Zafri Mudasser Nofil
Has selfies become a dangerous trend? A big yes, going by the recent spate of incidents of fatalities and the extent of the craze behind it.
Incidentally, India accounted for nearly half of the 27 “selfie-related” deaths reported last year – with people from several parts of the country getting killed by an oncoming train, falling out of a boat, off a cliff or into a canal and drowning in the sea while taking selfies.
In June, a youth drowned in the Ganga while clicking a selfie while bathing as he lost his balance.
Six of his friends died too as they drowned while trying to save one another.
Then in July, national steeplechase athlete Pooja Kumari drowned after she accidentally fell in a pond while clicking selfies with her friends on the campus of the Sports Authority of India near Bhopal.
These are few of the several such unfortunate cases which could have really been avoided. Some of the other deaths occurred when people tried to take selfies in more bizarre ways – with a snake or with a gun in hand.
Many people including leaders and celebrities have been criticised for their selfie craze – some taking their picture with a dried-up river as the backdrop and others taking with a rape survivor.
Team India member Ravindra Jadeja flouted rules by taking selfie with lions at Gir Wildlife Sanctuary at Sasan in Junagadh, an act strictly prohibited by law. He was let off by the Gujarat forest department after he paid a fine of only Rs Zafri Mudasser Nofil is Principal News Coordinator with PTI 20,000.
The Oxford Dictionaries named ‘selfie’ as its Word of the Year in 2013 in an unanimous decision.
“The term’s early origins seem to lie in social media and photosharing sites like Flickr and MySpace.
But usage of it didn’t become widespread until the second decade of this century and it has only entered really common use in 2012 or so. Selfportraits are nothing new – people have been producing them for centuries, with the medium and publication format changing. Oil on canvas gave way to celluloid, which in turn gave way to photographic film and digital media. As the process became snappier (pun intended) so has the name.
And now as smartphones have become de rigueur for most, rather than just for techies, the technology has ensured that selfies are both easier to produce and to share, not least by the inclusion of a button which means you don’t need a nearby mirror.
It seems likely that this will have contributed at least in part to its increased usage. By 2012, selfie was commonly being used in mainstream media sources and this has been rising ever since,” according to Oxford Dictionaries.
“Its linguistic productivity is already being seen by the creation of a number of related terms, showcasing particular parts of the body like helfie (a picture of one’s hair) and belfie (a picture of one’s posterior); a particular activity – welfie (workout selfie) and drelfie (drunken selfie), and even items of furniture – shelfie and bookshelfie.
In fact, it seems that the words knows no bounds, although some do seem rather forced, with multiple interpretations, like the apparent delfie (where the d could stand for dad, dog, double, or rather inexplicably dead) or melfie, with the m being explained as Monday, moustache, male, or mum.
Whether any of these catch on in the same way is debatable.
The multiple meanings may prove a difficult obstacle to overcome. One of the more popular offshoots is legsie, where the photograph is of a person’s outstretched legs, often with a suitably glamorous background visible, although this shows the productivity of the concept, rather than of the word.”
Politicians are also not to be left behind. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no stranger to selfie and is arguably the first world leader to use a Twitter Mirror, an exclusive app that produces autographed selfies and posts them to Twitter on his tours.
In 2013, US President Barack Obama and Britain’s the then Prime Minister David Cameron posed for a selfie with Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa, something which was much criticised.
But all said and done, there has to be a line somewhere.
Mobile phone manufacturers are also doing no good as many of them have come out with powerful selfie cameras to cash in on the craze that is growing dangerously.
And this is not all, one can now be left with a selfie shoulder is he or she indulges in too much of self-shooting.
Doctors say one puts too much stress on the muscle and it irritates the area where the muscle comes off the bone and he or she gets this inflammatory response and a lot of pain.
However, researchers at the University of California claim that taking and sending selfies responsibly can act as a mood booster and stress reliever, and help one beat the blues.
By conducting exercises via smartphone photo technology and gauging users’ psychological and emotional states, the researchers found that taking and sharing of certain types of images daily can positively affect people.
The project involved three types of photos to help the researchers determine how smiling, reflecting and giving to others might impact users’ moods. The first was a selfie, to be taken daily while smiling. The second was an image of something that made the photo taker happy. The third was a picture of something the photographer believed would bring happiness to another person (which was then sent to that person).
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