Selfie Motivations of Generation Y in Turkey within Visual Sharing Culture Context

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 304 - 325, 30.06.2018

İ. Ayşad Güdekli , Nur Cemelelioğlu Altın

Abstract

In recent years selfie has become an inevitable part of social
networking sites (SNS). With the substantial growth of profile-based SNS, users
communicate and represent themselves through photographs, particularly with
selfies. A selfie is a self-representation tool, more intensely among younger
generations. In this research, we focused on motivations of Y generation to
express themselves through selfie in Turkey. We specified 4 main hypotheses;
social media usage, showing and defining themselves, social acceptance, and narcissism.
In order to investigate this hypothesis, we focused on college students who are
active SNS users. Semi-structured interviews conducted to reach in-depth
information about their tendencies and motivations. Our findings supported
hypothesizes we identified.

As a result, participants have social networking accounts for a long
time and are observed to be spending a long time each day on these platforms.
Users utilize SNS to be present in the virtual world as well as to see the
shares of other users. It has been observed that users take a selfie to share
their social media identities, to be liked by other people, to show themselves
better than they are in real life, to take the pleasure of continuous likes.
When we examined the motivations of the users, we observed that there are some
narcissistic tendencies. We have discussed our insights for the future research
in line with such findings.   

Keywords

Visual Communication, New Media, Self-portrait, Self-representation, Narcissism, Social Networking Sites

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