Trends: selfie
- sn pubs
- Oct 23, 2019
- 2 min read
Social media has given rise to a strange sensation called the selfie. A selfie is a picture taken of yourself by yourself. These pictures can be easily taken with the front-facing cameras on smartphones and are often posted on social media. Although everyone with a smartphone is able to take a selfie, the younger generation seems to be especially immersed in this trend.
People take selfies as a way of expressing themselves and to build their own self images. Many people take selfies for themselves as a way of boosting their confidence in their appearances. On the other hand, some may do it to get attention from as many people as possible. People enjoy getting noticed on social media and gathering likes and gaining followers is an easy way to fish for compliments and boost their own ego. However, selfies become a serious issue when more and more people are attempting to take dangerous selfies in order to gain popularity.
Selfies become dangerous and life-threatening when people are, quite literally, dying to take them. In Russia, 2015, there have been a handful of selfie-related fatalities, including the death of two men in the Ural Mountains who posed for a photo while pulling the pin from a hand grenade. Likewise, Canadian Tom Ryaboi took a picture with his feet dangling from a Toronto skyscraper with the camera looking straight down into the streets. Unsurprisingly, his photos inspired others to try and do the same as well. As these dangerous shots become more popular, more people feel pressured to attempt to take them too. This has resulted in a rise in selfie deaths as shown in a study done in 2018.
As the trends become more popular, the death toll gets higher. I hope that more people will be more aware of the dangers of risking their lives to take their selfies. Although taking these life threatening selfies are a way of gaining popularity, there are other safer alternatives and I wholeheartedly wish that people will pursue them instead. Nonetheless, many people will still continue it due to their tendency to gravitate towards daredevil stunts and the thrill that such perilous acts can provide them with, despite the obvious dangers of hopping on board of this trend.
Gabrielle Sim
3 Hope
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