Why do we Love Taking Selfies?

The selfie is a kind of photo taking of ourselves, which has been popular for many years. The statistics indicate that we have uploaded about 24 billion selfies to Google in 2015. The number in 2015 only for Google is so big that it is difficult to imagine how huge the number is now with the developing techniques used in taking selfies. Additionally, a survey shows that about 69 percent surveyed adults admitted having taken selfies in February 2017. There’s no doubt that selfies have become an important part of our daily life.

Therefore, it comes to a question, why do people love taking selfies so much?

If you ask me about this question, I will say that the reason is that I look better in the selfies. It’s not only because the selfies can be easily edited automatically or manually but also we can easily control our expressions when looking at our own faces in the screen. Most people have suffered from the terrible experience of being taken photos with strange facial expressions by others so that we love the selfies which can show our best emotions and expression and make us pretty.

However, though we might admit that selfies make us more beautiful, few people can face another reason of taking photos, showing off ourselves and attracting others’ attention. According to Dr. Terri Apter, a psychology lecturer at Cambridge University, we take selfies in order to figure out who we are and project this to other people. In her words, it’s a kind of “”self-definition”” we believe in and want to show to others. Except the reasons about the need for our own fulfillment above, being gregarious is also a factor which urges us to continuously taking selfies.

For instance, there is a project named “”No Makeup Selfies”” which encourages people to post their selfies without make up to raise people’s awareness of cancer. With more and more people knowing the project, posting the selfies without makeup becomes a fashionable trend. To be not different from others, many people might begin taking selfies. As for me, taking a selfie with friends, classmates and the members in the same association after an activity has been a routine of the social contact.

Selfies help us more pretty in the photos, record the splendid moments we experience as well as gain our social relationship in a way. Nevertheless taking selfies brings some bad influence and even some tragedies. First, if people spend excessive time on taking a posting their selfies, their own life will be encroached. More seriously, taking selfies might result in narcissism, which has bad influence on people’s mental state and might be harmful to their relationships with others.

As for the more serious consequence, the Washington Post reported that there have been at least 54 deaths from 2014 up to August 2016 only in India. Moreover, taking selfies when people are driving greatly increases the risk of traffic accidents. To avoid these bad effects, we’d better think about why we take selfies before doing it. After doing so, we might have a clearer definition of ourselves.

Reference List

1. Statista.com,(2017). Share of adults in the United States who have ever taken a selfie as of February 2017.[online]. Available at:
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/683933/us-adults-shared-selfie/[2017]
3. Radhika Sanghani, 2014. Why we really take selfies: the ‘terrifying’ reasons explained.
4. telegraph.co.uk[online], 4:34PM 11 April. Available at:
5. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/10760753/Why-we-really-take-selfies-the-terrifying-reasons-explained.html
6. Peggy Drexler Ph.D, 2013. What Your Selfies Say About You. Psychologytoday[online], 16 September. Available at:
7. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/our-gender-ourselves/201309/what-your-selfies-say-about-you

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