Mapping Selfies and the “Selfiest” Cities in the World

With facebook viewed by many as the ultimate platform for narcissists coupled with Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, is it any wonder that the selfie has soared to new levels of fame?

You may have noticed recently that Time Magazine (online) has generated a little bit of buzz by jumping on the “selfie” hysteria that has carried over from the Oscars (ya thanks Ellen for inventing the selfie). In an interesting read that has very little science to support the findings, Time has generated a ranking of World cities that apparently take and share the most selfies.

Selfie – A slang term used to describe a photo that is taken of oneself for the purpose of uploading it to social networking sites and image sharing websites, such as Facebook, Instagram or Imgur.

Using a very simple formula of number of online Selfie photos shared online via Instagram with the hashtag #selfie and geotagged (warning, searching this hashtag can yield some not-so-family-friendly results!) they determined a ranking based on number of selfie photos per 100,000 population.

Time produced an interactive map based on more than 400,000 Instagram photos with the hashtag #selfie and used geo-location tags to where they were taken. The data was collected in two sets, from Jan. 28 to Feb. 2 and March 3 to 7. The magazine ranked 459 cities, including eight in Canada (Source). My own city of Victoria, BC Canada came in as the top city in Canada according to the rankings. The mainstream media has wasted no time at all boasting the results and articles are appearing all over the web touting the results, for example, this article in the Victoria Times Colonist. If you want your city to make the ranking next year though you’ll have to make sure that you geotag or geolocate your photos!