Originally published at: Death-by-selfie increasing amongst Australians | Boing Boing
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Further proof that everything in Australia is trying to kill you. Even mobile phones.
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Given the relative population sizes, that actually means you’re 6x more likely to die of a selfie in AUS than in either US or IN.
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Only if it were a random event. This is a self-selecting process. I’m pretty cynical about the intelligence of Americans, so I bet if things were on equal footing, more USian “influencers” would be having fatal interactions with the ground.
Stupidity really is limitless, isn’t it?
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Death by selfie should be a category in itself for the Darwin Awards.
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It’s only fair the the mobile phones get to join the plants, animals, weather, government, tourists, and other Australians in the national pass-time.
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So, how long before phone camera software adds some integration with the accelerometer to ensure that whatever selfie ends up killing you at least gets taken(should the operator be incapacitated prior to manually triggering the camera) and posted to social media before the phone hits the ground(should the operator successfully take the picture but less successfully negotiate the cliff edge)?
Just enable #failviral before the start of your photoshoot and rest assured that nothing will stop the moment from being captured. Like the Special Weapons Emergency Separation System; but for minor social media personalities.
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Think of it as Evolution in action.
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FA&FO exemplified.
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Sure, on the one hand, a terrible tragedy - on the other hand, if you time it just right, you end up with an awesome selfie, though.
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So 15 deaths over 13 years as a fraction of the 3700 annual deaths due to falls (itself, the 10th most common cause of death) is a crisis apparently? Or is this just judging kids these days and their strange ways?
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It really smells like that. Even globally, 379/13 ~= 29 person/year.
More than ten times that number of people dies strangled by their own bedsheets in the US alone.
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Yeah, badly written article quoted.
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) showed the number of people who died from accidental falls over the past year. Some 3,747 people plunged to their deaths with 20 of them happening off cliffs.
That’s the number of death from falls. “Plunged to their deaths” accounts for a very small fraction of death from falls.
Most fatal falls are elderly people in their homes. They’re not “plunging to their deaths”; they’re slipping on a wet kitchen floor and hitting their head, or falling a step or two and breaking a hip, leading to complications and death.
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"Sheila, hold my beer. Now watch me get into this bathtub, you young whippersnappers! "
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I’ve heard that the number of deaths from falls has really plunged over the past few years.
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I wonder if anyone has ever been killed while attempting a selfie with a wild emu. And I don’t mean they were standing too close to a cliff edge.
You have sparked a long dormant memory! I recall one Bowery Boys oldie, were “Slip” (leader of his gang; mangled the English language regularly) and his cohorts were chased up to the edge of a cliff. Paraphrasing Slip: “We’re at the edge of a terrific preci-pineapple.” Apparently, he had conflated “precipice” and “pinnacle”. He may have also twisted “terrible” into “terrific”. Whatever. Now back to our program.
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Precipitously.
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If you buy that they created the term 20 years ago, they have had more time to work on increasing the danger of them
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