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Can You Guess Which City Takes The Most Miserable Selfies?

Londoners take the most miserable selfies and are also older than other selfie snappers around the world, according to a new survey.

Comissioned by Somerset House to coincide with its new Big Bang Data exhibit, the ‘SelfieCity’ survey looked at hundreds of selfies were analysed for age, gender and face features based on more than 150,000 images posted in London.

The data was compared to selfies taken in five other major cities around the world - Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paulo.

A team of researchers studied all public Instagram photos taken during one week that were tagged within a 5km radius of Somerset House.

SelfieCity looks at data from six world cities (Somerset House)

Dr. Lev Manovich, Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York and one of the co-creators of Selfiecity, explained: “Considering that young Londoners face challenges such as rising property prices and highly competitive job markets, the fact that Londoners are a little older and not always jumping for joy is perhaps not so surprising.

“Yet these are also issues felt in other cities around the world, so it’s interesting to see that Londoners are more honest and they’re not painting an alternate perfect picture on social media, which can often be the case.”

The results showed that Londoners prefer slight more restrained poses than other city dwellers around the globe and that they also smile less.

The average age for selfie takers was also higher than in other cities, with the London average being 28 years old.

Claire Catterall, Director of Exhibitions at Somerset House, said: “Selfiecity scientifically shows that we’ve become a society of perpetual selfie posters – the number of photos with shared locations in a small space in a short amount of time is staggering. Selfies are modern day data and each one of us is endlessly producing data without even realising it.

Image credit: StockRocket