CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

The researcher systematically identified, located and analyzed documents

containing information related to the research problem. These documents which

consisted of a number of periodicals, books, published and unpublished thesis,

dissertations and memorandums helped in the conceptualization of the present study.

Selfie is a simple act of taking a photo of your own self. People takes selfies at

parties, in class, while eating their food, working out at the gym, and almost everywhere

and anywhere. Many individuals believe that self – imaging is a great way to present or

validate existence, but it can also be viewed to be a mirror of narcissism by others.

Even hanging out, eating out, wearing new clothes, riding new cars, enjoying vacation:

these situations present the author or the photographer’s own idea and method of

presenting self (Foucault, 2004).

According to Moreau (2014), the main reasons why people take and post selfies

are to get somebody’s attention, to show off, out of boredom, to boost self – esteem,

and because social media is enjoyable.

Although there are different reasons for an individual to post selfies, this research

focuses on the relationship between self – esteem levels and the nature of the people

who take and post selfie. In this research, the following literatures were assimilated

because of the conclusion findings of some researchers in the study of correlation of

selfies on an individual’s self-esteem. Furthermore, these were found relevant in the

conducted study.
 The term “selfie” is considered as a modern word emerged up just recently but in

fact if we travel in the history, it was already an existing concept. According to the

research of University of Columbia, USA, the first shape of ‘selfie’ is declared to the

portrait which was drawn by an Italian artist “Parmigiannino” in 1524. This portrait is

called “Self-portrait in Convex Mirror” and it was made by an amateur photographer

named Robert Cornelius’ of Philadelphia in 1839. Cornelius had set his camera up at

the back of the family store in Philadelphia. He took the image by removing the lens cap

and then running into frame where he sat for a minute before covering up the lens

again. On the back he wrote “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”

Steven Wrighter coined the term “selfie”. In September 2002, Wrighter posted a

photo of himself in a forum on the website of ABC, the Australian public broadcaster

saying, and captioned:

“Um drunk at a mates 21 st, I tripped offer and landed lip first (with front teeth

coming a very close second) on a set of steps, I had a hole about 1 cm long right

through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”

However, the usage of #selfie first appeared on Flicker in 2004. Nowadays, using

the sign # are common on social media sites to highlight a specific word that describe

the photo, or details of an event and other more. Since 2012, the rate of usage of selfie

reportedly increased by 17,000% (Bennet, 2014). It is so widespread that it was even

nominated as the word of the year by Oxford dictionary in the year 2013. For many

people, taking selfies almost become a daily habit all over the world while social media
became the number one medium that is used by individuals when it comes on sharing

and posting their selfies.

According to Leary (2013) there are two basic human motives for selfie. The first

one is to attract “attention from the other people” others used selfie as the basis of

presenting self through posting pictures online mainly to get attention by expecting

credits and good appraisals from others. While, the second one is to “send a particular

image of the self” without expecting credits and appraisals from others. However, either

both ways of the motive of a person when it comes on taking selfie there are also

positive and negative effects on a person.

Selfies can empower a person in many ways. According to Nguyen (2013),

people are gaining confidence and always optimistic due to selfies. Especially, when

people notice something about their appearance because of their selfie. It can also

improve one’s social status and makes an individual feel good to see the comments

such as 'Gorgeous' or 'You look so nice’ (Cozine, 2013). While, if a person posts a selfie

picture and only gets a 30 likes, that person feels ugly or embarrassed and may want to

delete the picture (Fierstein, 2014). So, if a person take a selfie and post it and gain

almost a hundred likes, that person feels good and satisfied about him self. Green

(2014) also said that Selfie can improve a woman’s self-esteem. Woman’s most likely to

take a lot of picture until they take the perfect one and post it. It can make a person feel

good in creating own image and at the same time gives an individual the opportunity to

appreciate selves better.

 On the other side, selfie can also bear a negative effect. Selfies are indicator of

low self – esteem, social independence, or attention seeking behavior (Peek, 2014).

Some people are not aware about this and usually to the person who got

addicted to the use of it are not aware that it may lead to a serious mental health

problems as stated. Numbers of people do take a lot of selfies but they are not truly

confident about themselves. They look on other people’s post and compare it to

themselves until they to feel insecurity and will start imitating it. A person may start

comparing her not-so-perfect hair or teeth with the other person who gets over 100 likes

on their selfie, which is indeed harmful for a person’s self-esteem (Sarah, 2014).

Not just insecuriy can harm someone’s self – esteem, but also likes and

comments that build self-esteem can crush it as well. A single negative comment on a

photo can make a person’s not feel good about themselves and never try to post again.

Self-esteem problems occur when a person is eagerly waiting for feedback from others.

If a person spend the hour after posting a selfie furiously hitting refresh to see

aggregate likes or waiting for a specific person to comment, it could be a sign that your

self-esteem is overly dependent on the feedback of others (Ramadan, 2014).

It is a great sign of an unusual behavior and a how someone’s view himself is not

base on what he wants, but rather depends on others. It is most common to people to

focus attention into other people’s perspective on to how a particular person look, the

comments, credits and likes received, which basically affects and lowers one’s self

esteem and also it might affect one’s self love (Wood, 2013).
 Selfies main aim is to receive positive comments about self, particularly to the

looks. It can definitely be concluded that selfies do more harm than good, to an

individual’s self-esteem. (Cowman, 2014).

Conceptual Framework

Self-Verification Theory is a social psychological theory that focuses on people’s

desire to be known and understood by others. The key assumption is that once people

develop firmly held beliefs about themselves, prefer others to see them as they see

themselves which held that people form self-views so that they can understand and

predict the responses of others and know how to act toward them (Swann, 2002). The

theory suggests that people may begin to shape others’ evaluations before it begin

interacting with them. Displaying identity cues, Physical appearances are particularly

common type of identity cue such as the clothes one wears, for instance can advertise

self-views and at some cases these identity cues may somewhat give an impact on

one’s level of self-esteem.

Self-verification theory predicts that in so far as people are motivated to bring

others to verify their self-conceptions, they should intensify some efforts to elicit self-

confirmatory reactions when they suspect that others might be misconstruing them.

Researchers tested this idea by informing participants who perceived themselves as

either likeable or dislikeable that they would be interacting with people who perceived

them favorably or unfavorably. There were two key findings.

First, there was a general tendency for all participants to elicit reactions that

confirmed one’s self-views. This is social environment to satisfy their needs.

 Second, the tendency to evoke confirming reactions was especially strong when

participants expected that their evaluator’s appraisals might disconfirm their self-

perceptions (Swann W. J., 1981). In this second finding, when people’s evaluation did

not match on person’s view of themselves there’s a tendency that people may

strengthen efforts nor increase it on a higher level to achieve self-verification that would

definitely change the mind same as to what the evaluator has reflected.

In line with this, the researchers thought that self-esteem is an outcome of

confidence and satisfaction and necessary ingredient in self-verification that occur

within individual. Furthermore the theory can define integration of the various

conceptualization of self-esteem precisely that can be applied to teenagers. Thus,

researchers also thought that self-verification theory might help to establish studies on

finding whether selfie has a relationship to a teenager individual’s self-esteem.

Moreover, the theory would also help the researchers in conducting and finding the

dependable results and answer onto the given problem.

CLSU STUDENTS

SELFIE SELF ESTEEM

CORRELATION

IMPLICATION
 Figure1.

Paradigm of the study

Figure 1 illustrates the pattern and direction on how the study was conducted.

Paradigm of the study

The researcher systematically identified, located end analyzed documents

containing information related to the research problem. These documents which

consisted of a number of periodicals, books, published and unpublished thesis,

dissertations and memorandums helped in the conceptualization of the study. The

Figure shows the Central Luzon State University respondents connected to the level of

their Self-esteem and Selfie Take as this two will correlated with each other to show the

implication of the study.