The Ultimate Guide to Survive the Increasing Selfie Madness

Stone age, Iron Age and now the Digital Age? Is there any going back from the selfie fever?

Maybe it’s time to look up from our phone screens? (Photo: iStockphoto)

Maybe all it takes to avoid being hit by a truck when you’re on the road is to not take a selfie!

Historians have broadly classified human history into three parts – the Stone Age, Bronze Age and the Iron Age. While the three periods of history are pretty much self-explanatory, we are in a very different era now and if anyone had to give it a name, we’d most likely end up calling it the Digital Age.

When most people talk about the Digital Age though, they mistake it for the internet. According to me, the internet is just the facilitator but the true Digital Age lies in our devices. Pick your head out of your laptop or your smartphone screen and look at most teenagers these days – they’ll be walking around with at least two (if not more), devices in their pockets – smartphone, iPad, Kindle, so on and so forth.

The fact that people are going ga-ga over a ‘selfie stick’ speaks a lot in itself. (Photo: iStockphoto)

While many argue that we live in starkly different times, there are actually quite a few parallels too. Earlier, when one wielded a sword they had to carry the armour to protect themselves from an attack as well. Today, when we carry our devices we need the charging cables and battery packs to keep them going. We share the same problems as our ancestors but in completely different contexts of survival.

That pretty much brings me to the crux of this piece – survival. This used to be pretty simple earlier too – stay away from the pointy end of the sword. In the Digital Age, it’s about another ‘S’ word – Selfies. Poke your head out again from your laptop or your smartphone and look around you. Chances are that you will find at least a couple of people at that given point in time clicking selfies. They’re all the rage these days – old people do it and the young are perfecting the art of doing it. Heck, you don’t even need a mirror anymore!

The problem with taking selfies though, is the ones taking them end up being blissfully unaware of anything around them. Not only has it become more important to freeze a moment in kilobytes and miss out on being in the moment in the first place, but everything around has also become alarmingly ignorable, including survival. We’ve all heard of various accidents when trekkers have attempted taking selfies at the edges of cliffs.

One gust of wind or one wrong step is all it takes to make that short journey to the afterlife. As if that was not enough, the selfie phenomenon has now become cause for danger on the road too.

Just recently, we heard of a case in the USA of a woman attempting to take a selfie (using Snapchat’s speed filter) at 100mph, and colliding with another vehicle resulting in brain damage to the driver of the other car. Of course, the woman who caused the accident can be argued to already have brain damage considering she was attempting a selfie at those speeds in the first place.

It’s not just the ones at the wheel that are causing problems – pedestrians immersed deep into their screens are an equally big hazard. They’ll step out into the path of an oncoming vehicle without warning – coz that text was just so important. The question to be asked is this – are we as a species becoming ever more complacent with every passing generation? Have we managed to squeeze out every last ounce of basic survival instinct from the human construct?

I’m not against technology at all – in fact, I love it because it helps me stay in touch with friends, allows me to have fun, keeps my ego up and breeds creativity too. What I’m against is stupidity and I see a whole lot of it out there now.

I’m sure there were completely absent-minded fools in the time of kings who accidentally ended up chopping off their limbs while handling swords. All I’m saying is that there seem to be too many of these fools running around free on this planet in the Digital Age. Kids, let’s keep some things as simple as they need to be – leave your devices in your pockets unless you’re sitting in a cafe or parked on the side of the road or simply when you have no chance of being a danger to yourselves or to people around you. While technology may be complex, its driving focus is to make our lives simpler and easier.

Let’s just stick to that, shall we?

(Muntaser Mirkar is one of India’s renowned automotive journalists and the Co-Founder of MotorScribes. He can be reached on Twitter: @Bullspeech)