Now I’m of an age when the phrase “taking a selfie” required barricading yourself in your bedroom for ten minutes, with a certain type of magazine and a roll of toilet tissue. You can imagine my confusion when a few years ago I started to hear that people were “taking selfies” in public, with their friends and family. I don’t keep up with a lot of what happens in society, but this seemed to me to represent a very liberal shift in how society viewed “taking a selfie”. My misunderstanding of the paradigm shift that the term “taking a selfie” had taken became apparent to me when my wife and her parents and I visited a temple, we laugh about it now and explain it away as cultural differences, luckily my wife is from Thailand. Whilst I realize now that my faux pas was the result of a misunderstanding any of us could have made, there have been a couple of instances recently of people “taking a selfie” at times, in places, where it has been considered inappropriate to do so. After doing some wildly incoherent searching on the net I found what I felt to be the best of the best, or the worst of the worst, depending on how you wish to look at it. These will leave you asking “just where does our society go from here?” These people’s actions actually make me feel better about my indiscretion in the temple.
Now for most of us funerals are somber times when we respectfully mourn, and take the time to remember the deceased, who on this occasion happened to have been perhaps the most influential statesmen of the 20th century. Or, if you are three of the most influential leaders of the free world an ideal opportunity for a self indulgent selfie.Now Obama, Cameron and the Danish Prime Minister were out of order, but I can’t justify this.There can only be a few sick minded people who would deny that the mass shootings of 38 tourists in Tunisia was a disgusting tragedy. Not so disgusting that other tourist used the site of the blood bath to take selfies.Although it’s not a selfie, taking holiday snaps at the scene where 116 people have recently lost their lives is pretty heartless.Now the holocaust is always a sensitive subject, not one that you would be likely to bring up at a christening, or in a synagogue, but one you wouldn’t think twice about taking a selfie at the scene where at least a million Jews were murdered. The little blushing and smiling emoticon let’s us know that her heart is in the right place.I don’t know why, but I just really think this one is funny. Just how close must the chaos and carnage be before someone in the group says “you know what, this might not be safe”?Now I’m not going to become all pious and say I can’t understand her motivation, I mean we’ve all done it, it’s just her sense of location that must really be brought into question.If I’m honest it took me a hell of a long time to find the ashes to which she is referring. I’m not so sure this is inappropriate, if I was in the urn I can think of worse places to be.Is this wrong, his plane crashed and he survived. Just how do you keep a clear enough head to think “you know what, I should take a selfie of this”?Putting the shameful grammar aside, this really is one of my favourites. The panic expressed by the hand at the top of the picture is in such contrast to the “happy go lucky” Rastafarian guy below it.American tv personality Geraldo Rivera, doing god knows what. Why is he wearing the sunglasses? I just thank god we didn’t get to see the next shot, the money shot.Applaud the creative genius of the sellotape selfies. Just when we though the trend was about to die out, the doers in our society breathe new life into it.It’s not a funeral, it’s not Auschwitz, but it’s really weird.
The Examined Life 