SELFIE AN ART OR SANITY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

Research in MAPEH Secondary Education

Field of Specialization: Arts

By:

Janerose A. Aguillon

Chabel Negru

Kyle Patrick I. Go

Fred Joven A. Globio

February, 2019
 I. BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

In today’s generation many of us are equipped with smartphones with high

resolution camera where we can take a photograph. Many millennials engage to

photography with the use of their smartphones. Photography means “the art or

practice of taking and processing photographs.” (Oxford Dictionary).

The word ‘selfie’ was first used in an Australian Internet forum in 2002

(Tomassoni, Rosella., et al, 2016) and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in

2013 as word of the year (Wade,2014), a noun which means “a photograph that

one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and

shared via social media.” In today’s generation it won’t be a surprise if we’re one

of those people who loves taking a selfie.

People take selfie at school, at home, at the mall, at the beach, in some

landmarks, underwater, and almost anywhere. Taking and sharing selfies have

become common with the advent of various smartphones and in social media

(Sung, Lee, Kim, and Choi, 2016). Which leads us to the question, why take a

photo in almost everything that we are doing? What is the implication of taking

too much photo of yourself?

According to Singh, Sanchita & Tripathi, Kaushlendra (2016) there have been 47

deaths all around the world and 14 just in India since rise of this photography
style. Taking selfie is as if becoming a necessity in this era and becoming an

addiction.

Balakrishan, Janarthanan and Griffiths, Mark (2017) said that in 2014 stories

appeared in international media claiming that the condition of ‘selfitis’ (an

obsessive taking of selfies) was to be classed as a mental disorder by the

American Psychiatric Association and classified the condition with borderline, the

acute and chronic level.

Moreover, according to e.g., Martino (2014) those who post selfies are

narcissistic on the other hand Wortham (2013) believes that selfie is a kind of

exploration, which allow a person to be more genuine and lift up his or her self-

esteem. Wortham (2013) also added that it is also a means of communication.

For this reason, the researchers would like to study the relationship between

photography as an art to selfie as a disorder.