Selfie: Society's Deadliest Killer?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="634" caption="Taking a Selfie. (2/11/2015)/Kompasiana (Huffington Post.com)"][/caption]

On the record, I am not part of the selfie bandwagon. It's not as if I am not in the social media ring, since I have my own Facebook and Twitter account. However, self-indulgence is not my best virtue, and that's why I haven't created an Instagram account as of yet, which I am not ashamed of.

Still, selfie's swift embedding into pop culture cannot just fall on deaf ears. Almost every time there is a social gathering, big party or just a beautiful backdrop, you will see people hold their smartphones aloft, either with their own hands or with the assistance of a customized selfie stick, and immortalize these moments in life with self-portraits of themselves. Soon after, the pictures are already trending on social media, generating likes after likes (or dislikes after dislikes). Its cultural upsurge even inspired an American DJ duo the Chainsmokers to create the club hit "#Selfie" in early 2014.

Then, how does the art of selfie culminate to human's demise? One day, I stumbled upon a short newspaper article about a Cessna 150 plane crash which happened in Denver in May last year. After nine months of thorough investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) came upon an uncanny conclusion. Its pilot Amritpal Singh was believed to be taking a selfie when the plane was going on a steady climb. It was also believed the flash of the camera caused him to experience spatial disorientation. This snowballs into the pilot's loss of direction and eventually, control of his plane. Though, it was not much about the hull loss, but the one human casualty the pilot caused. In light of that, the impact of selfie to individuals is suddenly put under microscopic scrutiny. Which leaves the question: is selfie society's deadliest killer?

If you're behind the "no" fence, then you'll say it depends on the individuals. After all, we live in an era where people's popularity is defined by how much followers or how active are they in the social media. Taking a selfie leaves the door open for social recognition.

However, there have been so many cases where individuals' dependence in social media fame blinds them from the most important things in life. At the end of the day, it does more harm than good on a psychological and social level.

There's this one tragic story I stumble upon on the website of the UK tabloid newspaper Mirror. Using her salary from a summer job in 2013, teenager Xenia Ignatyeva bought a camera. The camera was like her personal window of opportunity, where she can express her artistry by the click of a button.

So, on another chilly evening in St. Petersburg, Xenia took her artistry to outrageous level when she climbed atop a railway bridge on her own, while her friend Oksana Zhankova watched from below. Police said that she "wanted to take a snap of herself at night, to give it the most dramatic effect and with the railway line as a backdrop." Little did she knew, her drive for the ultimate artistry would compound to her slipping off the top of the railway bridge, getting electrocuted by a high-voltage cable she tried to hold onto for dear life, and falling to a premature death.

It's true we don't live in a perfect world. In fact, it's the imperfections which make the world far more perfect. However, every human's purpose of living is to seek that perfection, and that's what drives them forward. Sometimes, you just never know what the expectation of perfection is, that in the end becomes your poison chalice.