Philippines’ Makati and Cebu Cities among top ‘selfiest’ cities in the world!

March 11, 2014

by benign0

Another feather added to the Philippines’ cap of dubious acheivements! Two Philippine cities made it to the Top Ten “Selfiest” cities in the world. A database compiled by TIME, reveals that the Philippines’ financial centre Makati City produced “more selfies per capita than any other city in the world.” Following Makati, which logged “258 selfie-takers per 100,000 people” is Cebu City ranked Number 9 delivering “99 selfie-takers per 100,000 people”. Baguio City made Number 16 with 82 selfie-takers per 100,000.
Data sampling was quick and dirty via the Instagram API, but nonetheless “far and away the most comprehensive means of comparing the 459 world cities”…

The photos were downloaded from the Instagram API in two sets of five days: from Jan. 28-Feb.2, 2014 and Mar. 3-7, 2014. Each day’s data consists of the 24-hour period from midnight to midnight to account for all time zones equally. During that time, 402,197 Instagram photos tagged “selfie” that included geographic coordinates [were collected].

The findings seem to be consistent with past observations about Filipinos’ renowned narcissistic tendencies. Indeed, back in 2011, another study did confirm this…

[...] a recent survey conducted by global market research company, Synovate Inc. revealed that 48 percent of Filipino males felt they were sexually attractive. This revelation made another global media outlet, CNN International conclude that Filipino men are the most narcissistic in Asia.

Filipino politicians lead the selfie craze.

Although most individuals have some narcissistic traits, high levels of narcissism can manifest themselves in a pathological form as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), whereby the patient overestimates his or her abilities and has an excessive need for admiration and affirmation. Joan Jutta Lachkar author of the book The Narcissistic/Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Marital Treatment described the notion of cross-cultural narcissism in the context of immigrants observing how the “cross-cultural narcissist brings to his new country a certain amount of nationalistic pride, which he holds onto relentlessly. He refuses to adapt and will go to great lengths to maintain his sense of special identity.” In one of the luncheons he hosted a few years ago for clients of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., Ambassador Alfonso T. Yuchengco asked the writer Francisco Sionil Jose to share some of his observations of the current scene. On the subject of Filipino narcissism, Jose wrote that “We [Filipinos] are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over- coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production. We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking.”
Then again, such “surveys” need to be taken with a grain of salt. After all, a Social Weather Stations, (SWS) survey reportedly commissioned by the National Book Development Board in 2012 “revealed that the Filipinos who more frequently watch TV are more likely to read non-school books.” The subjects of all this Filipino reading leave a lot to be desired, however, considering that the survey revealed that “the Bible (58 percent) remains the most popular book read, followed by romance books (25 percent), and cooking books (21 percent).”
[NB: Parts of this article were lifted from the Wikipedia.org article “Narcissism” in a manner compliant to the terms stipulated in the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License that governs usage of content made available in this site.]