Selfie (Self-shooting) & Homicide

Harashankar Adhikari

Globalisation influences many changes in India's social, cultural and economic aspects. People have adapted it steadily. This adaptation, one finds in changing behavioural pattern, life style, life choices and habits in individual's daily life. Now people of India are gradually accepting another change popularly publicising as digital India. Mobile (cell phone) with multi-media facilities is the key transformer. It's users are now of all ages of all educational and social-economic background. It badly influences to build up relationship with artificial world via social media and etc, and gradually detachment from relationship with virtual world (even with immediate family members) pushes into a mental state of loneliness.

Selfie becomes a way of homicide and that it causes accidental death during sell-shooting is in alarming threat. It might be a cause of loneliness and a technique of self-exhibition of body and image as adventure. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2013), selfie denotes a self portrait made in a reflective object of from arm's length. Images take an important role in daily online interaction. Visual economy tells that it is profoundly ageist, ablest and heteronormative and leads people to feel inadequate and dissatisfied with themselves, it reflects sexualisation, pornification and raunchiness. It looks how bodies are experienced and performed within visual culture and its' focus is body-normativity. 'Bodies are entwined with sexuality, but we seek to interpret what body-selfies are and do in a space where voyeurism and sexualised looking are permitted, indeed encouraged'. It acknowledges beauty and sex appeal as full members of the community. This online visual self-presentation causes self-injury. According to Coleman (2008), selfie taking and sharing determines theoretically the concept of 'bodies as becoming'. But 'bodies are socially constructed and invested with cultural meanings and values'. Present consumer cultural makes body as commodity to keep it fit, slim and young. It is a sign of a 'flawed self'. And it equates as 'slenderness with beauty'. Foucault (1977) says that it focuses the 'games of truth in the relationship of self with self'.

In this era of consumerism and marketism, individual feels good to self expose in digital network. One feels proud to be interacted with this network and comments from fellow members and it is for psychological satisfaction. Practically, broken family and social bondage are the burden of individual-individual interaction. Everybody in the family and society is busy for self and this thin network of relation does not permit to ventilate one's joy and sorrow. The material civilisation influences to keep relation with materials. Parental bonding becomes a statutory need for money and materials. Peer, friendship and neighbourhood relations become inactive in one's daily life.

Therefore, one individual suffers from mental ill-health of isolation and loneliness and he/she prefers relation with artificial world which demands various entertaining materials like selfie. It pushes into the world of competition and if one fails to compete to fulfil the demands of this relationship, he/she has to face a break up. It causes also mental injury of annoyed, absent-minded, demanding and arrogance. Not only that they like to ignore family relations and disrespect their seniors in the family. So, one should think about human relations. Otherwise, this selfie would take more lives.

Frontier
Vol. 51, No.12, Sep 23 - 29, 2018