Selfie addiction

The desire of expressing oneself is a natural human need. Young people depend on their peers’ ratings and assessments, which makes them search for ways of showing themselves to the world. Some hundred years ago, hand-drawn portraits used to be the main possibility for people to get attention to their life. Then the humanity invented the camera that made the process of making portraits easy and common. Nowadays, we have a device for taking photos called “selfies”.

A recent phenomenon means a self-portrait photograph typically taken with a smartphone. The rapid spread of a selfie affected teenagers’ minds and created a new form of addiction to the “selfie”. Constant taking photos of oneself and posting them on social networks is becoming a typical behavior.

What motivates people to do it more and more? The answer is that people are using social media platforms in order to build their own self-concepts in the form of social comparison and self-evaluation. In the process of comparison and evaluation in social media, people are generally sensitive to others' feedback including postings and comments, and they do subjectively interpret that information based on their own feelings, states of mind, and points of view in order to enhance their self-esteem [1].

At the last stage, addiction becomes stable. A person realizes himself or herself through the creation of pictures. He or she is working on improving their image as a brand. Photos are published several times a day, and the real life is replaced with a virtual one. Today selfie addiction is becoming connected to such a phenomenon as narcissism.

Both narcissism and selfie addiction are related to self-esteem which is meant to refer to the way people feel about themselves. One way high self- esteem people maintain feelings of self-worth is by claiming to possess socially valued qualities [2]. To demonstrate to others that they have these qualities, youngsters are showing up their private life to share their emotions, feelings about a certain social problem and giving some advice via posting a new photo of themselves. In fact, self-centered or narcissistic people with a low self-esteem are most likely to be addicted to selfies [3].

Literature review

Narcissism is a trait expressed by a very high self-esteem that is excessive and unjustified. In psychology, narcissism is considered to be a personality disorder

[4]. There has been done a lot of researches about selfie addiction and its connection to narcissism. Sigmund Freud was the first person to write about this psychological abnormality in his article entitled “On narcissism” in 1914. He concluded “Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature” [5]. Later his treatise was considered as the fundamental basis for other psychologists’ investigations.

To better understand the double-edged nature of selfie circulation online, it may be helpful to recall that on social media platforms users tend to consume image, sound, and text differently than they do when viewing print, film, or television [6].

In English-speaking media an excessive and sometimes dangerous practice of taking selfies was conceptualized as an inflammation-like ‘selfitis’ [7]. There is still a scope of studies to explore more about ‘the selfitis’. There are some personality factors that people have who are more inclined towards taking selfies.

The research conducted in Manav Rachna International University by Sanchita Singh showed that posting selfies may be reflective of a low self-esteem, or may enhance the man’s self-esteem; as such photos typically emphasize one’s ideal, controlled image. Demographic factors, such as age, are also likely factors in social media behavior because of generational differences in experience with, and exposure to, social media [8].

Materials and methods

We interviewed N= 80 students (40 male and 40 female) who are studying at Kuban State University. Using a questionnaire ‘ Selfie addiction ’, which consists of 10 multiple-choice questions (Table 1), we conducted an online survey, which was completely anonymous.

Table 1. Questionnaire “ Selfie addiction ”

Students were given points for each answer (A-3 points, B – 2 points, C – 1 point) (Table 2).

Table 2. Questionnaire scale

Results and conclusion

Table 3. “Test results of male respondents”

Table 4. “Test results of female respondents”

The results of the study presented above (Table 3) showed that 100% of the surveyed female respondents are interested in taking ‘selfies’ while there are 10 % of males who are not interested in taking ‘selfies’ at all (Table 4). However, on overage, 65% of male respondents tend to take ‘selfies’ very often. According to the results obtained, 70 % of the females are posting ‘selfies’ every day. It is noteworthy that among these female respondents 12.5 % have the real ‘selfie’ addiction. Nevertheless, about 30 % of each surveyed group of the respondents is at the risk of taking selfies more often, which ultimately can lead to ‘selfie’ addiction.

The analysis of the results of our study showed that females are more sensitive to ‘selfie’ addiction. Thus, we can conclude that nowadays the percentage of “selfie” addicted people is high and includes not only women. Young people of both genders are equally addicted to “selfies”.