Confirmed: Bristol loves selfies

Bristol ranked as one of the top cities in the world for selfies!

| UPDATED

It’s official: Bristol’s one of the top cities in the world for selfies. 

Time magazine recently published a list of the world’s 100 ‘selfiest cities’ using a database of 400,000 Instagram photos with the hashtag #selfie.

Bristol registered as the 49th most selfie-obsessed city in the world with around 49 selfie-takers per 100,000 people.

Appropriate

Urban Dictionary  describes the selfie phenomenon as:

“A picture taken of yourself that is planned to be uploaded to Facebook, Myspace or any other sort of social networking website. You can usually see the person’s arm holding out the camera in which case you can clearly tell that this person does not have any friends to take pictures of them so they resort to Myspace to find internet friends and post pictures of themselves, taken by themselves. A selfie is usually accompanied by a kissy face or the individual looking in a direction that is not towards the camera.”

On a standard night out at Bunker, it’s not rare to see flocks of girls crowding around an iPhone desperately seeking to creep into the edge of a photo to get themselves noticed on Facebook the next day.

Even the most strong-willed of Bristol students are sometimes victims of the selfie pandemic and inevitably leave university with a portfolio of poor resolution, self-shot photographs.

Oh dear…

Everyone’s doing it – even Obama. If you search ‘selfie’ on Instagram, over 85 million images appear. So why do Bristol students, and the human species in general love these photographs so much?

Is it just new age narcissism and a natural progression from the painted portraits of the past? Is it a chance to seek credibility in the eyes of other students through social media? Or can these selfies be seen as a positive projection of our self-worth and image?

Maybe our generation has been made insecure by years of pop culture and airbrushed images. Selfies are a way of affirming your own existence in an age where technology has diminished individuality through creating trends.

Maybe selfies are just harmless fun and none of the above. Either way, Bristol is in the top 50 selfiest cities in the world and University students are certainly contributing!