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PT KONTAK PERKASA - Why do people take selfies? It’s
not all about narcissism, says a new study from Brigham Young
University. Based on survey responses and interviews with a small group
of social media users, researchers identified three categories of people
who snap and share the iconic digital self-portraits: communicators, autobiographers, and self-publicists.
Communicators are really interested in two-way conversation,
according to the study authors, and they take selfies primarily to
engage friends, family, or followers. The researchers cite actress Anne
Hathaway’s recent “I voted” selfie as an example of a “communicator”
post, as it sparked a spirited discussion about civic duty.Autobiographers, on the other hand, use selfies as a tool to record important events in their lives. They still want others to see their photos, but they’re more interested in preserving these moments than in social engagement and feedback. Astronaut Scott Kelley, who posted space-suit selfies while chronicling his year in space, is a good example.
And finally, there are the self-publicists. These are the people who love documenting their entire lives, say the study authors, and hope to present themselves in a positive light. The classic example? You guessed it: the Kardashians.
To find these selfie types, master’s students in the department of communications gave surveys and follow-up interviews to 46 participants, ages 18 to 45, all of whom had taken multiple selfies in the past. The participants were asked to sort 48 different motivations for taking selfies— “to show off my looks,” for example, or “to discover new sides of myself”—into one of three categories: agree, disagree, or neutral/uncertain.
The participants were then asked to rank their motivations, and answer open-ended questions about the choices they’d made. These results, published in the journal Visual Communication Quarterly, helped the researchers single out specific similarities and differences among the respondents.
Despite the celebrity examples given above, lead author Steven Holiday told Health that selfie types should, ideally, be self-defined. “They speak to your own motivation—so I can’t just look at someone’s Instagram and know that they’re a communicator,” says Holiday, who’s now a PhD student at Texas Tech University. “It’s really about why they’re posting selfies, which may or may not be obvious from their profile.”