Forensic features of fatal self photography or “selfies”

Excerpt

In 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary had “selfie” as its word of the year, referring to the phenomenon of self or group photography using smart phones or webcams followed by uploading of the images to the internet [1]. The selfie has been defined as a “self-generated digital photographic portraiture spread primarily via social media” [2]. While the behavior in itself may be quite harmless, the need for certain individuals to mark every step of their lives with a photograph sometimes borders on the obsessive. This of course may reach alarming proportions in major world tourist sites where individuals and groups often spend most of their time moving from one selfie vantage point to another without actually looking at their surrounds. Their selfie sticks almost reach the status of weaponry in allowing them to claim space at crowded venues; the gentle days of the “European tour” sadly appear to be well and truly over. In 2015 it was estimated that 24 billion selfies were uploaded onto Google Photos with the number of selfies on Instagram increasing by a factor of 900 between 2012 and 2104 [3]. …