Selfie Deaths in the Outdoors
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
This story is not outright dishonest, unlike the typical mass media story [1] that says she climbed mountains in her bikini and then immediately follow that up with the story of her falling and freezing to death, leaving readers with an image of a stupid girl prancing up a mountain half-naked without appropriate gear. Still, I hope they get roasted by their readers for it and forced to publish an apology.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bikini-hiker-g...
There's no story here beyond bad luck and the inherent dangers of remote, rugged places, so for ostensibly dignified outlets like the Washington Post to headline their pieces with "Bikini Hiker" was lurid and unfair. But seeing Outside do it, even with a more accurate story, is much nastier. This is their beat, and they're usually much better at discussing these risks than non-dedicated journalists. Anyone who keeps track of dedicated hikers and climbers knows that these incidents happen, and happened long before selfies got involved. So Outside ought to know better, and with any luck their readers do know better.
Honnold got his start free soloing because he didn't have a climbing partner, then continued later because it let him climber faster and more easily. Wu's past is less documented, but to all appearances she was seriously hiking and mountaineering long before her rise on social media, no different than any other mountaineer who hones their skills and then later lands a sponsorship. Bypassing those histories in favor of talking about "personal brands" and selfie-induced selective attention is incredibly unfair. The comparisons between professional and amateur photographers taking risks make some sense here, but there's no such narrative for these two. The risks they run aren't related to their photography, and there's no copycat epidemic of solo mountaineers and climbers.
Better to talk about Wu alongside other hikers lost in Yushan, or even alongside other serious 'celebrity' mountaineers like Scott Fischer. It's not a story that has any place in this piece.
It's immaterial whether we like or dislike people who also say so. We need to face this fact: Far too much "news" media in 2019 is shamelessly sensational and devoid of fact checking and journalistic ethics. The "Fake news" phenomenon has two sides. On one hand, there are fly-by-night small content creators popping up, and many of these are click-bait trash or are propaganda tools used to manipulate the public. On the other hand, there is a dying legacy media who is falling afoul of their fading business model and the same incentives the modern Internet creates. If it weren't for the fading credibility of the latter, the former wouldn't be a problem. We need to call out both!
On the other hand, there are also "startups" in the news media space who are doing good work and are prospering. It's vital that our society develops enough of an immune system to quiet down the click bait trash.
(EDIT: This cannot take the form of big tech firm censorship! It's just a 2019 technological twist that private companies now have power commensurate with governments. The effect is the same.)
I see this sort of "let's take a new look at this thing we all have a preconception about" approach to podcasts too, which start with a point and try to gather all the evidence they can to support it. It's obnoxious and dishonest and should not be considered comparable to an objective and well-researched article.
I wonder statistically about outdoor activities like that what is the probable and average life expectancy impact - since while it has hazards all should respect being active is also better for your health than sitting at home.
> It’s easy to write off these tragedies as catastrophically bad judgment.
Yeah, because they are. I have never once thought about risking my life for a selfie. The only thing the author offers to explain why this isn't true is that some selfie deaths occur while the photographer is engaged in “non-risky” behavior. That would make them accidents. Whether someone was holding a phone when an unforeseeable accident befalls them seems pretty irrelevant.
Overall I'm not sure 259 people dying in six years worldwide can be called an epidemic, especially when you consider that they may have died this way even without handheld cameras to document it. It seems very silly to call it “our obsession” with photographing risk-taking when obviously the overwhelming majority of people do not do this.
(Also good to know that apparently you can have a dizziness spell gazing into a deep void like that, a large chunk were people who stood on the edge, looked in, got dizzy and fell over)
While it's definitely an issue, I'd caution against blaming technology.
They call out Gigi Wu, Victor Thomas and Alex Honnold - all three do this with purpose, and planning (Alex Honnold especially. To bring him into this topic is odd to me.
<SPOILER> He had practiced the El Cap climb roped in countless times, until he had every hand hold memorized, and understood intimately that he could die. </SPOILER>
That is all very different than the person who sees a shot where they are, and takes an uncalculated risk, because the photo is just there to take.
> Is Gigi Wu’s summit project really all that different than the stylized images we love to see in glossy magazines like Outside? Do we put it in the same category as, say, elite athlete Alex Honnold’s epic free climb of El Capitan
That's a nasty rhetorical trick, because they are in the same category, but it's not the one the story set up for Wu. Solo traverses and free soloing are both risky but established practices, and neither is a product of selfies or modern media culture. John Bachar was setting the precedent for Yosemite free solos 30 years ago, and solo hiking is too old to date. Wu and Honnold aren't average people getting hurt imitating experts, they're experts who happened to gather fame for risks they were already taking. Neither of them deserves to be present in a story about people endangering themselves for the sake of social media.
259 deaths over 6 years is hardly an epidemic and probably statistically insignificant as a cause of death.
Which it did, of course.
I'm pretty sure it was far fewer deaths than this over a period of 30-40 years, yet for some reason, it was deemed to be highly dangerous and pulled from the market (IIRC, you can still get it for industrial uses - consumer use has been banned).
Just to be clear, I'm saying the same thing I believe you are; that statistically the numbers are insignificant. I find it ludicrous that in the case of MEK, it was used as an excuse to pull the product (to be replaced by far inferior other products on the market) - though I tend to wonder if that was the only reason (I tend to wonder if it didn't have to so with our "war on some drugs", as such a fluid could be used for the making of meth, I imagine).
I doubt any laws will be enacted in the case of "selfie deaths", though - even though if you compared the numbers with the "death from MEK inhalation", you'd see that people are far more likely to die from a selfie than from stripping paint with MEK.
As far as I can tell, there's no law requiring "air duster" manufacturers to add bitterant to their products to prevent inhalant abuse. But despite that, it is in pretty much all of their products. It has become nearly impossible to purchase uncontaminated dusters.
It's a kind of disgusting example of how diseases get transferred, now that I think about it...
Lastly, you should NOT use it to clean flour out of the crevices of your kitchen mixer.
It’s not even necessary in this case. A selfie-induced death is interesting enough without a manufactured tale of an “epidemic.”
To be sure, I think it should be compared to the number of deaths in the same situations.
But without the risks "added by taking selfies", as it's the point of the article.
What does this even mean?
Anyway, there is a small movement to create an 8th Leave no Trace principle: https://8thlnt.wordpress.com/ - and that is to be mindful of what we do digitally in the outdoors.
Another good article on the subject: https://lnt.org/new-social-media-guidance/ & https://www.racked.com/2018/8/27/17719792/outdoor-influencer...
In any case, I've seen what people do to trails/nature/wilderness and its pretty depressing. Just last weekend I went hiking with my friend and his friend in the Olympic Peninsula. Friend's friend has 35k Instagram followers all from taking photos of himself and his dogs outdoors and to my great dismay he left his dog poop right on the trail within the first half mile of the hike!
I've noticed that Big Agnes, for example, is pretty discrete about the locations in their catalog. Last year there was a picture of a hot springs in an Idaho wilderness area and the caption was simply "secluded hot springs".
As one of the people who started the 8th LNT "movement" (really just a haphazard attempt by myself and two friends to create a coherent "policy" stance to bring the multitude of conversations about social media impacts together under one banner) I appreciate you bringing that idea up and linking to the articles you did.
LNT likely will never add an 8th principle (and in hindsight I wished we'd called the "movement" something else), but they were very responsive the idea and acknowledged the problems -- hence the social media guidelines they released. I think the fact that they did that was really courageous of them, given the potential for backlash by the "don't tell me what to do online" crowd.
I'm also very emotionally invested in public lands (I moved cross-country to be closer to some of the wildest places in the lower 48 five years ago) and think that most people who are see the fact that social media impacts wild places, often negatively.
Bummer about your friend's friend, but just goes to show just because people project an "outdoorsy" vibe doesn't mean they really care at all.
Thanks again for linking to the articles you did, makes me happy to see someone else out there "gets it". Hope you have some great hikes this summer.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2160416/instagram-ruining-grea...
Ultimately, it's about resource protection and making sure that places don't suffer too greatly from the impacts of having a huge surge in visitors after people see them on Instagram.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of some of the criticism of being discrete about posting vulnerable outdoor locations on social media as being NIMBY or elitist is the fact that once places become super popular (Conundrum Hot Springs, wilderness areas near Portland, etc.) they almost inevitable end up becoming areas where permits are required and limited amounts are available-- thus actually limiting the number of people that can go there and making it more of an "elite" experience.
There is plenty of public land for everyone to spread out on and enjoy, but real issues arise when too many people go to the same exact place (and are often uninformed about how to properly interact with a natural landscape, because the only "research" they did was see a photo on Instagram and then plug the location into Google Maps on their smartphone).
43 deaths per year is ABSOLUTELY NOT an epidemic. Sorry to be harsh, but it is a (minor) rounding error in accidental death statistics. I wouldn't even consider it newsworthy.
How many where neither a phone nor camera is, or was, involved?
Without numbers to compare the reported numbers against, this tells us nothing.
Often it's not even the selfie itself that causes the accident. Just being in these places/environments increases risk of death obviously, but that's not newsworthy.
1: 6.5% death rate among people who summit. Probably higher overall, but I couldn't find a statistic for that.
2: Death rate of 0.8 per 100,000 people.
While this may be true, the ability to determine a situation might be unsafe before the act of taking the selfie isn't diminished. When I visited the Grand Canyon, there were people sitting on the edge of precipitous drops, carefree. I chose to not even come within 50ft. of the drop simply because the potential risk far outweighed any potential gain. By going to the edge I risked death, for what? A view down the canyon? There are extraordinary views from a very safe distance. My life is worth more than any photograph.
... but hang on while I try to convince you that 259 deaths (supposedly) in 6 years (‘11 - ‘17), a time period beginning immediately following the launch of Instagram, is an epidemic we should all take a moment away from our families and work to be concerned about.
I think there is value in questioning why we care so much about photos of us in exotic places, and how that desire has grown with the advances of digital photography, phone cameras and social networking/sharing. But this article fails to ask or comment on those questions.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not talking about lovebirds taking a selfie. My wife and I do that all the time. I'm talking about the sustained amateur photo shoots. We kept hearing over and over as we walked along, "Why can't I connect here? My instas aren't loading." It was bizarre.
This is so condescending. They're primates in some berserk mating ritual because people like taking pictures of themselves with nature in the background? I'm also curious how you know they were dating but not married. Apparently, "sustained amateur photo shoots" is a good indicator of who they are as people or human beings? How does the Mona Lisa fit into all of this? That portrait in front of nature is okay because it's a painting? Because she was married?
More peiple die by struggling themselves in their bed by accident. Nuf said.
Sorry for the direct rhetoric approach - but instead of commenting on bs inthink the thinkers on HN could use use their brainlard on more positive, insightful and entertaining topics.
Me, waking up now.