Editorials, Opinions

Our view: Selfies are cause for concern

If you haven’t heard of selfieswithhomelesspeople.tumblr.com yet, it won’t be long before you do.

A number of news publications, including New York Daily News, Fox News and USA Today, to name a few, have discussed their negative opinions about the website.

Fast Company senior editor Jason Feifer created the site, along with a similar site: selfiesatfunerals.tumblr.com.

The most recent post on this site is of President Barack Obama’s participating in a selfie during Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.

Interestingly enough, Feifer’s “selfies with homeless people” (SHP) seems to be generating more negative publicity than the “selfies at funeral” (SF) site.

The SHP website features some pictures where the homeless person is either sleeping on a curb or unaware that someone is taking a photo with him or her.

There are also some people who take selfies with a homeless person smiling at the camera, which we find a little strange but, more or less, harmless.

And then there are those who take the selfie to another level, taking photos in front of the Chernobyl site or the Holocaust Memorial, and smiling while they do it.

We find photos like this shocking and in bad taste. Not only that, but it’s also a little confusing.

Feifer’s defense is that the blog is only posting selfies through hashtags from the public. He is not personally taking seflies.

He also said visitors to the site can donate money to a number of organizations through a link at the bottom of the blog’s home page.

We wonder: is that Feifer’s cover up for promoting offensive images? Or is he trying to generate funding to help the homeless?

We’d like to think that all of this is in good nature but we have our doubts.

Selfies are scattered throughout every social media platform. It’s safe to say those of us who have any social media account, are accustomed to seeing selfies on a daily basis.

We understand that seflies are taken in good fun and, although some of us don’t want to admit it, they have become a staple of our generation.

New York Daily News said it’s only teenagers who are taking inappropriate selfies, but that’s not entirely true.

SHP has a collection of pictures where many of the selfie snappers are in their early to mid-twenties.

We may not like what selfies have become, but unfortunately, it’s an unavoidable trend.

With sites such as Feifer’s, we’re worried that the insensitive selfie has become accepted as some type of weird social norm.

At this rate, we may see society accustomed to such immoral conduct that we’ll no longer be able to draw the line.

In the end, we’re left confused, shocked and irritated that sites like Feifer’s exist. Worst of all, people from our generation are willingly particpating in them.

We definitely don’t condone or agree with these people’s actions, and hope people quickly hop off of this disturbing bandwagon.

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