The age of social media has produced the most self-indulgent phenomena of our era: the selfie. These photographic portraits, made possible thanks to front-facing cameras, have enticed our inner narcissist, so much that sites like Instragram and Facebook (News - Alert) are flooded with our mugs and now people are on board to make a science project out of it.

Hashtags have made it possible to track down all of the available public selfies (just go ahead and look for #selfie). Selfcity wants to see the trends associated with the selfie, and taking a look at Instagram, different cultures may attribute to how and why we take these. There are different patterns, like head position, facial expression, gender, age, and yes, there is a website where you can look up this data and see who is taking what kind of selfie and where.

Lev Manovich, a computer science professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, along with Moritz Stefaner and their team of researchers, historians and designers digested this data over the period of six months and found that there are, in fact, patterns to the modern selfie.  

For one, women tend to partake in the selfie more than the guys, so much that in Moscow, 80 percent of selfies are that of women. Women are more likely to do the head tilt, and Sao Paolo versus New York, there is a 16.9 degree tilt versus the 11 degree tilt respectively.

So, can the selfie give us some cultural assumptions? It’s not exact science, but the data is there for those who want to tinker with it to draw their own conclusions.

Of course, there are too many avenues to explore here, so the conclusions seem limitless. For example, Selfiecity’s mood analysis shows that people in Bangkok and Sao Paulo appear to be happier than people in Moscow because they smile more in their selfies. Does it mean they are happier? Interesting correlation, but it’s not actually a fact.

“Showing the high level patterns in the data — the big picture — as well as the individual images has been an important theme in our project,” says Stefaner according to Wired. “How can we find summarizations of big data collections, which still respect the individuals, and don’t strip away all the interesting details?”

Who knows what sort of information we can glean from spending hours looking through the various selfie hashtags. It’s certainly an interesting way to pass the time, perhaps get a good laugh, or if you’re really into social studies, see what these portraits say about ourselves and the culture we live in.

Or, if none of this is of interest to you, you can always amuse yourself by checking out what The Muppets have to say for themselves via the Instagram selfie.