unabashedly each week on "Girls" (and on her 715,000-follower Instagram feed). Much like the availability of mirrors during the Renaissance era allowed painters to turn the brush on themselves, the smartphone has allowed for all sorts of experimentation.

"I think we're collectively rebounding from perfection fatigue," said Pamela Grossman, the director of visual trends at Getty Images. "Everyone knows what Photoshop is now. Everyone's seen the wizard behind the curtain in advertising, in Hollywood. We know how the machine works. And so we're gravitating toward people, images and experiences that we deem to be authentic, unvarnished and real."

Indeed, a few months back the animator for "Frozen," the blockbuster Disney princess movie, was quoted as saying that female expressions are hard to illustrate because animators have to "keep them pretty." The Internet reaction went ballistic. What was it, exactly, about a woman making an emotional face that was so unsettling?

"One of the things ugly selfies do for girls of all ages is strip the conventional approaches to 'prettiness,' " said Ms. Karp, a television producer and a founder of Bust Magazine. "That you can manipulate your face to look like 'a thumb' for fun (one of Ruby's favorite poses) is a reminder that your face has other avenues of expression. That it doesn't necessarily have to be rooted in attractiveness."

The ugly selfie, then, is a kind of playful slice of authenticity in an age where everything seems airbrushed to perfection. (The joke, explained Ruby, is that "the better the friend, the uglier the selfie.")

If you track the forms of Internet communication over time, from IM to email to emoticons to SMS, then perhaps the emotive selfie is simply the currency of communication for a new generation, and an increasingly valuable one as face-to-face communication becomes rare.

"Those who make the pictures make the rules," Ms. Grossman said. "In one tap of their iPhone, these girls are participating in a visual coup d'état."

Correction:

An article last Sunday about adolescent girls who post deliberately ugly self-portraits (or selfies) on the web misstated the role played by Nancy Etcoff, a cognitive psychologist, in the production of the short film "Selfies," which received funding from the cosmetics company Dove. She is an adviser for the company; she did not directly advise on the film. And because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly at one point to Marcelle Karp, the mother of Ruby Karp, a girl who posts ugly selfies. She is unmarried and therefore is Ms. Karp, not Mrs. Karp.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST12 of the New York edition with the headline: With Some Selfies, the Uglier the Better. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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With Some Selfies, the Uglier the Better

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Thirteen-year-old Ruby Karp was sitting in a dark corner of a coffee shop on the Upper West Side, angling a glowing iPhone underneath her chin. She scrunched up her face and tilted her head downward. "This is the 'uncomfortable double chin,' " she said, snapping a photo of herself.

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Win a Spot on "Nailed It" with Netflix's Hilarious Contest

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Win a Spot on "Nailed It" with Netflix's Hilarious Contest

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funny activity

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Netflix's Nailed It is my new favorite TV competition show, in large part because I am convinced it is a reality TV show that I could win. I'm not a particularly great baker, but I've watched a lot of cookie-decorating videos on YouTube, and if you put me in a room with two other people who don't really know how to bake, I think I could win.

Now Netflix is giving fans the chance to appear on an episode of the show as part of a contest called #BakeYourSelfie.

If you want a chance to have Nicole Byer shoot $10,000 at you with her money gun, you just have to make up a batch of sugar cookies using this recipe, then take a selfie and try to decorate a cookie to look like the selfie. Then post a side-by-side comparison of your photo and your selfie cookie to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram using the hashtag #BakeYourSelfie, and make sure to tag @NailedIt so they can find your entry.

You have until April 20 to submit a cookie selfie, but some fans have started uploading entries, and the contest is producing some great results already.

Some of the entries are actually very good-looking, too. They might be too professional-looking for a contestant on Nailed It - they look more like the Pinterest samples the show's contestants try to model - but it's still like, "Whoa, you made a recognizable portrait out of a cookie!"

If you want to be on Nailed It, or if you are actually very good at decorating cookies and want to show your work to the world, make sure to submit your entry ASAP. And in the meantime, keep an eye on the #BakeYourSelfie hashtag, because it's a hoot.

Would you enter Nailed It's selfie contest?

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Win a Spot on "Nailed It" with Netflix's Hilarious Contest

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Netflix's Nailed It is my new favorite TV competition show, in large part because I am convinced it is a reality TV show that I could win. I'm not a particularly great baker, but I've watched a lot of cookie-decorating videos on YouTube, and if you put me in a room with two other people who don't really know how to bake, I think I could win.

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8 Steps for Doing a Digital Detox Without FOMO

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8 Steps for Doing a Digital Detox Without FOMO

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Chances are your smartphone is within arm's reach right now, if you're not already using it to read this. We're spending more time than ever on our digital devices-anywhere from one to two hours daily, depending on which study you consult-and with the flood of incoming texts, emails, calls, and push notifications, it's rare if our screens stay dark for more than a moment.

While there's no doubt technology has made our lives easier in many ways (remember roadmaps?), research suggests that our addiction to it is real. "Every new notification or text triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that drives us to seek rewards, so you keep coming back for more," explains Levi Felix, co-founder of Digital Detox and Camp Grounded, which run tech-free weekend getaways for adults.

This vicious cycle is taking a toll on our health, mental wellbeing, and relationships. Surveys and studies have reported an association between various tech and depression, anxiety, and decreased marital satisfaction, to name a few.

Ending that cycle, however, doesn't need to require an anguishing separation trial with your gadgets. With a few simple steps, you can stay plugged in and "detox" at the same time, helping you feel more fulfilled, calm, and connected-IRL, that is-to the things that really matter. "When technology no longer dictates your life, you'll feel like you're truly living to the fullest," says Carson Tate, founder of Working Simply in Charlotte, NC, who helps clients establish a better work-life balance.

To cut back on your digital dependency, turn off your phone's push notifications for social media apps, Felix says, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, news sites, dating apps-anything that sends an alert when someone contacts you or likes a post. [ Tweet this tip!] Starting with one or two, set a specific time of day to check each and a time limit for how long you'll spend on the site, such as 20 minutes. "This way you're not going offline entirely but rather choosing when to access your social media sites and networks," Felix says. "This puts you back in the driver's seat."

They may not be the best cuddlers, but we can't resist getting into bed with our phones. In a 2012 Qualcomm survey, 50 percent of Americans reported sleeping with their devices next to their beds, and another 15 percent leave theirs somewhere out of reach in their bedrooms. If you do so because your phone doubles as your alarm, watch out. "You're inviting the whole world-every Facebook friend, reporter, blogger-into bed with you," Felix says. Switch to a real alarm clock, and when it buzzes, give yourself 10 to 20 minutes, or even an hour, to ignore your devices as you prep for the day. "You'll be able to start your day on your own terms, not someone else's," Felix says, "and feel more inspired and rested, and less anxious."

Switch to Airplane Mode During Workouts

It's pretty inevitable that you use your phone to listen to a playlist while on a run or lifting. But although music is a proven way to pump up your effort, stopping mid-interval to answer a text or like an Instagram photo isn't the most productive way to burn calories. Before you lace up to exercise, turn your phone to airplane mode or do not disturb, Felix suggests, so there's no temptation to check it. You'll not only sculpt a better body, you'll be more likely to reach that blissed-out, endorphin-soaked mindset by focusing on your workout, not your social network. [ Tweet this tip!]

Gradually Power Off for a Day

"Just as you wouldn't run a marathon before running a mile, you need to ease yourself into taking breaks from the digital world," Tate says. Start by putting your phone down for 15 minutes without looking at it one day. The next day, break away from technology for 30 minutes, and so on. Or designate one day a week to stay away from one social media platform completely-say, Twitter-free Tuesdays.

When you feel ready to take the full-day plunge, a weekend day is a good choice since work pressures tend to let up. Sundays are probably your best bet, as it's typically intended for rest and relaxation. Place your phone in a drawer and spend the day connecting interpersonally-not electronically-with family and friends.

Since not being connected 24/7 has practically become a cultural taboo, many people's biggest fear about doing a digital detox is that others won't be able to reach them. If you're ready to take the leap to a whole day or weekend of unplugging, put in place what Felix calls "digital safety nets." Tell family, friends, and colleagues that you'll be going off line-and use technology to do so. At least one week in advance, send emails, texts, and tweets, and set up an out-of-office away message. You can also write on your social media profiles that you'll be unreachable for that period of time.

To ease your mind, consider leaving your phone with a trusted family member or friend who will know how to reach you if something truly urgent comes up. Then keep in mind: What's really an emergency? "Ask yourself, 'What's the worst that could happen while I'm offline?'" Tate says. Most likely whatever may happen during your unplugged period won't be life-threatening or even all that important.

Be Prepared for Temptation

When you're on a diet, it's smart to keep single-serving dark chocolates on hand to nosh if a molten cake craving kicks in. Do the same thing for a digital detox, Tate says. "Have activities available to distract you when the urge strikes to check your phone or laptop." Consider buying magazines, a book, or a new nail polish, or head out for a walk and simply take in what's going on around you. "When you are fully present in the moment, you'll feel more thoughtful, your stress levels will dial down, and you'll develop stronger relationships as you chat with friends and family," Tate says.

Find Your Social Media Fix IRL

Identify the sites or apps you're spending all your time on and ask yourself why you're drawn to them, Felix says, then create a way to find that satisfaction in real life. If you're inspired by artistic photos on Instagram, visit an art gallery with a friend. Or if fitness blogs are your go-to, organize a run or hike with your friends. And when the itch to post a photo arises, create your own "Instagram filter," Felix suggests: "Make a frame with your fingers, and take a mental snapshot of that sunset or beautiful bouquet for yourself, not your followers." It really can enrich your experience. "Science shows that when you engage with a moment with all of your senses, you'll be more likely to remember it later on," he explains. "The same recall doesn't occur when you're too busy snapping photos."

Now that " FOMO" has officially entered the Oxford Dictionary, we know we're not the only ones feeling anxious about what we're passing up. Whether you're sitting at home and know a party's going on, or you're lying in bed and yoga class started five minutes ago, be okay with where you are. "Tell yourself, 'Wherever I am is exactly where I need to be,'" Felix says. "Remember that the choice you made is the right one for you at that time."

Later when you turn on your phone and are flooded with party pictures on Facebook and Instagram montages of fun-filled weekends, remind yourself that social media shows only the highlights of others' lives, Felix says. People choose the flawless photo, add the best filter, and draft the perfect caption, so of course everyone's lives are going to look awesome-although chances are they're not so shiny behind the scenes.

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Chances are your smartphone is within arm's reach right now, if you're not already using it to read this. We're spending more time than ever on our digital devices-anywhere from one to two hours daily, depending on which study you consult-and with the flood of incoming texts, emails, calls, and push notifications, it's rare if our screens stay dark for more than a moment.

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IAI TV - Philosophy for our times: cutting edge debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers

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With more data stored from one day's selfies than all the world's books, many have dismissed Generation Selfie as superficial and vain. Yet creative genius has often been linked to narcissism - Dali once quipped there was no greater joy than waking up as himself.

Could focussing on ourselves rather than others be a route to happiness and success? Or is an obsession with ourselves damaging to social cohesion and a likely route to personal misery?

Should we, taking a leaf from North America, encourage a more upbeat confidence in personal achievements or does positive change and community require humility and self-denial?

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With more data stored from one day's selfies than all the world's books, many have dismissed Generation Selfie as superficial and vain. Yet creative genius has often been linked to narcissism - Dali once quipped there was no greater joy than waking up as himself.

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In the opening scene to cult British movie, Trainspotting, the film's protagonist, Renton (played by Ewan McGregor,) launches straight into a nihilistic, yet perversely uplifting, tirade against the spiritually bankrupt materialism that had triumphed in Britain throughout the Margaret Thatcher years.

"Choose life," advised the now-famous monologue. "Choose a big fucking television, washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers," it continued, before descending into a dressing down of the consumerist condition.

It was a perfect diagnosis of the state of the nation as 18 long, brutal years of uninterrupted Conservative Party rule drew to a close, and it would be remembered forever as a pop cultural epitaph for this defining period in British history. Then in January 2017, a full 20 years later, Trainspotting got itself a sequel.

Set two decades after the original, it was accompanied by yet another Renton rant that had been updated for the modern era. "Choose life," it went. "Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares.

Choose looking up old flames, wishing you'd done it all differently," then lining up an assortment of other modern malaises. Although it fails to live up to the original, and the social media angle has been dismissed as "superficial" in certain corners of the internet, I can't think of anything more appropriate for 2017.

A decade since the mass-proliferation of Facebook, I challenge you to name a single development that has shaped mass culture in that period as much as social media.

It has changed the way we communicate, it facilitated the victory of Donald Trump, has separated us into reality-distorting bubbles, elicits an addiction-like response in the human brain, and threatens to destroy the news industry.

Listing all the ways that it has altered our world is a fool's errand, as is tracing all of its side-effects, but there is an argument that I will make: it has turned an entire generation into vapid narcissists.

From deceptive selfie angles that make average-looking people appear attractive, to curating your Facebook feed so it looks like you're having more fun than you actually are, social media has taken neoliberalism's self-centered mantra and pumped it full of cocaine-laced steroids.

While Thatcher and Reagan may have promoted greedy self-interest that Renton lampooned in the original Trainspotting, social media has bloated humanity's capacity for self-obsession to new extremes.

Silicon Valley tech barons and Snapchat-obsessed teenagers who rarely venture outside of their bedrooms might argue that social media makes the world more interconnected (and no one can deny that it does), yet those connections shouldn't be mistaken for any sort of collectivism.

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook

All social media platforms are comprised of a mass of individuals competing against each other for followers, likes, retweets, favorites, and whichever other show of approval exists out there rather than any sort of collective goal.

Sure, this isn't its only purpose, and plenty of benign interaction occurs without any sort of agenda, but there are masses upon masses of people who utilize it as a means of projecting an idealized version of themselves out into the world - an avatar of the person that they wish they were, rather than who they are in reality.

It's logical that such an extreme focus on the self has a tendency to spill over into self-obsession, but this goes far beyond people taking too many photos of themselves and treating every action as a hashtagging opportunity. Every life event, however irrelevant to their social media audience, becomes a source of self-promoting content.

Consider the utterly ridiculous phenomenon of people wishing their parent a happy birthday even though that parent isn't on Facebook.

I doubt that anyone would be able to explain why they do it, because it's likely a reflexive behavior: they've learned that sharing gets them validation, which feels good, so they continue to share. Every like and retweet gives the brain a small rush of dopamine comparable to a tiny hit of coke.

via Dallas News

This is why people pathetically attach # tagsforlikes # likeforlikes and # likes4likes to their Instagram photos. The yearning for validation is so pronounced that it has spawned an entire exchange economy where people pimp themselves out to the world, offering to repay insincere engagement with equally insincere engagement. The sentiment doesn't matter as long as that little ego-affirming notification bubble pops up on their screens.

The cynicism that social media has fostered is staggering. As you might know, Highsnobiety is based in Berlin. In the December of last year, an Islamic fundamentalist drove a truck through a Christmas market in the west of the city, killing 12 and injuring 56 in the process.

Facebook - with its long, all-reaching finger that's constantly on the pulse of global events - added a check-in feature that allowed its Berlin-based users to let everyone know that they're safe, so they don't have to reply to worried friends or relatives individually. I'm not going to dispute that this was helpful, but it's what happened after that made me groan.

The more avid social media users in my feed (you know the types, they're usually the same infantile clowns that use Snapchat's dog filter) all rushed to give their take on the tragedy, to tell the world how they felt about it.

I struggle to remember everybody who did this and I'm not going to go through the feed of everyone that I know, but I will use the example that sticks out most in my mind. One of my Facebook friends wrote: "I'm okay, but at least nine people aren't. And that's not okay."

Yes, mass murder is not OK, just as the snow is cold and the chemical formula for carbon dioxide is CO2. What purpose does this serve apart from confirming to other Facebook users that you're not a sociopath? The response, of course.

The ego-validating likes. The comments. The attention. There are no doubt people reading this right now who would label me a cynic, but I think the real cynicism is how human tragedies have been converted into content for Facebook and a promotional opportunity for the people using it.

Others would dismiss as normal human behavior what people have always engaged in: conversation, collective mourning, the voicing of opinions. The only thing that separates it from a post-funeral wake, they would have you believe, is the medium.

Superficially, yes, they are correct, but there's a fundamental difference here: before the digital era these were behaviors we engaged in discretely with people who have direct relevance to our lives. Social media is a very public forum.

The Facebook user who I quoted above wasn't simply voicing their condolences for the people who died, they were placing themselves within the context of the tragedy. The focus wasn't solely on the dead, but also their feelings or thoughts on what happened.

The same thing happened after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, when Facebook enabled users to layer a translucent French flag over their profile pictures.

Its purpose was to send out a hollow show of solidarity with those who died, their families and all the French people that survived either through chance or geography.

I remember getting into an argument with one self-absorbed twat who genuinely believed that his one-click display of empathy could somehow make the next-of-kin feel a tiny bit better after having their loved ones murdered.

As if anyone at any other point in history would have thought to themselves "God this is horrifying, but I would feel a little bit better right now if I knew that millions of people around the world were draping my country's flag over their faces." Yes, because the best way to distract from emotional anguish is with unimaginative jingoism.

But is this really any different to the age-old practice of leaving flowers and candles at the scene of a tragedy, as people did here in Berlin after December's attack? Yes, because that requires physical engagement and quantifiable investment into said tragedy.

There's almost a religious aspect to the pilgrimage that you have to make to the location, even if it's just across the street from where you live. There's a tiny element of sacrifice to buying a candle or a flower that demands more effort than simply typing out a Facebook status or a tweet.

It's an anonymous ritual because no one can tell who left what. It's the polar opposite of grief on social media, which is vulgar herd behavior that siphons attention away from the dead and redirects it to the "grieving;" behavior that is, as I established earlier, rewarded with the currency of engagement.

Furthermore, old-school, analog grief can't be monetized by some tax-dodging Silicon Valley conglomerate that created these features not out of sincerity, but because they serve their business model.

Now I don't want to shame people for what is instinctive, almost unconscious behavior (and if that Facebook friend of mine that I quoted above happens to be reading: nothing personal, you were just the most memorable example) but that's the point: these tech giants have quietly crept into our minds and rewired our brains.

They have engineered a generation of self-obsessed narcissists - us - while we were distracted by our search for Kony. Registration might be free, but long-term use quite evidently comes at a price.
Now read why this author is finally sick of Kanye West.

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Social Media has Created a Generation of Narcissists

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In the opening scene to cult British movie, Trainspotting, the film's protagonist, Renton (played by Ewan McGregor,) launches straight into a nihilistic, yet perversely uplifting, tirade against the spiritually bankrupt materialism that had triumphed in Britain throughout the Margaret Thatcher years. "Choose life," advised the now-famous monologue.

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Watch 'Mark Zuckerberg' Field Senator Selfie Questions on 'Kimmel'

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Watch 'Mark Zuckerberg' Field Senator Selfie Questions on 'Kimmel'

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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees for over five hours on Tuesday, fielding senators' questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Jimmy Kimmel Live envisioned how the sixth hour of questioning might've gone in a hilarious parody.

Taibbi: Can We Be Saved From Facebook?

The social media giant has swallowed up the free press, become an unstoppable private spying operation and undermined democracy. Is it too late to stop it?

In Kimmel's spoof, a trio of fake senators grilled Zuckerberg on social media taboos. "Mrs. Dorgan" asked, "If someone 'pokes' me, is that a sex thing?'

"Mr. Field" chimed in with, "I just want a straight 'yes' or no': Can anyone see those pictures I sent to my intern?" And "Mr. Baxter" closed with a doozy: "Is it mad basic to post a selfie of your feet while on vacation?" (Zuckerberg, in repurposed footage from the hearing, laughed and, after a couple seconds, replied that it is not "mad basic.")

Kimmel introduced the piece with a slew of Facebook jokes. "Mark Zuckerberg testified for more than five hours today," he said. "It was tough, but then at the end of the hearing, he wowed the senators by presenting them with a slideshow he made of all the memories they've shared together."

Later, Kimmel cracked, "He defended himself well. He said, 'Listen, I didn't do this - it was the Winklevoss twins who invented this stupid thing."

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Watch 'Mark Zuckerberg' Field Senator Selfie Questions on 'Kimmel'

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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees for over five hours on Tuesday, fielding senators' questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Jimmy Kimmel Live envisioned how the sixth hour of questioning might've gone in a hilarious parody. Taibbi: Can We Be Saved From Facebook?

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This is What Digital Addiction Looks Like

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This is What Digital Addiction Looks Like

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Let's say you're having one of "those" days at work (you know the type of day I'm talking about) and you find yourself thinking, "I can't wait to get home to my friends/partner/family so that I can be with the people that I truly care about."

But what do you actually do when you get home? Statistics say, you probably spend most of that time on one or more of your digital devices. Consider these facts:

According to Pew Research Center, 77 percent of U.S. adults own a smartphone, and adoption has more than doubled since 2011; and 69 percent of U.S. adults are social media users.

The meteoric, ubiquitous rise of smartphones-and internet-connected devices generally-could not have been predicted. And it all happened before we stopped to ask ourselves-is this behavior healthy?

When use becomes addiction

You can be a social media star and not be addicted to digital devices: addiction has more to do with how a device or substance affects your day-to-day life.

Jessica Wong, a state-certified prevention professional at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Saint Paul, Minnesota, says that people can be addicted to technology the same way they are addicted to online porn and video games.

"It impacts the same area of the brain as drugs and alcohol," Wong explained. "Still, it takes a lot for technology use to meet the definition of dependence. We call it addiction when it starts to impact day-to-day function, relationships with children, spouses, children and friends."

According to Drugabuse.gov, most addictive drugs flood the brain with dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in movement, emotion, motivation and feelings of pleasure. More specifically, dopamine regulates our impulse to seek out pleasure, according to Psychology Today.

Dr. Craig Sawchuk, chair of the division of Integrated Behavioral Health at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, uses the term addiction only to describe the abuse of a chemical substance, and classifies excessive technology use as an "impulse control problem."

Signs that use is turning into abuse

Even though the experts differ on the use of the word addiction, the experts both identify the unhealthy behaviors associated with technology the same way.

"Technology use crosses the line when a person starts to experience functional impairments, in that the use is taking time away from important responsibilities such as work, family and social life," Sawchuk said. "And they continue to use in spite of negative consequences, for example financial problems, sleep disruption, arguing with spouse, warnings from work and failure to pick up your kids from school."

But how can you tell the difference between a regular argument or an argument fueled by addiction?

Wong offered some all-too real examples of red flags that indicate that digital use has turned into something that's not healthy: "The signs of digital addiction mimic the signs you see in someone who's an alcoholic. People are constantly nagging them about their use, so they find creative ways to lie or conceal use from their family or spouse.

"They hide online shopping or social media use from their spouse, for example they'll sit in the car on their device before they walk in the door. They need to immediately respond to any text alert, and some people even feel 'phantom vibrations,' imagining that they received alerts that didn't actually happen."

More screen time, more problems

Unfortunately, dependence on digital devices harms individuals beyond the damage done from neglecting important aspects of life like friends, family and household chores.

A recent study in the Journal of Psychopathology found that self-reported "internet addicts" were significantly more depressed than those with a healthy relationship to digital devices.

Excessive screen time damages brain function, both in white matter and gray matter, according to Psychology Today. In fact, just holding your smartphone can make it harder to think.

Last year, the number of pedestrian fatalities jumped by 11 percent, due to an increase in distracted driving and texting while walking.

When kids' social interactions primarily take place through texts or social media posts, they can fail to develop important skills like reading facial expressions, tone of voice and other social cues, Stephanie Marcy, clinical psychologist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told LAparent.com.

Internet safety experts agree that the later children get smartphones, the better, according to The New York Times. Maturity helps them cope better with bullies, online predators and sexting.

When doctors or nurses are on their phones, mistakes in checking symptoms and in proper treatment went up more than 12 percent with just a single interruption.

You know you have a problem when...

Smartphones are everywhere, but how many people have a real problem with them, exactly?

"About 1 in 8 people have problematic use of technology, they're making less than healthy choices but they are not dependent," said Wong. "About 1 in ten have progressed to level of dependence."

In fact, there are several in-patient treatment programs for internet addiction, including the Center for Internet Addiction, in Bradford, Pennsylvania; the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Connecticut; and ReSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program in Fall City, Washington.

"When people enter a residential treatment program for technology, they leave their cell phone and computer at home," Wong said. "They have to learn how to set limits for their time online, the difference between socializing and completing functional tasks."

The trickest part? Most people aren't even aware of how much time they're spending in the digital world, according to Sawchuk.

"People tend to under-report use," Sawchuk said. "Using a simple self-monitoring form or an app feature that shows timing, frequency, and duration of use can be very sobering to help people be more aware of their actual use."

Ready to test yourself? Dr. David Greenfield developed an online quiz to test your internet compulsion.

Changing family dynamics

You may be a long way from phantom alerts, but remember, statistically speaking, if you've got a smartphone and a kid, odds are that digital devices are impacting your relationship with your offspring.

A 2017 study by Digital Awareness U.K. revealed that 36 percent of children ages 11 to 18 years old had asked their parents directly to put their phones down- and 46 percent said their parents did not acknowledge this request.

(In this same study, 72 percent of children surveyed reported using mobile devices between 3 and 10 hours a day.)

An expert in teens and technology and how technology affects the family, Wong supports the insight that our children are watching our online behavior and comparing it to their own.

"Whether we think our kids are listening or not, they pay attention to what we do and what we say," Wong said. "When we set limitations for our kids, we need to stick to what we say. Being consistent with consequences."

How to set healthy limits on technology use

Unlike addictive substances like alcohol and illicit drugs, it's virtually impossible to eliminate digital devices from one's life moving forward.

"From what we've seen early on, it's very similar to an eating disorder or sex addiction," Wong explained. "You can't eradicate it from your life, it's more about teaching people how to build restrictions and boundaries so that they can live healthy lives."

Even though digital dependence is a growing problem, the good news is that settings limits, although difficult at first, can reduce-if not eliminate-the disruptive behavior.

"Although you may also notice that attempts to reduce use can be difficult, and they may become irritable when limits are set, these reactions are usually temporary," Sawchuck said. "It's important to have a plan in place of alternate behaviors that can take the place of excessive technology use that are more functional, healthy, and rewarding."

Wong and Sawchuck offered several tried-and-true strategies to reduce technology use:

1. Sign a family contract: If someone in your household is struggling to set limits on their digital devices, it can be difficult if others don't have the same restrictions.

"Sometimes that means that the family takes a step back from technology as a whole," Wong said.

She recommends a written contract between the family members that specifically outlines when and where devices can be used.

2. Work with your manager to set healthy limits around work: It's a great excuse, right? But even social media strategists put down the Facebook from time to time. Many Human Resources departments have employee assistance programs that will support you if you are struggling with a documented problem, Wong said.

Another strategy for reducing digital dependence in the workplace is initiating phone calls and in-person contacts rather than sending emails or messages.

"You can learn to balance workplace behavior by asking this question: am I using technology to perform a task or for peer enjoyment?" Wong said.

3. Play the Dinner Device game: This has been in circulation for a while, and it's a game that you can play when sitting down to a meal at home or when eating out at a restaurant. Everyone places their devices face down on the dinner table, and the first one to reach for their device does the dishes or picks up the check.

4. Schedule time in your day for technology use: Sawchuk recommends scheduling time, which therefore sets limits on its use during appropriate times of the day. Rather than using devices whenever they feel they need to use them, scheduling tech time is a good way to moderate internet use.

"If it's causing interpersonal problems, say with your spouse, then it may be a good opportunity to negotiate the appropriate time of day and for how long when its least disruptive, not during family meals, wait until after the kids go to bed," Sawchuk said.

5. Set a technology-free zone in your house: Maybe instead of setting a certain time that you can use devices, you want to set limits on where devices can be used. Wong suggests setting the kitchen as a device-free zone because it's a great place to interact, and other experts suggest leaving all devices outside your bedroom for a good night's sleep.
Pro tip: Make one of those rooms the bathroom. A microbiologist at the University of Arizona found that your phone has 10 times more bacteria on it than a toilet seat.
6. Turn off your wifi for hours at a time: If wifi is disrupting your sleep, or if your household can't seem to follow the limits you agreed upon, then you may have to force the issue by turning off your wifi for hours at a time.

"Most service providers have controls on wifi connectivity, and there are also external control that you can purchase that will work on any signal," Wong said.

If none of these work, you may need to level up and create a healthy use plan with a qualified therapist, Wong said.

And keep the big picture in mind. Remember, " There is no spoon."

Marguerite Darlington

Marguerite Darlington has worked in digital marketing and media since 1999, supporting brands like The New York Times, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin School of Business, Jessica Simpson, ALDO Shoes and various independent entertainment properties. She joined Twin Cities Public Television as Rewire Director in June 2016.

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This is What Digital Addiction Looks Like

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Let's say you're having one of "those" days at work (you know the type of day I'm talking about) and you find yourself thinking, "I can't wait to get home to my friends/partner/family so that I can be with the people that I truly care about."

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Dear Paris Hilton, here's a brief history of the selfie

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Dear Paris Hilton, here's a brief history of the selfie

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"11 years ago today, Me & Britney invented the selfie!" wrote Paris Hilton on Twitter on Sunday, posting two pictures of the pair from 2006.
Unfortunately, as some of her Twitter followers have pointed out, neither Paris nor Britney were anywhere near the invention of the selfie.

In fact, they're around 167 years too late to make that claim.

Here's how the selfie started - and how it's evolved since the invention of the photograph.

https://twitter.com/ParisHilton/status/932325973046984712

1839: The trailblazer

The oldest existing photo selfie is thought to be by 30-year-old Robert Cornelius, who took it outside his lamp shop in Philadelphia.

He looks unsure whether the photo will work or not - unsurprising, as technology then meant that he would have had to have stood still for up to 15 minutes in order to get the shot.

1914: Teenagers get on board

https://twitter.com/LeahJCallen/status/932392490392363008

Ah, mirror selfies. While most of us associate them with the early-2000s (pre front-facing cameras), go back 100 years and you'll find Russian royalty were just as into them.

Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, the Emperor's youngest daughter, took this photo aged 13.

In a letter to her dad, she wrote: " I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling."

1920: Your dad discovers selfies

https://twitter.com/MuseumofCityNY/status/483663830296567808

New York photographer Joseph Byron took a rooftop selfie in 1920 with his mates (although not all of them seem to realise where the camera is).

The camera was a large, heavy box - which explains why it took two of them to hold it up.

1938: Celebs get involved

https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/737753563506434048

Before the likes of Kim and Kylie were posing for bathroom mirror selfies, original celebrity Frank Sinatra was pioneering the movement.

Taken at the age of 23, just before he got really famous, the legendary crooner is looking rather dapper giving the OK sign wearing a trilby.

1966: The gap year kid's Instagram is invented

https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/659888471373402112

We all know that person who "found themself" travelling in Asia - and managed to document the whole experience through selfies.

Well, that's what Beatles guitarist George Harrison did when he went to India in 1966 with a fish-eye lens.

To be fair, it led to the band making some of the best music ever, so you can't blame him too much.

2002: The word 'selfie' is finally invented

Australians are known for shortening words and putting "-ie" on them: "barbie", "tinnie", and "sunnies" are just some examples.

So it's unsurprising that the first recorded use of the word - short for self-portrait - is on an Australian online forum in 2002.

A guy called Nathan Hope posted a photo of his lip which he'd cut at a mate's 21st birthday, writing: "sorry about the focus, it was a selfie".

2011: Monkeying around

https://www.instagram.com/p/BY93EGBgOL_/

That famous selfie taken by Naruto the crested black macaque was the work of photographer David Slater, who let a bunch of monkeys play around with his camera.

It became the centre of a legal battle over who owned the photo - basically coming down to who actually pressed the button.

A US court ruled that Naruto couldn't own copyright over her selfie. Because she's a monkey.

2013: Selfie is the word of the year

It was always going to happen.

In a year where selfies with the Pope went viral and Barack Obama was criticised for taking a selfie with David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Oxford English dictionary finally named "selfie" its word of the year.

2014: Ellen breaks the internet

https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/440322224407314432

2014 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres said she wanted to get the most retweeted photo ever.

Posing with a group of stars which includes Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, she quickly achieved her wish.

She held the record for three years - until she was beaten earlier this year by a 16-year-old who wanted some chicken nuggets.
Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeat

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Dear Paris Hilton, here's a brief history of the selfie

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"11 years ago today, Me & Britney invented the selfie!" wrote Paris Hilton on Twitter on Sunday, posting two pictures of the pair from 2006. Unfortunately, as some of her Twitter followers have pointed out, neither Paris nor Britney were anywhere near the invention of the selfie.

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SELFIE - New Trading & Investment Platform | Geojit Financial Services Ltd

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SELFIE is a next generation trading platform which combines several new web technologies to meet your emerging needs. It is the first of its kind in India to have such an exhaustive range of features in a single platform

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what really happens to your brain and body during a digital detox

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what really happens to your brain and body during a digital detox

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We feel guilty that we're constantly plugged in.

We sense that our smartphones are making us less focused, that constantly checking our email and Twitter is making us less productive, and more disconnected from our real lives. But what do we really know about how our devices are affecting us? We have plenty of anecdotes, but the science of how always-on technology impacts human behavior is still in its infancy.

Results from the few studies that have been done are troubling. Social media appears to promote narcissism, smartphones could be causing insomnia, and screens seem to be making our kids less empathetic.

"I don't want my children growing up like this," Kate Unsworth, the 27-year-old CEO of Kovert Designs, tells Fast Company. "Reading these studies convinced me that we need to do something. But it will take more than just individuals unplugging periodically. It will take a change in social values and etiquette."

Unsworth founded Kovert in 2013 to spur this social change. She describes the company as a research organization with a product wing. Based both in London and New York, her 20 employees include neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who design experiments to learn about exactly how technology is changing people's bodies and behaviors. Kovert uses this qualitative and quantitive data to build products that allow people to set boundaries with their technology. Kovert has produced a range of connected jewelry-in the same vein as Ringly -that allow the wearer to put away the smartphone, but to be alerted if there is something that requires immediate attention. (They've sold out of the current line; products become available again next month.)

But to Unsworth, the really exciting work at Kovert is gathering data. She claims that these consumer products are just one way to get people interested in the larger mission of her company, which is to help people detach from technology to live happier lives. After a year and a half of bootstrapping her company, she tells Fast Company, Unsworth has recently closed a round of seed funding from a range of investors in the U.K. and the U.S. This investment is allowing her team to design and conduct new experiments.

Two months ago, for instance, she invited a handpicked group of 35 CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other influencers on a trip to Morocco to study their behavior with and without technology. (Kovert paid for the trip, since Unsworth didn't want to restrict participants to those who were wealthy enough to afford it.) She also brought along five undercover neuroscientists to observe the group.

On the first day of the trip, the group spent time getting to know one another at an upscale hotel where they had plenty of access to their smartphones. But for the next four days, Unsworth took the group into the Moroccan desert and required all guests to give up all their devices as part of a digital detox. Neuroscientists observed every aspect of people's behavior both in the context of being plugged in and unplugged. They studied participants' facial expressions and physical movements, as well as how they related to one another. This is what they observed:

Better Posture, Deeper Friendships
After three days without technology, people's posture noticeably changed. They began to adapt to primarily looking forward into people's eyes, rather than downward into their screens. This opened up the front of their bodies, pushing back their shoulders and realigning the back of their head with the spine. "A wonderful side effect of this is that people's general energy opens up," Unsworth says. "They appear much more approachable when they enter a room."

This better eye contact also appeared to encourage people to connect with one another more deeply. They were able to relax into conversations and seemed more empathetic toward one another.

Google Is A Conversation Killer
The content of conversations changed when people were without technology. In a connected world, when a general trivia question comes up, people immediately Google the answer, ending that particular line of questioning. However, without Google, people keep talking as they look for an answer, which often results in creative storytelling or hilarious guessing games that lead to new inside jokes. "These are the conversations that really form bonds between people," Unsworth points out. "You gain insight into the way someone's mind works, and it is not typically a conversation anyone has had before, so it is engaging and memorable."

Improved Memory
Even after a few days without technology, people were more likely to remember obscure details about one another, such as the names of distant relatives mentioned in passing. The neuroscientists believe that this is because people were more present in conversation, so their brains were able to process and store new information more easily. With the many distractions of technology, our brains have been trained not to register seemingly insignificant details. These minor facts are actually very important in the process of bonding and learning about other people.

More-Efficient Sleep
The guests on the trip said that they did not have to sleep as long, but felt even more rested and rejuvenated. The neuroscientists believe this is because the blue light from screens suppresses melatonin in the body, which makes us more alert as we are going to sleep. Studies show that people who check their phone before going to sleep-and, let's face it, that's most of us-don't get particularly high-quality rest.

New Perspectives
One of the most powerful findings was that people tended to make significant changes to their lives when they were offline for a while. Some decided to make big changes in their career or relationships, while others decided to recommit to health and fitness. The lack of constant distraction appeared to free people's minds to contemplate more important issues in their lives, and it also made them believe they had the willpower to sustain a transformation. (Of course, there was no control group that detoxed from devices while remaining in their regular work and home routines.)

"It seems grandiose to say this, but many of our guests said that this was a life-changing experience," Unsworth says. "They said that they wanted to permanently change their digital habits by disconnecting from technology at night and over weekends. They wanted to introduce some of the benefits of the digital detox into their everyday lives."

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What Really Happens To Your Brain And Body During A Digital Detox

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We feel guilty that we're constantly plugged in. We sense that our smartphones are making us less focused, that constantly checking our email and Twitter is making us less productive, and more disconnected from our real lives. But what do we really know about how our devices are affecting us?

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The Selfies Research Network is an international group of academics studying the social and cultural implications of the selfie. Our membership includes teachers, students, visual artists, reporters, and others from around the globe. Our projects include publications, conference panels, gallery installations, and teaching resources regarding the politics and aesthetics of selfie culture.

Our primary project is a five-week class (including syllabus and teaching exercises) for university students studying selfies. In September and October 2014, we ran the class online with a select group of international students. In June 2015, we are launching an additional set of teaching resources created in at the Selfies Pedagogy Workshop at IR15.

Our group welcomes scholars from everywhere, speaking all languages. If you would like to help us translate materials from our group to languages other than English, please click "Contact Us" above, or join us for conversation at our Facebook site linked below.

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The Selfies Research Network is an international group of academics studying the social and cultural implications of the selfie. Our membership includes teachers, students, visual artists, reporters, and others from around the globe. Our projects include publications, conference panels, gallery installations, and teaching resources regarding the politics and aesthetics of selfie culture.

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despite the growing popularity and widespread sharing of selfies in the online space, little is known about how privacy concerns moderate selfie behaviour. In addition to this, it is also not known whether privacy concerns across age and gender groups influence selfie behaviour. To address this timely issue, a survey assessing common selfie behaviours, that is, frequency of taking (individual and group selfies), editing (cropping and filtering), and posting selfies online, and social media privacy concerns (over personal data being accessed and misused by third parties) was conducted. The web-survey was administered to 3,763 Norwegian social media users, ranging from 13 to 50 years, with a preponderance of women (n = 2,509, 66.7%). The present study investigated the impact of privacy concerns on selfie behaviours across gender and age groups (adolescent, young adult, and adult) by use of the structural equation modelling approach.

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Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Selfies, or self-portraits, are often taken and shared on social media for online self-presentation reasons, which are considered essential for the psychosocial development and well-being of people in today's culture. Despite the growing popularity and widespread sharing of selfies in the online space, little is known about how privacy concerns moderate selfie behavior. In addition to this, it is also not known whether privacy concerns across age and gender groups influence selfie behavior. To address this timely issue, a survey assessing common selfie behaviors, that is, frequency of taking (individual and group selfies), editing (cropping and filtering), and posting selfies online, and social media privacy concerns (over personal data being accessed and misused by third parties) was conducted. The web-survey was administered to 3,763 Norwegian social media users, ranging from 13 to 50 years, with a preponderance of women ( n = 2,509, 66.7%). The present study investigated the impact of privacy concerns on selfie behaviors across gender and age groups (adolescent, young adult, and adult) by use of the structural equation modeling approach. The results suggest that young adults have greater privacy concerns compared to adolescents and adults. Females have greater privacy concerns than males. Greater privacy concerns among female social media users were linked to lower engagement in selfie behavior, but privacy concerns did not influence selfie behavior in the case of male adolescents and young adults. Overall, privacy concerns were more consistently and inversely related to selfie behavior (taking and posting) among females than males. The study results have theoretical as well as practical implications for both researchers and policy makers.

Introduction

People turn to online social media for various reasons including communication and self-expression, connecting, observing others, and establishing new and strengthening existing relationships ( Dhir and Tsai, 2017; Dhir et al., 2017a, b). Most important of all, people use online social media to present themselves in the computer-mediated space (see Haferkamp and Krämer, 2010). Online self-presentation refers to the process of sharing content (e.g., photos, status updates, videos, and web-links) with the motive of influencing the impression formed by the people around the individual ( Haferkamp and Krämer, 2010). Psychologists have argued that self-presentation is important for an individual's well-being since it addresses their fundamental need to continuously obtain positive reactions and leave positive impressions on others ( Goffman, 1959; Leary and Kowalski, 1990; Leary, 1995).

Digital photos are popularly utilized to practice online self-presentation on social media platforms ( Dhir, 2016a, b). This is clearly evident from the ever-increasing growth in the number of photos shared on online social media. For example, every day nearly two billion Facebook photos alone are shared ( Facebook Newsroom, 2015). Although selfies may be taken and shared in computer-mediated spaces for a number of reasons, e.g., obtaining feedback, experimentation with surrounding, etc. ( Kiprin, 2013), very often selfies are shared for self-presentation reasons ( Katz and Crocker, 2015). We define a selfie as a photo taken of oneself without the assistance of anyone else. Recent studies suggest that selfies have received global prominence in a short time frame ( Kiprin, 2013; Katz and Crocker, 2015). The popularity of selfie sharing can be gauged from the fact that on social media, millions of selfies are shared on a daily basis. According to Weiser (2015), over 238 million photos had the hashtag #selfie, and 128 million photos had the hashtag #me on Instagram. Similarly, Svelander and Wiberg (2015) mentioned that 193 million Instagram photos and videos contain the #selfie and #selfies hashtags. This statistical evidence suggests that selfie sharing is now a dominant activity on different online social media platforms. The possible reasons behind this increase in selfie sharing on social media include identification and self-presentation ( Katz and Crocker, 2015), experimentation with one's surroundings ( Kiprin, 2013), and obtaining feedback from friends, family, and peers ( Katz and Crocker, 2015).

The concepts of self-presentation and self-disclosure in online social media are highly relevant, and are also strongly interrelated with each other ( Haferkamp and Krämer, 2010). The precondition of online self-presentation is, to some extent, to self-disclose private information online ( Boyd, 2008; Haferkamp and Krämer, 2010). However, scholars have observed a phenomenon called the "privacy paradox" which is a discrepancy between self-disclosure and privacy concerns in the computer-mediated space ( Barnes, 2006). On one hand, people tend to present themselves in online space by sharing their interests, likes, tastes, hobbies, places they visit, physical appearance, etc. But on the other hand, they are wary of the potential social privacy threats (e.g., unintended exposure to a hostile or unknown audience, theft and misuse of photos) and have some degree of "privacy concern" ( Livingstone, 2008). In addition to this privacy paradox, complex tensions between privacy issues and online self-presentation in a computer-mediated space also exist ( Dhir, 2016a). For example, van Dijck (2008) observed that when private photos are shared in the computer-mediated space, they easily turn into public property. This rapid transformation of content from private to public space forming the desire to self-present actually results in tensions between the tendency to self-disclose and privacy concerns that are complex in nature. Similar observations were made by Boyd (2008) who found that when social media users self-disclose more personal information, it sometimes also disturbs their self-presentation choices because of social privacy issues. The different social privacy threats to personal online self-presentation goals include exposure to unknown people, negative criticism from peers, and being tagged in an unattractive, inaccurate, undesirable, and/or low quality self-presentation ( Lang and Barton, 2015; Dhir et al., 2016a). Scholars have also emphasized that such social privacy disturbances in online self-presentation goals also result in online regret (i.e., negative cognitive experience) ( Wang et al., 2011; Kaur et al., 2016a), and negative feedback on perceived social and self-identity ( Lang and Barton, 2015). It can even affect continuous service use and customer retention ( Dhir, 2016a). These studies have found that privacy concerns and privacy issues significantly influence users' online self-presentation choices and decisions. However, it is currently unknown to what extent "privacy concerns" predict specific online self-presentation behavior or acts.

According to the privacy paradox phenomenon, selfie sharing also involves some degree of self-disclosure of current activities, emotions, hobbies, and interests. At the same time, however, it makes those people wary of their actions, and they also have some degree of privacy concern. Furthermore, when private selfies are shared in the computer-mediated space, they turn into public property and generate tensions, which are complex in nature, between privacy concerns, self-presentation goals and social privacy threats. Despite the fact that "privacy concerns" can possibly affect user experience and different choices pertaining to online self-presentation, surprisingly little is known about the relationship between self-presentation and online privacy concerns. Furthermore, selfie sharing in the computer-mediated space is becoming more and more popular; yet, it is not known how privacy concerns influence selfie-related behavior. It is important to understand this relationship because it informs the researchers and practitioners of how privacy concerns predict online self-presentation-related behavior, which is considered a dominant activity in online social media. Furthermore, better understanding of this relationship can potentially provide new insights into the complex relationship between online privacy concerns and self-disclosure (i.e., the privacy paradox) in computer-mediated systems (see Boyd, 2008; Madden and Smith, 2010; McLaughlin and Vitak, 2012). This study has addressed this open research gap through the investigation of the relationship between privacy concerns and selfie-related behavior as a means of online self-presentation. To date, scholars have investigated different issues pertaining to online self-presentation and privacy, but the novelty of the current study lies in its investigation of the relationship between privacy concerns and user behavior pertaining to online self-presentation, which has not as yet been studied. Hence, the current study contributes to the emerging literature on selfie-related behavior as well as the extant literature on online self-presentation and privacy.

The prior social media literature has been criticized due to its overemphasis on United States (US) based study participants ( Dhir et al., 2015; Dhir, 2016a; Kaur et al., 2016b). However, the vast majority of social media users are actually based outside of the US; for example, over 84.2% of Facebook users are in fact based outside of the US ( Facebook Newsroom, 2015). Another limitation of the previous literature is the emphasis on the social media behavior of young-adult samples only ( Dhir, 2016a). However, significant age differences in social media usage patterns have been reported. For example, adolescents differ from young and older adults in their use of social media ( Andreassen et al., 2016; Dhir and Torsheim, 2016). Similarly, these groups also differ in terms of selfie-posting ( Sorokowski et al., 2015; Dhir et al., 2016b) and online privacy behavior ( Madden and Smith, 2010; Xie and Kang, 2015). Due to these two inherent shortcomings, only limited understanding of social media behavior (particularly selfie-related and online privacy) across age and cultures is available. Furthermore, only a few studies have set out to investigate the differences in the social media behavior of different age groups; for example, adolescents vs. young adults vs. older adults. Consequently, the transferability of the prior study findings across a broad age range is not known.

The current study has addressed these research gaps by examining the impact of privacy concerns on selfie behavior in the context of three target user groups: adolescent, young-adult, and adult social media users. This study also addresses the pressing need to investigate the selfie behavior of mixed age/gender groups ( Albury, 2015) since the overwhelming majority of the prior literature has focused on single gender samples only ( Nelson, 2013; Nguyen, 2014; Warfield, 2014). The main research questions of the current study are: RQ1. How do adolescents, young adults, and adults differ in their privacy concerns regarding social media? RQ2. How do males and females differ in their privacy concerns regarding social media? RQ3. How do privacy concerns across genders (male and female) and age groups (adolescent, young adult, and adult) predict selfie behavior (taking, editing, and posting selfies)?

Background Literature

Online Privacy Concerns and Age Differences

The prior computer-mediated communication literature suggests significant age differences in privacy behavior. Young-adult social media users possess high levels of privacy concern, and they tend to disclose less information than both older and younger (e.g., adolescent) users ( Nosko et al., 2010). The study by Madden and Smith (2010) found that young-adult social media users (18-29 years) have more experience of managing privacy of online shared content, and are more likely to use privacy-preserving strategies (e.g., changing default privacy settings, limiting access to the shared content, and cropping photos to hide personal information) than older (50-64 years) social media users (41% vs. 18%). This is also consistent with the observations of Strano and Wattai (2010) who found that privacy-preserving strategies (e.g., untagging) are more popular among young adults (aged 18-21 years), compared to older (above 31 years) social media users (66.4% vs. 14.5%). Similarly, Dhir et al. (2016a) claimed that older adolescents are more likely to untag compared to their younger counterparts. Lang and Barton (2015) found that young adults actively engage in management of their social privacy. In comparison to young adults, adolescents are known to self-disclose themselves more often on social media compared to when they are offline ( Schouten et al., 2007). Feng and Xie (2014) also suggested that adolescent social media users have lower social privacy concerns and therefore have greater willingness to self-disclose online compared to young adults. Several studies have indicated that, compared to young adults, adolescents tend to disclose more personal information and do so more frequently ( Livingstone et al., 2010; Xie and Kang, 2015). Similarly, Madden et al. (2013) observed that adolescents with high privacy concerns actually post more content online. The possible reasons could be that adolescents lack up-to-date understanding of the different privacy-related settings ( Christofides et al., 2012), they may face technical glitches when managing their online content ( Brandtzæg et al., 2010), or there may be differences in the use of computer-mediated technologies among younger and older users ( Hayes et al., 2015). However, despite all of these studies, it is not known at present how these three user groups, adolescents, young adults, and adults, differ in their privacy concerns regarding social media. Therefore, we propose the following hypotheses based on the prior literature:

H1: Young-adult social media users possess greater privacy concerns than adult users.

H2: Adult social media users possess greater privacy concerns than adolescent users.

Online Privacy Concerns and Gender Differences

Similar to age differences, several studies have suggested significant gender differences in privacy behavior. Young-adult men are known to self-disclose relatively more personal information online since they do not foresee associated social privacy concerns ( Fogel and Nehmd, 2009), and are likely to experience online regret due to high self-disclosure ( Moore and McElroy, 2012) compared to female young-adult users. Similar observations have been made in the case of adolescents, as males disclose more personal information online than female adolescents ( Xie and Kang, 2015). In terms of privacy-preserving strategies, Dhir et al. (2016a) found that female adolescents are less likely to use privacy-preserving strategies (e.g., untagging) than male adolescents. This is contrary to the case of young adults, as female young adults have been found to be more likely to use privacy-preserving strategies compared to male young adults ( McLaughlin and Vitak, 2012; Tufekci, 2012). However, how this compares with the gender differences in privacy behavior among adults (aged 30-50 years) is presently unknown. There is still a lack of understanding of how males and females across the three age groups (adolescent, young adult, and adult) differ in their privacy concerns regarding social media. Based on the limited available literature, we propose the following hypotheses:

H3: Female adolescents possess greater privacy concerns than male adolescents.

H4: Female young adults possess greater privacy concerns than male young adults.

H5: Female adults possess greater privacy concerns than male adults.

Age and Gender Differences in Selfie Behavior

Selfies are popular among adolescents ( Senft and Baym, 2015) as well as among young adults ( Katz and Crocker, 2015). Using a convenience sample, Katz and Crocker (2015) found that 96% of 20- to 23-year-old young adults had taken selfies in the recent past, while 25% had taken a selfie only the day before. Furthermore, 98% of 18- to 24-year-olds had taken selfies, 46% had shared selfies only the day before, while 69% of the young people shared selfies 3-20 times per day. Similarly, Dhir et al. (2016b) found that adolescents were the most active and adults were the least active social media users in taking and posting selfies. These studies articulate that taking and sharing selfies are very popular pastimes and are part of the daily routine of adolescents and young adults. However, how this compares with the popularity of selfies among adults (aged 30-50 years) is presently unknown. A handful of recent studies have suggested significant age differences in selfie behavior. The older population is less likely to take selfies compared to their younger counterparts ( Qiu et al., 2015) due to less of a desire to fulfill their narcissistic objectives ( Weiser, 2015). Furthermore, young adults are less concerned as to how posting selfies on social media will affect them in the future compared to older adults ( Katz and Crocker, 2015). Several studies have indicated a positive relationship between online self-presentation and selfie taking and posting in the context of adolescent social media users ( Senft and Baym, 2015).

Selfies are taken and shared for the identification of gender and self-presentation reasons ( Katz and Crocker, 2015), and several studies have suggested significant gender differences in selfie behavior. Albury (2015) also emphasized that selfie taking and posting behavior is a gendered process in which females tend to receive unfair criticism and are inappropriately targeted and scrutinized due to their provocative selfie posting ( Albury, 2015). Similarly, Burns (2014) argued that females are typically viewed as objects of consumption, while males are not subjected to such surveillance or scrutiny. On this issue, Williams and Marquez (2015) argued that due to gender role stereotypes (e.g., Rudman and Glick, 2001), people who tend to violate the gender code (i.e., Anderson, 1999) actually receive negative feedback from their peers.

Scholars have found that selfies are relatively more popular among females, and that they are more likely to take selfies than males ( Qiu et al., 2015). To begin with, Sorokowski et al. (2015) found that females post more personal and group selfies compared to men. Albury (2015) also found the existence of gender differences in the linguistic aspects of any selfie post. Poe (2015) noticed that high self-esteem was associated with posting of more selfies among young-adult women, while Cao and Halloran (2014) observed that, compared to men, selfies taken by women were more personal in nature. Young women (18- to 29-year-olds) tend to share selfies to obtain positive feedback ( Nguyen, 2014). Nelson (2013) found that young women use the hashtags #me, #selfie, and #self in their selfies for self-presentation reasons (e.g., obtaining positive feedback). Furthermore, young women tend to worry after sharing selfies if they fail to attract sufficient positive feedback (e.g., number of likes) ( Nelson, 2013). In a recent study, Dhir et al. (2016b) found that female social media users are more likely to take personal and group selfies and to post personal selfies. Similarly, Warfield (2014) found that "policing" selfie-taking and sharing are popular among younger women (aged 16-28 years). In comparison to these findings, Fox and Rooney (2015) observed that men who are self-objectifying are more likely to spend time on social media and to frequently edit photos. Furthermore, men who are relatively more narcissistic and psychopathic are more likely to share edited photos and selfies and to engage in impulsive posting of selfies on social media, which tends to attract the attention of their peers. This review of the prior literature clearly suggests the importance of age and gender in selfie behavior.

Online Privacy Concerns and Self-Presentation

The prior findings on the empirical linkages between online privacy concerns and self-disclosure are not consistent, as some studies have indicated that there is no significant relationship between them ( Stutzman and Kramer-Duffield, 2010; Forest and Wood, 2012). However, in comparison, a recent study by Xie and Kang (2015) observed that social media users with high levels of privacy concern actually disclose more personal information, consistent with the 'privacy paradox' phenomenon. The relationship between privacy concerns and activities pertaining to online self-presentation is also unclear. For example, people with high privacy concerns do not necessarily maintain a low self-presentation profile, but usually conceal part of the content shared online (e.g., cropping or hiding) ( Haferkamp and Krämer, 2010). Therefore, it is currently unknown how privacy concerns predict different user activities pertaining to online self-presentation. Similarly, it is also not known how gender and age differences impact the influence of privacy concerns on the online self-presentation behavior of the three different age groups, that is, adolescent, young-adult, and adult social media users. These issues are addressed in the present study. Based on the prior literature on "age and gender differences" in online privacy (see "Background Literature"), we propose the following hypotheses:

H6: Privacy concerns do not play any significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of male adolescents.

H7: Privacy concerns play a significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of male young adults.

H8: Privacy concerns play a significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of male adults.

H9: Privacy concerns do not play any significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of female adolescents.

H10: Privacy concerns play a significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of female young adults.

H11: Privacy concerns play a significant role in influencing the selfie behavior of female adults.

Materials and Methods

Study Participants and Procedure

This current study is based on a large-scale national cross-sectional web-survey, which explored several on-/offline behaviors of the general population in Norway. The survey was broadcast (July-August 2015, for a period of 1 week) by two nationwide news media delivering news to the general public (i.e., a television news broadcast and an online newspaper).

The survey featured and focused on the use and overuse of online social media (with no specific reference to selfie behavior or privacy concerns regarding social media). Respondents could enter the survey by clicking on an open-access web-link providing access to the survey. The first page provided the complete details of the study, that is, study objectives and process, ethical considerations, and anticipated outcomes. In order to participate, the respondents were required to confirm by actively entering "yes" (the other option was "no" which led to a page just thanking them for their interest). At the end of the survey, immediate feedback on scores was used to design engaging obtainer experiences, to which each participant was given informative content of general and specific interest. There were no other incentives for participation. Consent to participate was considered as "given" if a participant successfully completed the questionnaire. The responses obtained from the participants were stored in the database of the Internet survey company and were later passed over to our researchers. In conducting the study, we followed the Norwegian Health Research Act and the ethical guidelines of the Helsinki Declaration. According to the guidelines of the Norwegian Health Research Act, if the data collection is anonymous (voluntary and non-interventional) then approval from the Norwegian Social Science Data Service and the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Related Research Ethics is not required.

A total of 4,126 social media users ( M age = 30.45, SD age = 13.00, range 13-82 years) participated in the study. Out of the total valid sample, 3,763 ( M age = 27.79, SD age = 10.05) social media users represented three groups: adolescents ( M age = 16.96, SD age = 1.74, range 13-19 years, 398 males and 570 females), young adults ( M age = 24.18, SD age = 3.07, range 20-30 years, 478 males and 994 females), and adults ( M age = 39.73, SD age = 5.66, range 31-50 years, 378 males and 945 females). This data-set was also used in another study for investigating the age and gender differences in selfie-related behavior ( Dhir et al., 2016b).

Study Measures

Selfie Behavior

Selfie behavior was assessed using five items. The first two addressed the frequency of selfie-taking: "How frequently do you take individual selfies" and "How frequently do you take group selfies." Both of these items were taken from Sorokowski et al. (2015). The third item examined the frequency of selfie-posting: "How frequently do you post individual selfies on social media." This item was taken from the prior selfie literature ( Fox and Rooney, 2015; Weiser, 2015). The last two items assessed photo-editing behavior and were adapted from Fox and Rooney (2015): "How frequently do you post photos on social media that are cropped in order to make you look better," and "How frequently do you post photos on social media after using photographic filters to make you look better." These items were evaluated using a 5-point response scale ranging from 1 ( never) to 5 ( always).

Social Media Privacy Concerns

Social media privacy concerns were evaluated using four items based on the work of Dinev and Hart (2006). The items were: "I am concerned that the information I share on social media could be misused," "I am concerned that others can find private information about me on social media," "I am concerned about providing personal information on social media, because of what others might do with it," and "I am concerned about sharing personal information on social media, because it could be used in a way I did not foresee." The four items are addressed using the following descriptive statements throughout the manuscript - "Fear of information misuse," "others find private information," "others might use my private information," and "use of private information is unforeseen." The social media privacy concerns were evaluated on a 5-point response scale ranging from 1 ( completely disagree) to 5 ( completely agree).

Data Analysis

The statistical software Mplus was used for the data analysis. The data did not deviate strongly from a normal distribution across the three age groups because skewness and kurtosis were in the range of ±1 ( Byrne, 2001; George and Mallery, 2003). All Z-scores were below 3.29 (recommended threshold limit), hence the data were considered free from any potential outliers ( Tabachnick and Fidell, 2007). Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed in order to examine how privacy concerns influence different selfie behaviors across age and gender groups. It was postulated that the four items on privacy concerns reflected a common latent privacy concerns factor. According to the model, privacy concerns predicted the five dependent variables on selfie behaviors, namely individual selfie-taking, group selfie-taking, selfie-sharing frequency, photo-cropping, and use of photographic filters. The theoretical model of the study is presented in Figure 1 (omitting error terms). In line with previous validation studies, the theoretical model was used as baseline model. To evaluate sources of model misspecification, modification indices ( Sörbom, 1989) were computed. Strong modification indices would suggest a need for model revision. Prior SEM literature suggests that scholars should evaluate the goodness of model fit for the baseline model and revisions of the baseline model ( Khazaal et al., 2011, 2012). This is important to address the possible discrepancy between the empirical data and the hypothetical model which tends to exist in most scenarios.

Results

Table 1 presents the mean and standard deviation values for selfie behavior across age and gender groups.

The baseline structural equation model (Figure 1) resulted in a poor model fit where χ ² = 1585.71, df = 132, χ ²/ df = 12.01, comparative fit index ( CFI) = 0.92, Tucker-Lewis Index ( TLI) = 0.86, and root mean square error of approximation ( RMSEA) = 0.13. The recommended values for goodness of model fit are as follows: χ ²/ df < 3, CFI ≥ 0.92, TLI ≥ 0.92, and RMSEA < 0.08 ( Hu and Bentler, 1999; Byrne, 2001). The modification index between the error terms of the "fear of information misuse" and "others find private information" items was very high, suggesting a possible discrepancy between the empirical data and the hypothetical model. The revised model, including correlated error terms of "fear of information misuse" and "others find private information," revealed a good model fit where χ ² = 199.48, df = 125, χ ²/ df = 1.60, CFI = 0.996, TLI = 0.993, and RMSEA = 0.03. Table 2 presents the standardized factor loadings for the "privacy concern" items in the revised measurement model.

Figure 2 presents the estimated latent mean scores of privacy concerns across age and gender groups. Young-adult social media users had greater privacy concerns in comparison to the other two age groups, and the adult social media users had greater privacy concerns than the adolescent social media users. For the gender variable, the study results suggest that females have greater privacy concerns than male social media users across all three age groups.

Table 3 presents the regression weights for selfie behaviors as observed dependent variables regressed on latent privacy concern. The SEM results revealed that privacy concerns did not significantly predict selfie behaviors of the male adolescents and young adults. However, privacy concerns significantly predicted "taking group selfies" ( p < 0.01) and "remaining selfie behavior" ( p < 0.05) among male adult users. In comparison to this, privacy concerns significantly predicted taking personal selfies, cropping or editing photos, and use of photo-filters among the adolescent, young-adult and adult female social media users. However, privacy concerns significantly predicted posting personal selfies only among young-adult and adult females. Furthermore, privacy concerns significantly predicted taking group selfies only among adult female social media users (see Table 3).

Discussion

The present study investigated the role of online privacy concerns in influencing selfie behavior of social media users across gender and age groups, that is, adolescent, young-adult, and adult social media users. A large self-selected sample of online social media users based in Norway was recruited in order to investigate the three main research questions of the current study. The novelty of this work lies in the focus on two important yet less studied variables: age-gender differences in selfie behavior in the computer-mediated space. The present study further examined the complex, obscure, and rarely studied relationship between privacy concerns and online self-presentation (i.e., selfie behavior in this study). Such investigation is timely as well as being much needed since it addresses the urgent demand to understand the differences in selfie behavior across gender and broader age groups [see the recent work by Sorokowski et al. (2015)]. Furthermore, the current study also addresses the long-standing demand of prior computer-mediated literature to examine social media behavior among culturally and geographically diverse groups of users ( Dhir et al., 2015; Kaur et al., 2016b). The study results suggest that (a) young adults have greater privacy concerns compared to both adults and adolescents, (b) greater privacy concerns among females were not linked to lower engagement in selfie behavior, and (c) privacy concerns among male adolescents and young adults did not influence their selfie behavior. In addition to this, the study findings indicate that privacy concerns were more consistent and inversely related to the selfie behavior of female social media users than of their male counterparts.

The first research question ( RQ1) investigated the differences in the perceptions of privacy concerns among adolescent, young-adult, and adult social media users. The results suggest that young-adult (20-30 years of age) social media users have greater privacy concerns compared to the other age groups, and that adult social media users are much more concerned about their privacy compared to adolescent users. Therefore, both hypotheses H1 and H2 were supported. These findings are consistent with the findings reported in the prior literature. For example, scholars have observed that young-adult social media users are more experienced in managing their online privacy ( Madden and Smith, 2010; Young and Quan-Haase, 2013; Lang and Barton, 2015), and in utilizing privacy-preserving strategies ( Strano and Wattai, 2010), as well as having a greater level of privacy concerns ( Nosko et al., 2010) than older adults. Similarly, the prior literature also suggested that adolescent social media users possess lower online privacy concerns ( Feng and Xie, 2014), self-disclose themselves online more often ( Schouten et al., 2007), post content more frequently ( Livingstone et al., 2010; Xie and Kang, 2015), and post more online content despite their privacy concerns ( Madden et al., 2013; Feng and Xie, 2014) than young adults. These findings also suggest that "age differences in privacy concerns" are similar to age differences in the management of online privacy and related issues. Possible explanations for these findings include: First, adolescents do not possess sufficient understanding of "privacy concerns" ( Christofides et al., 2012), and face technical problems in understanding and later in the translation of their privacy concerns into practice ( Brandtzæg et al., 2010). Second, young adults have a better understanding of online privacy-related issues due to which they have greater "privacy concerns."

The second research question ( RQ2) examined the differences in the privacy concerns of male and female social media users. The study results suggest that female users have greater privacy concerns than male users across all three age groups. Therefore, hypotheses H3, H4, and H5 were supported. These findings are consistent with the prior literature, in that male young adults tend to self-disclose more and to have relatively lower privacy concerns ( Fogel and Nehmd, 2009; Moore and McElroy, 2012) compared to female young adults. Similarly, male adolescents are known to self-disclose more personal information online compared to their female counterparts ( Xie and Kang, 2015). These findings suggest that: (1) female social media users have greater privacy concerns across all three age groups, and (2) The use of privacy management strategies has no influence on the degree of privacy concerns among male and female social media users. For example, the prior literature suggests that male young adults are less likely ( Hoy and Milne, 2010; McLaughlin and Vitak, 2012; Tufekci, 2012), and male adolescents are more likely to engage in privacy-preserving strategies than their respective female counterparts ( Dhir et al., 2016a).

The third research question ( RQ3) investigated how privacy concerns across the three age groups (adolescents, young adults, and adults) and the two gender groups (male and female) influence selfie behavior (i.e., selfie-taking, sharing, and photo-editing).

The study results indicate that for male adolescents and male young adults, privacy concerns play an insignificant role in influencing selfie behavior. However, in the case of adult social media users, greater privacy concerns translate into lower engagement in selfie-taking and sharing frequency, and in photo-editing behavior. Therefore, H6 and H8 were supported but H7 was not supported. The study finding that privacy concerns among male adolescents and young adults do not influence their selfie behavior is consistent with the prior literature, which has also indicated that male social media users self-disclose much more and have relatively lower privacy concerns ( Fogel and Nehmd, 2009; Moore and McElroy, 2012; Xie and Kang, 2015). The study findings also indicate that although male adults have relatively greater privacy concerns than adolescents and lower privacy concerns than young adults, the privacy concerns of adults tend to moderate their selfie behavior because their greater concerns lead to lower engagement in selfie behavior. These findings suggest that: (1) greater privacy concerns do not necessarily translate into lower or higher engagement in selfie-related behavior (i.e., online self-presentation), and (2) adult social media users were the least active of the three age groups in terms of selfie behavior, and had lower privacy concerns than young adults, but their privacy concerns still translated into lower engagement in selfie-related behavior.

In the case of female social media users, the results suggest that greater privacy concerns result in lower engagement in taking personal selfies, cropping photos (i.e., a privacy-preserving strategy) and use of photographic filters among all three age groups, including adolescent, young-adult, and adult female social media users. Therefore, H10 and H11 were supported, but H9 did not receive support from the results. This is consistent with the findings of the prior literature which indicated that female social media users are relatively active in terms of monitoring their privacy settings ( Hoy and Milne, 2010), and engage in privacy-preserving strategies ( Pempek et al., 2009; Strano and Wattai, 2010). However, the present study results extend this understanding because it indicates that privacy concerns moderate the selfie-related behavior (i.e., online self-presentation) of female social media users, where greater privacy concerns result in lower engagement in taking personal selfies, cropping/editing photos, and use of photo-enhancement filters.

In terms of group selfie-taking, the study results suggest that privacy concerns among female adolescent and young-adult social media users were a non-significant predictor, unlike the case of female adult users. A possible explanation for this could be that female adolescents and young-adult social media users actively engage in group selfie-taking as a means of showcasing as well as strengthening peer membership because it is part of their self-identity development, and is considered very important to them (see Senft and Baym, 2015). Due to their urge to engage in peer membership via group selfies, privacy concerns do not influence their group selfie behavior.

Regarding personal selfie posting behavior, the study results suggest that privacy concerns were statistically non-significant in the case of female adolescents, but were a statistically significant predictor in the case of female young-adult and adult social media users. One possible reason could be that adolescent females tend to post personal selfies as a means of experimenting with self-identity and self-presentation ( Gibbs et al., 2014) due to which they are not bothered about their privacy concerns. Therefore, privacy concerns among female adolescents do not influence their personal selfie posting behavior.

Comparing the two gender groups across the three age groups, the results for the adolescent social media users suggest that privacy concerns did not influence group selfie taking or personal selfie posting behavior among either male or female users. This suggests that group selfie taking and personal selfie posting are part of the online self-presentation behavior that is considered very important for the well-being and development of adolescents ( Dhir, 2016b). Due to their desire to self-present themselves in the computer-mediated space, privacy concerns do not influence their online self-presentation choices. In terms of taking personal selfies, cropping photos, and using photographic filters, the results suggest that privacy concerns were a significant predictor among female but not male adolescents. This suggests that privacy concerns among female adolescents are a significant predictor of privacy-preserving strategies (e.g., cropping of photos) and online self-presentation (i.e., taking personal selfies), which is consistent with the prior literature (see McLaughlin and Vitak, 2012; Tufekci, 2012).

In the case of young-adult social media users, privacy concerns did not predict group selfie-taking among either male or female young adults. As mentioned before, one possible reason could be that group selfies are associated with peer membership, which is important for young adults. Due to this reason, young adults are less bothered about privacy concerns when it comes to taking group selfies. In comparison, privacy concerns did not influence taking and posting selfies, cropping photos, or using photographic filters among male young adults, whereas they did for female young adults. This is again consistent with the findings of the prior literature, which suggests that females are more concerned about online privacy than male social media users ( Pempek et al., 2009; Hoy and Milne, 2010).

Finally, in the case of adult social media users, the results suggest that privacy concerns resulted in lower engagement in selfie-taking and selfie-sharing frequency and in photo-editing behavior across both male and female users. The possible reasons could be that older adults are more concerned that selfie taking and posting will affect them negatively in the future ( Katz and Crocker, 2015).

Study Implications

The present study has different theoretical and practical implications for both scholars and practitioners. In terms of its theoretical implications, the current study findings contribute significantly to the interdisciplinary literature on human-computer interaction, new media, computer-mediated communication, as well as developmental psychology. Second, the present findings complement the available qualitative findings (e.g., Nelson, 2013; Nguyen, 2014; Warfield, 2014) on the age and gender differences in selfie behavior with quantitative results. Similarly, the study results also contribute to the sporadic literature on age and gender differences in the computer-mediated communication space. Third, the study findings provide new understandings of the social media use and selfie behavior of the lesser-studied cultural group of Norwegian social media users. Therefore, it contributes to broadening the limited literature on cross-cultural studies on social media use behavior. Fourth, this study has addressed the long-standing need to investigate the social media use behavior (including selfie behavior) of mixed age and gender groups because the prior literature focused on young-adult social media users only. Fifth, the study findings provide deeper insights into the age and gender differences in privacy concerns among social media users. Furthermore, the study results provide crucial insights into how privacy concerns influence online self-presentation choices, that is, selfie behavior in the present study. Sixth, the present study concludes with insightful findings on the influence of privacy concerns across gender (male and female) and age groups (adolescent, young adult, and adult) in predicting the selfie-related behavior of social media users. The practical implications of the current study include: New insights and knowledge for the various stakeholders such as social media and service companies, startups, online service and mobile application designers, developmental psychologists and researchers, and developers who are interested in capitalizing on the popularity of selfie behavior for business gains. Second, the study results can help these different stakeholders to understand the importance of age and gender differences among social media users, which will enable them to tap age- and gender-specific user markets with ease. Consequently, the study findings will enable them to understand their existing as well as prospective customers. Third, the study findings may motivate scholars to investigate the age and gender differences in the important issues concerning the computer-mediated communication space, including user-generated content, online communities, and massive online sharing and tagging. Similar investigations will bring more clarity to and understanding of the obscure and complex age and gender differences existing in the computer-mediated space. Fourth, the present study findings could possibly offer innovative space and also initiate discussion for redefining the discourse on social, personal, legal and policy-making discussions regarding online self-presentation (consistent with Albury, 2015) and the relevant age and gender related differences in the use of computer-mediated platforms.

Study Limitations and Future Work

The main limitation of the current study is the self-selected nature of the sample, which was recruited via two leading online news media. Due to this, it is likely that two user groups, namely young adults and adults, were over-represented. This is mainly because online newspapers are particularly popular among young adults and adult Internet users. However, the sample sizes across the three groups were comparable. Of note, the two news entities are nationwide rather than local news media, which increases the possibility of reaching out to a broad range of Norwegian people. Norwegians are also known for being heavy newsreaders, as well as having broad access to the Internet. Nevertheless, we still recommend that other scholars validate the study findings using more representative study samples. Any future investigation with similar research questions should also try to generalize the findings to other age groups, particularly adults older than 50 years. In addition to this, other possible future directions include expanding the study focus to other aspects of selfie behavior such as selfies classified as public, private, and romantic (coined by Sorokowski et al., 2015). Similarly, other aspects of selfie behavior related to online self-presentation should be investigated in future studies. One example is studies on how social media users attribute personality traits to other users based on photos and other displayed social network profile characteristics ( Mazza et al., 2015), and also to which extent the users' self-reported personality matches the attributed traits. We would also like to emphasize the dynamic nature of social media. Therefore, future investigations should investigate the longitudinal effect on the user patterns in selfie and social media behavior.

Conclusion

Overall, the present study offers important insights into the relationship between privacy and self-presentation, including selfie behavior in the computer-mediated communication space. It further highlights the importance of studying age and gender differences in selfie behavior. In addition to this, the study complements and extends the available findings in the context of age and gender differences in computer-mediated environments, privacy concerns, and selfie behavior among adolescent, young-adult, and adult social media users.

Author Contributions

SP, CA, and AD led the conception and design of the study. CA led the data collection. AD led the literature search, analysis, interpretation of the data, drafting, writing, and revising the work. All authors contributed to the design (AD, CA, SP, and TT), analysis (AD, SP, and TT), interpretation of data (AD, CA, SP, and TT), and/or writing and revising the work critically for important intellectual content (AD, CA, SP, and TT). All authors read and approved the final version of the work to be published (AD, CA, SP, and TT), and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions to the accuracy of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved (AD, CA, SP, and TT).

Funding

This work was supported by the different funding agencies: Academy of Finland Researcher's Mobility grants (Decision No. 299265, 298098, 311191). The Strategic Programme for International Research and Education (SPIRE) by University of Bergen, Norway and Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES) funded Beam Project Sustainable Education Design (SED) (Project No. 440176).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References

Haferkamp, N., and Krämer, N. C. (2010). Social comparison 2.0: Examining the effects of online profiles on social-networking sites. Cyber Psychol. Behav. Soc. Network. 14, 309-314. doi: 10.1089/cyber.2010.0120

Strano, M. M., and Wattai, J. (2010). "Covering your face on facebook: managing identity through untagging and deletio," in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 288-299.

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Do Online Privacy Concerns Predict Selfie Behavior among Adolescents, Young Adults and Adults?

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Selfies, or self-portraits, are popularly taken and shared on social media for online self-presentation reasons, which are considered important for the psychosocial development and well-being of young people in today's culture. Despite the growing popularity and widespread sharing of selfies in the online space, little is known about how privacy concerns moderate selfie behavior.

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What Impact Has Social Media Truly Had On Society

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What Impact Has Social Media Truly Had On Society

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Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves / by Jill Walker Rettberg.

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Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves / by Jill Walker Rettberg.

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https://discovered.ed.ac.uk/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=44UOE_ALMA51149579080002466&context=L&vid=44UOE_VU2&lang=en_US&search_scope=default_scope&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=default_tab&query=any,contains,selfies&mode=Basic

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Poletti, A. & Rak, J. (2014) Identity technologies: Constructing the self online. University of Wisconsin Press

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Poletti, A. & Rak, J. (2014) Identity technologies: Constructing the self online. University of Wisconsin Press

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facebook

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken from a 1963 interview in Art News, is a great description of how we interact on social media today.

Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
Art News: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. It's liking things.
Art News: And liking things is like being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

The like and the favorite are the new metrics of success-very literally. Not only are they ego-feeders for the stuff we put online as individuals, but advertisers track their campaigns on Facebook by how often they are liked. A recent New York Times story on a krill oil ad campaign lays bare how much the like matters to advertisers. Liking is an economic act.

I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked-even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn't sure how long I'd keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I'd learn (possibly nothing.)

See, Facebook uses algorithms to decide what shows up in your feed. It isn't just a parade of sequential updates from your friends and the things you've expressed an interest in. In 2014 the News Feed is a highly-curated presentation, delivered to you by a complicated formula based on the actions you take on the site, and across the web. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots making these decisions for me, if I continually said, "good job, robot, I like this." I also decided I'd only do this on Facebook itself-trying to hit every Like button I came across on the open web would just be too daunting. But even when I kept the experiment to the site itself, the results were dramatic.

>There is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

The first thing I liked was Living Social-my friend Jay had liked it before me and it was sitting at the top of my feed. I liked two more updates from friends. So far, so good. But the fourth thing I encountered was something I didn't really like. I mean, I don't truly like Living Social either, whatever the hell that is, but who cares. But this fourth thing was something I sort of actively disliked. A bad joke-or at least a dumb one. Oh well. I liked it anyway.

One thing I had to decide right away was what to do about the related items that appear after you've liked something. Let's say you like a story about cows that you see on Modern Farmer. Facebook will immediately present you with four more options to like things below that cow story, "relateds" in Facebook parlance. Probably more stories about cows or agriculture.

Relateds quickly became a problem, because as soon as you like one, Facebook replaces it with another. So as soon as I liked the four relateds below a story, it immediately gave me four more. And then four more. And then four more. And then four more. I quickly realized I'd be stuck in a related loop for eternity if I kept this up. So I settled on a new rule: I would like the first four relateds Facebook shows me, but no more.

Sometimes, liking is counterintuitive. My friend Hillary posted a picture of her toddler Pearl, with bruises on her face. It was titled "Pearl vs. the concrete." I didn't like it at all! It was sad. Normally, it would be the kind of News Feed item that would compel me to leave a comment, instead of hitting the little thumbs up button. Oh well. Like. The only time I declined to like something was when a friend posted about the death of a relative. I just had a death in my family last week. It was a bridge I wasn't going to cross.

But there was still plenty more to like. I liked one of my cousin's updates, which he had re-shared from Joe Kennedy, and was subsequently beseiged with Kennedys to like (plus a Clinton and a Shriver). I liked Hootsuite. I liked The New York Times, I liked Coupon Clipinista. I liked something from a friend I haven't spoken to in 20 years-something about her kid, camp and a snake. I liked Amazon. I liked fucking Kohl's. I liked Kohl's for you.

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi's ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking "Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza," as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.

By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I'm offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax. Usually it went something like this:

A sentence recounting some controversial news. Good!

A sentence explaining why this is good.

A call to action, often ending with a question?

Once I see this pattern, I start noticing it everywhere. SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle's web presence, uses a similar tactic. It is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

I was also struck by how different my feeds were on mobile and the desktop, even when viewed at the same time. By the end of day one, I noticed that on mobile, my feed was almost completely devoid of human content. I was only presented with the chance to like stories from various websites, and various other ads. Yet on the desktop-while it's still mostly branded content-I continue to see things from my friends. On that little bitty screen, where real-estate is so valuable, Facebook's robots decided that the way to keep my attention is by hiding the people and only showing me the stuff that other machines have pumped out. Weird.

As day one rolled into day two, I began dreading going to Facebook. It had become a temple of provocation. Just as my News Feed had drifted further and further right, so too did it drift further and further left. Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I'm nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.

>Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z.

This is a problem much bigger than Facebook. It reminded me of what can go wrong in society, and why we now often talk at each other instead of to each other. We set up our political and social filter bubbles and they reinforce themselves-the things we read and watch have become hyper-niche and cater to our specific interests. We go down rabbit holes of special interests until we're lost in the queen's garden, cursing everyone above ground.

But maybe worse than the fractious political tones my feed took on was how deeply stupid it became. I'm given the chance to like a Buzzfeed post of some guy dancing, and another that asks Which Titanic Character Are You? A third Buzzfeed post informs me that "Katy Perry's Backup Dancer is the Mancandy You Deserve." According to New York magazine, I am "officially old" because Malia Obama went to Lollapalooza (like!) and CNN tells me "Husband Explores His Man-ternal Instincts" alongside a photo of a shirtless man cupping his nipples. A cloud that looks like a penis. Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z. My feed was showing almost only the worst kind of tripe that all of us in the media are complicit in churning out yet should also be deeply ashamed of. Sensational garbage. I liked it all.

While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the impact my behavior would have on my friends' feeds. I kept thinking Facebook would rate-limit me, but instead it grew increasingly ravenous. My feed become a cavalcade of brands and politics and as I interacted with them, Facebook dutifully reported this to all my friends and followers.

That first night, a small little circle with a dog's head popped up in the corner of my phone. A chat head, from Facebook's Messenger software! The dog turned out to be my old WIRED editor, John Bradley. "Have you been hacked," he wanted to know. The next morning, my friend Helena sent me a message. "My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it's kind of funny," she says. "No friend stuff, just Honan likes." I replied with a thumbs up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying "I like you," I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their feeds. "My newsfeed is 70 percent things Mat has liked," noted my pal Heather. Eventually, I would hear from someone who worked at Facebook, who had noticed my activity and wanted to connect me with the company's PR department.

But I'd already put a stop to it by then anyway, because it was just too awful. I tried counting how much stuff I'd liked by looking in my activity log, but it was too overwhelming. I'd added more than a thousand things to my Likes page-most of which were loathsome or at best banal. By liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked. To be honest, I really didn't like it. I didn't like what I had done.

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I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica.

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In 2016, PwC's Global Economic Crime survey found that 1 in 3 businesses had been impacted by financial criminals, but also that the nature of fraud itself was changing. As more companies move into the digital sphere, a nasty side effect is the attention of sophisticated cybercrime. Sadly, online fraud has become the new normal for ecommerce businesses. In 2012, digital fraudsters cost online businesses in the US $3.5 billion, and the number has continued to grow. In fact, from 2015 to 2016, incidents of digital fraud increased by 33 per cent. So, if you're an ecommerce business, chances are you've experienced online crime. But what are some of the different types of digital fraud, how do they work, and what can be done to stop them?

1. Business identity theft
According to a study by Worldpay, identity theft is the most concerning type of digital fraud for ecommerce merchants. This tactic steals a person's identity and uses it to make transactions. 'Identity' can include an email address, phone number, IP address, and of course credit card details. Cybercriminals can use these details to order items online under a false name, and then pay using someone else's credit card or account. Business identity theft does exactly the same thing with important, publicly available information about the business. By opening a credit card in the company's name, cybercriminals have a better chance of appearing legitimate and carrying out large scale scams.

2. Chargeback fraud
In short, chargeback fraud is where cybercriminals order a product or service using a credit or debit card and then instantly claim that the account details have been stolen. The company reimburses who they think is an innocent victim of account theft (see below), but of course the fraudster keeps the product or service and the business loses out twice. Although chargeback fraud is also referred to as friendly fraud, the former is premeditated whilst the latter is an honest mistake. The problem, of course, is telling the difference.

3. Affiliate fraud
Affiliate programmes can be instrumental to the success of an online business. They work in one of two ways - either a company will set up an affiliate programme, or join an existing one. Affiliates within the programme are paid by companies to market their product or service, usually via links. The affiliate is then paid commission when traffic or purchases increase. Affiliate fraud essentially works by tricking businesses into paying commissions that shouldn't be paid, convincing a company they are legitimate and then flooding their site with false clicks or illegal transactions. The fraudulent affiliate can also clone the company's site to steal traffic and income.

4. Man in the middle
The communication between companies and their customers is vitally important. Unfortunately, something as simple as an email conversation can become the target of a Man in the middle attack. This type of fraud aims to get hold of sensitive data by intercepting digital exchanges like emails and log in credentials. This can be done using malware, eavesdropping techniques, unsecured public networks or even badly protected company networks. The business's details can then be used to facilitate business identity theft or account theft.

5. Account theft
While identity theft topped the list of high concern fraud types in Worldpay's corporate study, 63 per cent of respondents stated that they were most worried by account theft. In ecommerce, new account creations and accounts are targeted more than direct payments as cybercriminals can use the account multiple times before detection. If it becomes apparent that a business is susceptible to account theft, their image will be tarnished. On top of this, their customer data and analysis will be shown to be unreliable.

As more companies move into the digital sphere, so do cybercriminals looking to take advantage of weak security settings or user naivety. If you're not sure who's at your front door, you can use the catch or check through the spy hole. This, of course, isn't the case when it comes to online fraud. Once you've clicked on a malicious file or dodgy link, you're in trouble. Of course, this doesn't mean that there's nothing ecommerce businesses can do to stop the likelihood of fraud. The key is to set up complex security settings and protocols, inform staff and customers about the various hacking techniques, and checking activity logs for anomalies. Another option is to use a digital fraud prevention company. Given the incremental increase in ecommerce crime, developing and investing in fraud prevention is no longer advisable - it's a necessity.

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5 Types of Digital Fraud Impacting Online Retailers - Disruption Hub

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Ecommerce crime is on the rise and changing In 2016, PwC's Global Economic Crime survey found that 1 in 3 businesses had been impacted by financial criminals, but also that the nature of fraud itself was changing. As more companies move into the digital sphere, a nasty side effect is the attention of sophisticated cybercrime.

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Advice on the use of social media and social networking in the workplace. Here we explore the issues, rules and guidelines for employers and employees, including cyber bullying, disciplinary procedures and implementing a social media policy.

Social media is the term used for internet-based tools used on computer, tablets, and smart phones to help people keep in touch and enable them to interact. It allows people to share information, ideas and views.

Social media can affect communications among managers, employees and job applicants; how organisations promote and control their reputation; and how colleagues treat one another. It can also distort what boundaries there are between home and work.

Some estimates report that misuse of the internet and social media by workers costs Britain's economy billions of pounds every year and add that many employers are already grappling with issues like time theft, defamation, cyber bullying, freedom of speech and the invasion of privacy.

The Human Rights Act 1998 Article 8 gives a 'right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence'. Case law suggests that employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the workplace.

The Data Protection Act 1988 covers how information about employees and job applicants can be collected, handled and used. The Information Commissioner's Office has published an employment practices code - Information Commissioner's Office: Quick guide to the employment practices code [PDF, 168kb] - to help employers comply with the law.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 covers the extent to which organisations can use covert surveillance.

Employees should regularly check the privacy settings on their social networking sites, they should consider whether they want or need co-workers to see their profiles.

Employers should develop a policy setting out what is and what is not acceptable behaviour at work when using the internet, emails, smart phones, and networking websites. The policy should also give clear guidelines for employees on what they can and cannot say about the organisation. Any policy should be clear throughout about the distinction between business and private use of social media. If it allows limited private use in the workplace, it should be clear what this means in practice.

In working out a policy for use of social media, the employer, staff and unions or staff reps (if there are any) should agree the details. The policy should aim to ensure: employees do not feel gagged; staff and managers feel protected against online bullying; and the organisation feels confident its reputation will be guarded.

Disciplinary procedures

An employer should try to apply the same standards of conduct in online matters as it would in offline issues.

To help an organisation respond reasonably, the employer should consider the nature of the comments made and their likely impact on the organisation. It would help if the employer gives examples of what might be classed as 'defamation' and the penalties it would impose. The employer should also be clear in outlining what is regarded as confidential in the organisation.

Blogging and tweeting

If an employee is representing the company online, set appropriate rules for what information they may disclose and the range of opinions they may express. Bring to their attention relevant legislation on copyright and public interest disclosure.

Some rules should be included on the use of social media in recruitment, which managers and employees should follow. When recruiting, employers should be careful if assessing applicants by looking at their social networking pages - this can be discriminatory and unfair.

Update other policies

For example, an organisation's policy on bullying should include references to 'cyber bullying'.

Employers should inform and consult with their employees if planning to monitor social media activity affecting the workplace.

Using email at work

Email is an integral part of many peoples working lives. An organisation should have clear rules on how staff use their work email, whether it may be monitored and if there are time limits for deleting emails no longer required for business purposes.

Additionally, an organisation may want to provide guidance for staff on how to make the best use of email and ensure that it does not place unnecessary stress and pressure on them. Research commissioned by Acas suggested organisations may benefit from providing staff with email management strategies to help effectively manage inboxes. Other areas identified in the research included encouraging staff to use the 'delay send' function when sending an email out-of-hours. This means that colleagues receive the email during normal working hours rather than at home, which can adversely affect their work-life balance.

The Acas research on strategies for effectively managing email at work can be downloaded via our research papers page.

Further Acas support

Acas offers training in all major aspects of employment relations, for businesses of all types and sizes. View and book training courses near you. Our training can also be tailored to meet your organisation's needs and it can be delivered at your workplace.

We also have a wide range of free e-learning modules to help refresh and develop your knowledge. Explore our e-learning modules.

To find out more about how we can help:

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Social Media in the Workplace Advice & Guidance | Acas

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Advice on the use of social media and social networking in the workplace. Here we explore the issues, rules and guidelines for employers and employees, including cyber bullying, disciplinary procedures and implementing a social media policy. Social media is the term used for internet-based tools used on computer, tablets, and smart phones to help people keep in touch and enable them to interact.

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Does Your Child Have a Digital Addiction?

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Does Your Child Have a Digital Addiction?

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There is certainly is no disputing that children are putting in more media time than ever. Along with televisions, smartphones, texting, and video games, many children now have personal computers, digital music players, and the Internet to fill every waking moment. And evidence suggests that even toddlers and preschoolers now joining the digital masses.

Still, despite repeated warnings from public health experts and researchers, actual research looking at how addictive digital media really is remains fairly limited. In fact, up to now, much of that research has focused on video game addiction. Based on available research, the American Psychiatric Association has even proposed a new diagnosis, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). Based on other forms of addictive behaviour such as problem gambling, symptoms that might indicate IGD include: spending excessive amounts of time online, inability to control use, loss of interest in other activities, etc.

But can these same symptoms be applied to other kinds of screen media use? And can those symptoms appear differently in children under the age of twelve than they do in adolescents? A new research article published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture attempts to answer both of these questions. In this article, Sarah E. Domoff of Central Michigan University and a team of researchers presented the results of two studies looking at how parents and children often clashed over media use and whether it was related to other childhood problems.

They focused specifically on preadolescent children (aged 4 to 11) since they are more dependent on their parents for access to digital devices. Also, symptoms of addictive behaviour may be easier to detect in preadolescent children since they are usually not as secretive as older children.

To help with their research, Domoff and her colleagues developed a parent-report measure of children's addictive use of screen media, the Problematic Media Use Measure (PMUM). This measure was developed from a pool of 60 items designed to reflect different symptoms of addictive behaviour as seen in the IGD diagnosis. From this pool, they extracted 27 items that formed the test which they administered to the study participants. Items in the PMUM include:

It is increasingly difficult to pull my child away from screen media.

My child is always thinking about using screen media

My child gets upset when he/she cannot use screen media.

Problems occur for our family when my child cannot use screen media.

The first thing my child asks to do when he/she comes home from school is to use screen media.

The researchers also developed a nine-item version of the same measure to test how useful the short form was when compared to the longer form. This short form, also known as the PMUM-SF, used items such as:

It is hard for my child to stop using screen media

When my child has had a bad day, screen media seems to be the only thing that helps him/her feel better

My child's screen media use causes problems for the family.

The amount of time my child wants to use screen media keeps increasing.

My child sneaks using screen media

Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, the researchers recruited 291 mothers of preadolescent children (average age of seven years). They looked at mothers exclusively since previous studies showed that mothers were more likely than fathers to monitor and restrict media use in young children. The participating mothers were then asked to estimate the average screen time their children engaged in each day as well as the nature of that screen time (amount of time spend watching television shows, playing video games, using computers, etc.).

Participants were also asked items such as ""What age did your child first get his/her OWN mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet (e.g., iPad and Kindle Fire)?", "How often do you worry about your child's screen media use (TV, computer, video games, or mobile device)?" and "What type of screen media does your child use the most (not including screen media used for school or homework)?" They then completed a questionnaire looking at their child's psychosocial functioning, including whether they showed conduct problems, emotional symptoms, or trouble socializing with other children.

Results showed that high scores on both measures correlated strongly with total amount of screen time as reported by the mothers in the study as well as predicting psychological and social problems in children. This included hyperactive behaviour, social problems with other children, as well as conduct problems (aggressive acting out, etc.).

As a further test of their new instrument, Domoff and her colleagues recruited a larger sample of participants that included both mothers and fathers as well as grandparents, siblings, aunts, etc. who acted as primary caregiver of a child between the age of 4 and 14. Along with completing the short form of the PMUM, the 632 caregivers also reported on amount of conflict they had with their children over the various media devices the children used on a regular basis. While most of these conflicts centered around watching television, a large percentage of the children examined in the second study also used tablets, smartphones, video game systems, and desktop/laptop computers as well.

Results showed that the PMUM-SF works well for both boys and girls in detecting problem media use in children under the age of twelve. Also, high scores on the PMUM-SF correlated highly with parents reporting conflicts with their children as well as related behaviour problems.

Overall, these results suggest that problems with media addiction can begin much earlier than many parents realize. As for the PMUM-SF, it is the first test of its kind that specifically focuses on problem media use in preadolescent children. Since it can be completed by parents or other caregivers, this test can help detect problem media behaviour in children who might otherwise be too young to talk about their own symptoms.

While Domoff and her colleagues admit to limitations with their research, particularly since this is a one-time study that doesn't look at how problem media use might change over time, these results do highlight how important it is that parents keep an eye how their children are using media.

As it happens, we are still in the early stages of the digital revolution and new media experiences such as virtual and augmented reality are just around the corner. Perhaps now, more than ever, we should consider what this might mean for the children who will at the forefront of this new digital era.

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Does Your Child Have a Digital Addiction?

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There is certainly is no disputing that children are putting in more media time than ever. Along with televisions, smartphones, texting, and video games, many children now have personal computers, digital music players, and the Internet to fill every waking moment. And evidence suggests that even toddlers and preschoolers now joining the digital masses.

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definition
origin
development
current situation
literature review

-5W mode
broadcaster
receiver
content （say what）
social media
feedback

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Lasswell's model of communication - Wikipedia

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Lasswell's model of communication (also known as Lasswell's communication model) describes an act of communication by defining who said it, what was said, in what channel it was said, to whom it was said, and with what effect it was said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/01/antisocial-media-why-decided-cut-back-facebook-instagram?CMP=share_btn_tw

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Antisocial media: why I decided to cut back on Facebook and Instagram

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Only when I tried to quit social networks did I realise how addictive and enveloping they are designed to be. Now I am convinced we are heading for a public health crisis