Most of us cannot live without social media and enjoy capturing important moments in our lives with a timeless ‘selfie’.
As mobile users increasingly share images online, tragically they have sometimes snapped the moments leading up to a person’s death.
Recently, sixty year old Hideto Ueda was said to have been taking a ‘selfie’ at the Taj Mahal’s Royal Gate, when he collapsed after climbing up the stairs of the white marble tomb and fell.
“He was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital but could not be revived”.
“A postmortem was carried out and the cause of death is heart attack. We have duly informed the Japanese embassy about the unfortunate incident “. Sagar Singh, an officer at the local police station in Agra told the BBC and AFP.
The recent death at the Taj Mahal, India’s fabled mausoleum which is said to be packed with up to 60,000 visitors daily, is the latest in a series of selfie-related deaths and injuries which have occurred this year.
In January, it was reported that three young men were killed in India by a speeding train as they posed for daring selfie with the intention of using the speeding train as a background for their picture. The incident is in a series of fatal accidents in which the victims died as they took selfie photographs on their smart phones.
In August last year a young Mexican man accidentally killed himself while striking a selfie pose with a gun at his head. His friends said he had planned to post the picture on Facebook.
A few days later a Polish couple fell to their deaths while posing for a selfie with their young children on a cliff edge in Portugal.
A US woman died in a highway accident just seconds after uploading a selfie of herself enjoying Pharrell Williams’ hit Happy on her car stereo. The Independent reports that Courtney Sanford’s status declaring her love for the tune, accompanied by a selfie taken at the wheel, appeared on Facebook just one minute before police received reports of a collision involving Sanford’s vehicle.
This June, the European Union proposed a law to criminalize social media posts containing pictures of landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Rome’s Trevi Fountain.
While this remains an option, it is yet to be seen how effective this will be to help reduce the rising number of deaths over something as simple as a ‘selfie’.
