FINAL-REPORT

HANOI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF ST MARK AND ST JOHN School of Foreign Language CURRENT SITUATION AND CAUSES OF TAKING SELFIE BY HUST’S STUDENTS By Pham Thi Anh Le Thi Chinh Giap Thi Tuoi A paper submitted to the School of Foreign Languages of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology and the University of St Mark and St John in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts May, 2016 Declaration of Original Authorship We hereby certify that this graduation project paper constitutes our own product, that where the language of others is set forth, quotation marks so indicate, and that appropriate credit is given where we have used the language, ideas, expressions or writings of another We declare that the paper describes original work that has not previously been presented for the award of any other degree of any institution No Student’s Full Name Signature …………………………………… ……… …………………………………… ……… …………………………………… ……… APPROVED BY: Supervisor’s Full Name Pham Hoai Anh Signature Date ……… ……………… ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS At the very first beginning, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to those who directly or indirectly contribute in a variety ways in the preparation for our research study Firstly, we would like to give special thanks to our respected supervisor, Mrs Pham Hoai Anh for her lesson and professional guidance, encouragement, suggestions and feedback regardless of time It motivated our very much to complete our study within short duration Then, it is a great and unique pleasure to our that we have got a chance to thank a large number of individuals at School of…… for their generous helps to answer our questionnaire as well as participate in the interviews which we attach theirs record in Appendix… Finally, I would also like to pay our excessive gratitude to all of authors for their really helpful and relevant studies on Selfie phenomenon to our research I have no hesitation that without their supporting literatures, we would not probably success on implementing our research Once again, thank you all for what you have done to us ABSTRACT Selfie is the craze among the young over the world and it used to be “a word of the year” by Oxford in 2013 because of its popularity That basic knowledge motivated our group very much to conduct this research in order to explore the current situation on taking selfie by HUST students In addition, this research attempts to clarify the causes of this phenomenon among them Mixed-method enabled us to examine variables by combining questionnaire survey and interview In term of quantitative research, we developed list of questions based on previous literature and total 80 participants from School of Material Science Engineering at the age of 18 to 23, then we chose 30 responses of them to deploy the analysis The qualitative research questions were open-ended and semi-structured to acquire perspectives of three interviewees about taking selfie Results from the findings partly show that selfie phenomenon among HUST students is popular, that means almost students knew and used smartphone for their selfies However, they did not pay much attention to take selfie or become selfie addiction Most of them focused on their physical and mood when taking selfies This study is so important to provide a framework for the future explorations of selfie effects on younger and its trends LIST OF ABBRIVIATIONS MSE: The School of Material Science Engineering FB: Facebook HUST: Hanoi University of Science and Technology SNS: Social Network Site LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Frequency of taking selfie photo a day Figure 2: Times spend on taking a selfie Figure 3: Types of devices in taking selfie Figure 4: Components effecting on taking selfie photo Figure 5: Occasions for taking a selfie photo Figure 6: The highest priority in taking selfie photo LIST OF TABLES Table 1: The frequency of uploading selfie photo to SNS Table 2: Questionnaire summary TABLE OF CONTENT CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Rationale of the research The word ‘selfie’ is no longer strange with all people over the world nowadays, especially with youngers We can easily catch the image of younger who are holding their photographic equipment and taking a selfie in anywhere and anytime According to the Psychology Today paper, selfie simply defined as “pictures you take of yourself tagged with #selfie or just with #me They are showing up all across social networks like Facebook or Instagram” (Pamela, 2013, #1) So long as people use front camera to take a picture themselves and post them to social network pages, we call that action is “selfie” Therefore, for those who not really understand what exact selfie means, my group hope that the simple explanation above can help you have a better understanding about the topic The selfie is rapidly becoming a big phenomenon in all countries including Vietnam Recently, it was estimated that around 64% Vietnamese people selfie, on that 64% of ‘selfier’, there were surprised that more than a half of Vietnamese people had a habit of taking selfie including both female and male, which make us have to raise a question why a large number of people take selfie photo Every day, on the Internet, social pages namely Facebook, Instagram or many other TV programs, we can see people discuss or just simply talk about the selfie phenomenon Everything that we has its own reasons and selfie taking is not an exception For somebody, taking a selfie is a good way to overcome the sorrow, the loneliness, or the anger However, for some others who see the selfie taking on a negative side, they propose that taking a selfie photo too frequent is not a good thing Therefore, in order to have a better knowledge about that phenomenon, as well as knowing the significant elements that lead to that status, this research will partly help you on doing it You are going to see why and how often youngers take selfie photo After this research, you will have a proper awareness about selfie and at the same time, we are highly expected that you will be able to avoid being addicted on selfie Scope and subjects of the research Taking a selfie is mostly happening in younger recently Hence, our scope is younger from 18 years old to 23 years old at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) HUST is famous for training in technological block with 20 departments; nevertheless, because of a limited time and research condition, we decided to choose the School of Material Science Engineering to conduct the survey Moreover, we can easily conduct the survey in an equal quantity of male and female students from K57 to K60 of that School Importantly, students of that School have to use smartphone or intelligent photographic equipment and social pages consisting Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and so on Thus, this research will show the status of selfie taking of zoned subjects above and the elements, as well as the reasons, make or affect them take selfie image From that, students at not only that particular School but also at all other Schools of HUST will be able to have a comprehensive acknowledge about selfie phenomenon and avoid bad influences Research questions i What is the selfie status in the young of HUST nowadays? ii What are main elements that cause this situation? CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW A picture can paint a thousand words, selfie also much more You can see the image of a youth holding up his phone, using front camera, and taking a photograph of himself anywhere "Taking selfie" and "selfie" are buzz words which ingrained into the minds of everyone in a natural way that we did not recognize Selfie was considered as the "word of the year" in 2013 (theguadian, 2013, #1) Combining between selfie craze and social networking sites has created a global phenomenon "selfie" that we would like to present some its basic concepts I/ Overview of selfie 1.1/ Definitions of selfie According to the Oxford English Dictionary, selfie is defined as ‘a photograph that one takes of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2014, #3) The rapid development of new technologies such as network, social pages consisting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on, especially the front camera allows people to take picture themselves without any helps from others The full meaning of the phrase ‘selfie’ is not only ended at the action using your hands and the front camera to take a photo or uploaded to the OSN which is called ‘Online Social Networking’ but also shown in gestures for instance, like, retweet and comment (Theresa and Nancy, 2015, #4) For each selfie photo, people usually post in social network with signal #selfie which is read as ‘hash tag’ selfie From what the Urban Dictionary defines, the phrase ‘hash tag’ means “a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic and to begin a conversation” (Urban Dictionary, 2010, #1) For example, we can read the phrase ‘#sweetnight’ as hash tag sweet night, ‘#feelingtried’ as hash tag feeling tired and so on When you find something on network by typing a word or phrase and including the symbol ‘#’ before them, you will get a lot of information relating to that word or phrase Moreover, selfie is not only about taking a portrait image of oneself or of oneself with the other but also existing in several kinds such as ‘solo selfies; selfies with a romantic partner; and selfies in a group’ (Gwendolyn, 2015, #2) Selfie photos are not required a picture of a person, it might be a photo of one, two or a group of person In general, those definitions of selfie have same meaning which help us having a general understanding about what selfie is 1.2/ History of selfie As so many researches, people believed that the first kind of selfie was portrait image of American man named Robert Cornelius who used a ‘daguerreotype’ – the first successfully produced type of photograph (Cambridge Dictionaries Online, 2016, #1) to take a photo of himself in 1839 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institute for the National Portrait Gallery) However, in this research we will just mainly on the impact of technical development to the selfie so that we should study its history since front camera and network developed In agreement with Amy J Nguyen, he studied that the earliest images with #selfie appeared on website Flickr around 2004 (Amy, 2014, p.6, #2) After that, thanks to the quick innovation and development of smartphone as well as huge web pages typically as Facebook and Instagram today, the intensity of #selfie appears more and more and becomes a big phenomenon As we know, one of favorite applications on Facebook (FB), Instagram (IG) is that we can change our profile many times Moreover, most of the profiles are their own selfie picture which is mostly like the Identity Card, are used in order to identify each person It is the fact that everyone want to have an attractive profile or image to attract others or just be self-satisfied themselves That seems to be a common reason why they can spend hours to take and retake a selfie picture to make their profile look as greatest as they can As a result of technical exploration and some other reasons, Oxford Dictionary (2013) announced that Selfies is “the Word of the Year” (BBC News, 2013) Besides, the realizing of the song #SELFIE of a popular EDM DJ (Electric Dance Music Disc Jockey) whose content is about a young woman at a club took retook a picture and posted it on her Instagram account in order to get a lot of likes (Murray, 2014) There are so many other reasons that make selfie become a phenomenon and make people become ‘dependence’ or selfie addiction on another word In conclusion, because of the fast development of smartphone technologies and social networks, selfie images are no longer strange to any of us that we can easily meet selfie-portraits of someone on our Facebook or Instagram A number of selfiers are rising in every single minute, which makes us have to worry about this popular situation II/ Selfie addiction Through the first part, we had an overview of the selfie phenomenon and selfie addiction In this part, we will study in depth the selfie addiction based on asserting the strong development of the selfie phenomenon and demonstrating selfie addiction expressions that we acquired from previous involved literatures 2.1 Definitions of selfie addiction It is sure that you are familiar with the terms internet addiction, smartphone addiction, and selfie addiction is not so strange anymore However, may selfie be considered to fit addiction symptoms? Many scholars argued on this issue Shah (2014) insisted on International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resident that no research studies have studied on this issue before, and no standards for evaluating, no specific definition of selfie addiction I agree partly with this idea, mostly the word “selfie addiction” is appeared in the articles searched