‘Selfies’ have become a larger part of social media in society in recent years, mainly with the millennial generation. Named as the Oxford Dictionary’s first of the year in 2013, a selfie is described as being photo an individual takes oneself and is done using the camera on a smartphone or another digital device (Oxford Dictionary), today many selfies are taken by individuals are then uploaded to social media sites such as Facebook, and Instagram. Concern has been raised whether taking a large magnitude of selfies creates narcissistic tendencies in people. By investigating selfies I hope to show that while selfies can cause narcissism, there are positive factors for taking selfies.
Using both a positivist and an interpretive approach allows …show more content…
These students were members of nine different sororities, and were believed to be the group who took the most selfies (Wickel). The problem with this sample is that it is very small and only includes females who were known to be heavy selfie takers, this leads a particular bias in the data collected. This disregards other individuals such as males who could have different opinions whether selfies and narcissism correlates. One good thing Wickel achieves is by splitting his findings from the survey questions into positive and negative categories to show if survey participants agreed or not with selfies being narcissistic. Students who did not find selfies narcissistic found selfies increased their self-esteem and kept friends and family up to date with their lives. He could have found more interesting opinions if there were more open ended questions …show more content…
There are issues within Wickel’s article, such as his sample size being very small and excluding men, but overall I believe this article was successful, due to his survey questions covering a large understanding of narcissistic tendencies and selfies with the option to disagree on the matter. Whereas Novakova only critically observed Myslivcova and claimed she was self-absorbed due to her selfie taking while not continuing further to why she might act in this way. Wickel’s data showed that some individuals saw selfies as a way to allow friends and family to be updated with their lives. It would be interesting to see how future research from a cultivation theory with mixed methods could show how the media influences people to take selfies and societal expectations for how to look in a selfie. More interesting research that can be conducted in the future is to see how an aging millennial generation continues to take selfies and whether a younger generation continues this
Using both a positivist and an interpretive approach allows …show more content…
These students were members of nine different sororities, and were believed to be the group who took the most selfies (Wickel). The problem with this sample is that it is very small and only includes females who were known to be heavy selfie takers, this leads a particular bias in the data collected. This disregards other individuals such as males who could have different opinions whether selfies and narcissism correlates. One good thing Wickel achieves is by splitting his findings from the survey questions into positive and negative categories to show if survey participants agreed or not with selfies being narcissistic. Students who did not find selfies narcissistic found selfies increased their self-esteem and kept friends and family up to date with their lives. He could have found more interesting opinions if there were more open ended questions …show more content…
There are issues within Wickel’s article, such as his sample size being very small and excluding men, but overall I believe this article was successful, due to his survey questions covering a large understanding of narcissistic tendencies and selfies with the option to disagree on the matter. Whereas Novakova only critically observed Myslivcova and claimed she was self-absorbed due to her selfie taking while not continuing further to why she might act in this way. Wickel’s data showed that some individuals saw selfies as a way to allow friends and family to be updated with their lives. It would be interesting to see how future research from a cultivation theory with mixed methods could show how the media influences people to take selfies and societal expectations for how to look in a selfie. More interesting research that can be conducted in the future is to see how an aging millennial generation continues to take selfies and whether a younger generation continues this