I live in a place where I see kids making dangerous selfies daily. The signs posted are ignored. The barriers are jumped or climbed. Police and fire are pulling these idiot kids off of cliff sides when they fall on "the safe ones".
"Three young Indian men died earlier this year while trying to take a picture of themselves hanging out of a moving train car. A few days earlier, a man fell nine floors, phone in hand, attempting to snap a photo of himself against the Manilla skyline. The month before that, a plane hit two teenage girls in Mexico as they were trying to film themselves in front of the landing. While these are all tragic individual accidents, people are starting to see a trend.
According to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, selfie deaths are on the rise. Since 2014, more than 127 people have died taking photos of themselves, with casualties increasing by almost 50% from 2015 to 2016, with no signs of slowing down in 2017.
Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, the faculty advisor for the project in India, believes something changes in people’s focus when they are taking a picture of themselves that blocks out the evolutionary warning signs. “People interact with their surroundings differently when they are taking pictures,” he told Highsnobiety. “They get too attached and involved in the locations, so they often forget about things. This can become problematic, as certain vantage points and subjects that are worthy of a double tap on IG are not always the safest IRL. The research team found heights, water, moving vehicles, weapons, electricity and animals to be the most fatal combinations for selfies takers, but the selfie that is most likely to kill you depends on your country.
In India, the leading cause of selfie deaths was water, whereas gun photo fatalities were more common in the U.S. and Russia."
http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/05/30/dangerous-selfies/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/05/phone-humpback-whale_n_6619166.html
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