Janet Gershen-Siegel : Getting Your Content To Go Viral

Journalist Anna Hart argues this is the new era of people sharing selfies on a daily basis, that society has reached into “the age vanity, the digital vanity, you can argue no generation is immune from the selfie craze” (Hart,2014). A selfie has a variety of audiences from children capturing their best look to The Pope, it’s the new way of capturing evidence of your interaction with different people, better than asking for an autograph. However, in Hart’s (2014) article she argues that the idea that there is a need to look a certain way all of the time, especially when you are posting a selfie on social media, it almost has to be perceived in a positive way, showing the best selfie. Hart (2014) said “I need to look healthy, glossy and polished

Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book, “The Tipping Point,” identified 3 archetypes that are necessary to achieve a word-of-mouth epidemic: connectors, mavens, and salespeople.

“No one is forced to take selfies, but the preponderance of selfie culture inspires a heightened self-consciousness of our personal images online.” This is apart of the Times Article, and how peer pressure is the cause of people being self-consciousness about what they post online.

Photographs on Facebook are an example of this trend. We strive so hard to maintain this pristine image of ourselves, and use social media sites as a stage to project how we want the world to see us. There is nothing wrong with looking well, but we should not change for others. How we look is now our priority. Why do we want other people to perceive us in a way that isn’t the truth? ‘Natural’ is now merely a word printed in the dictionary.

In today’s world, images have become a form of self expression. People use images to show how they are feeling. From a selfie, at a family vacation, to their halloween evening, dressed as their favorite superhero. None the less, images have also become a way for people to express their thoughts towards other people and a form of approval. “My Embarrassing Picture Went Viral” by Caitline Seida touches on how, she, a girl with polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland posted a picture, of her halloween evening with her friends, that soon became of fountain of hate comments that ranged from “What a waste of space” to “You should kill yourself” (Seida 675). “What Selfie Sticks Really Tell us About Ourselves” by Kate Murphy informs

Companies take serious care when marketing their products or services to consumers. Consumers, therefore, are exposed to hundreds of advertisements each day with each ad specifically placed to maximize exposure to its potential target market. In the internet age, consumers are targeted more than ever. The following paper details four products or services and the targeting strategies behind them. These products and services are: Netflix, Apple’s iPhone 7+, Edushape’s Marublous Marble Run, and Chobani yogurt.

Here we are today, where social media often defines women, what they look like and their "perfect" lives.

A major aspect to all these types of social media is posting pictures and obtaining likes and comments. In turn of receiving these responses it is a form of “reassurance and validation regarding physical and social attractiveness” (Perloff, 2014). Once again females as well as men are generally sexualized and impressions are based on one’s appearance, resulting in altering the way a person perceives themselves.

Google understands the importance of getting an advertiser’s message out to the audience in as many forms as possible. Some

A systematic examination of photographs can reveal many insights into the individual taking the picture. For example, Dijck (2008) explains that picture taking has been widely used as a way for people to save memories of events, a tool for communication and experience, and more recently, as a tool for identity development. For example, in the 20th century, people used photography to save memories to remember their lives (Dijck,2008). As time moved forward it evolved into using photography to communicate with others by sharing their experiences with social media. By using social media like Twitter for example, people share different types of pictures from selfies, to video game screenshots, to a photograph of a new jacket; which occurs not just in the United States but, all over the world (Thelwall, Goriunvova, Vis, Faulkner, Burns, Aulich, Mas-Bleda,

Immediately upon loading the website, my browser’s ad blocker inhibited the content from loading. The website prompted me to either disable the blocker or provide my email. Blake, Munoz, and Volpe contend that “finding out who’s paying for a particular site will tell you something about the reliability of its content” (2016). The amount of advertisement on the commercial site points to its questionable credibility.

This response assignment will provide a case study on a highly popular controversial selfie for critical discussion. The case study will examine this selfie by academically analyzing and arguing that this photo is an empowering form of self-expression. It will discuss and theorize the social significance of this selfie, and how it can build and dismantle local and global community. The paper will use academic sources for this case study as supporting evidence for these claims.

This brings up the discussion of advertisement in relation to privacy invasion and

How did the simple (and perhaps narcissistic) act of snapping a picture of oneself become a global phenomenon? A more pressing question is, what special characteristics make a person, product, or idea capable of becoming a social epidemic? In his nonfiction work, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell proposes that there are three rules of epidemics: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. Focusing on the selfie in particular, two of these three rules can effectively be applied to analyze what is behind the vast amount of selfies found on various websites today - The Power of Context and The Stickiness Factor. The technology and social media of the modern world prove that the selfie has tipped.

Since celebrities and other famous or popular people take selfies, it seems rather difficult for most people not to join in on the selfie train. A lot of people are so obsessed on what celebrities are doing, as if they are their idol. It’s like if a celebrity does this, the majority of people will try to copy her. Many people view celebrities as one of their biggest role models. Celebrities can have a huge influence on society. Most of the time, they are the ones who starts or even makes the trend more popular, typically because of their social status or class with society. Let’s say that Beyoncé, an R&B singer, takes a selfie in a unique pose and post it on Instagram or Twitter. All of her fans that adore her are going to see it and like it, expressing that it’s beautiful and a cool way to take a selfie. Since the fans love Beyoncé, most of them are going to attempt to copy the way she takes the selfie. This indicates that most of the people in the society that we live in follow what most celebrities does, whether it’s good or bad. Celebrities seems to be one of the key