1142. Selfie Fever.....!

A group of NCC cadets from Bangalore who had gone for an outing decided to take a dip in a temple tank. After bathing in the tank they left from there to realise much later that one of the boys in their group was missing. Some students went through the selfie photos and what they found was shocking. In one of the photos they saw the missing boy struggling to stay afloat, only his hair was visible on the surface of the tank as the rest of the group was busy smiling at the mobile camera. Selfie fever had taken one more victim.

Is clicking selfie that bad???

No, not at all but getting mesmerised and to be unaware of the situation around is a cause for concern.  

Our face has always been used as an effective attention-grabbing mechanism. Hence there is an extra care taken to enhance and present it to the outside world. It has been mistaken as display of self-worth. Some feel that posting a selfie regularly on the social networking sites will boost up their self-confidence, but that is not true. Self-Confidence is an inner matter and doesn’t need approval from other.

American Psychiatric Association says that those who have a compelled feel to regularly post pictures of themselves on social media need mental help. The term for this mental condition is “Selfitis.” Selfie didn’t exist a decade ago but later the term came into use when self-portraits were possible with a digital camera. Then the digital cameras were replaced by the smartphones as it was quick and easy. Since then selfies have become a staple of the modern online landscape making way for the sales of selfie sticks and now selfie drones.

Clicking a selfie has a bad reputation for being something that “narcissists” do. Taking a self-photograph is not always an exercise in self-love. Sometimes it is simply a convenient way to take a photo when no one else is around to take the snapshot. But if a person wakes up in the morning and then clicks 10 or 20 selfies to choose which one to post to Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram it calls for a problem.

The height of selfie craze is when we find that it is taken in most inappropriate places like place of worship and in very insensitively at the place of disaster like accidents and natural catastrophes. I only wonder why people owning a smart phone are not smart enough to know how they should behave responsibly in the place where they need to volunteer to help instead of capturing the event. For some it is just the like and comments for the pics posted on the social networking sites which matter most. While a few want to be the “first” to send the pics on the WhatsApp looking for appraise from friends in their group. 

Amazingly there are many photo editing tools available to enhance the selfie taken and make it look better than others.