Selfies - Research Paper Example

Selfies are described as being photographs that are taken by individuals of their own persons with the typical aid of webcams or smartphones and then subsequently uploaded to the various social media websites. The increasing popularity of selfies and photography is highlighted by the fact that according to phys.org (2013), the internet search provider Yahoo recently estimated that in 2014, an estimated over 880 billion photographs will be taken. According to this estimate, there will be about 123 photos taken throughout the year for every child, man and woman on earth with the larger part of these photographs being selfies.

A survey conducted in Britain for Samsung found that 10 percent of women and 17 percent of men were recorded as stating that they greatly enjoyed what they believed to be good-looking photographs of themselves. Part of the allure of selfies is based on the fact that taking a selfie is considered to be a ridiculously easy affair. This is in contrast to the photo taking affairs of yesteryears where taking photos was considered to be a serious and careful affair. During this era of film cameras, it was not worth it to waste an expensive roll of film on attempting to take self-portraits that had a high likelihood of not being well focused (Adewunmi 2013).

The raging popularity of selfies on social media led to the development of Instagram in October 2010. Instagram is a social media website that is dedicated to facilitating the sharing of both pictures and videos. Instagram users are able to take pictures which they then easily upload and share with their friends on the site. Hoping to ride on the ever rising popularity of the selfies phenomenon, the social media site Facebook bought Instagram for approximately $1 billion in combined stock and cash, this is after Instagram had only been operational for only about three years.

The increasing number of users