What does a selfie say about a city? Lev Manovich and Moritz Stefaner reveal the top 5 facts from selfiecity London.
selfiecity examines the effects of the explosion of data generated by the public’s online activity, such as selfies shared on social media. The fascinating insights into how people in the six studied cities (Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, São Paulo, and now London), represent themselves will be displayed in digital visualisations at Big Bang Data. The work features interactive “selfiexploratory” software to discover popular poses and selfie trends.
Creators, Lev Manovich and Moritz Stefaner, share their London findings with five selfiecity facts:
1) London has the the least happy faces – London’s average is 0.55 vs. 0.62 for other cities. (ReKognition face analysis estimates happiness emotion on 0-1 scale, 0 = least happy; 1 most happy.)
2) The oldest average age for male London selfies – an estimated 28.0 years vs. 26.3 years for other cities.
3) The highest number of glasses (29% vs. 18% in other cities) and also the highest number of eyes closed (28% vs. 20% in other cities).
4) The most upright poses – 15° average head turn angle, as opposed to 20° average for other cities.
5) Twice as many women (62.8%) than men (37.2%). The proportions of female selfies in the other cities are: 55.2% in Bangkok, 59.4% in Berlin, 61.6% in New York, 65.4% in Sao Paolo, 82.0% in Moscow.