The country’s obsession with selfies has ventured into a questionable ethical boundary when some people traveled far and wide just to take selfies at the site of natural disasters.
As reported by Suara, Lampung Province’s Way Muli Village, one of the areas hit by last Saturday’s deadly Sunda Strait tsunami, has recently seen a surge in visitors who are exploiting devastation from the disaster as backgrounds for their selfies, apparently to boost their social media standing.
Well, the pursuit of the perfect disaster snaps didn’t end well for a couple of selfie takers, whose motorcycles were stolen while they were off posing in front of a tsunami destruction site.
“Those visitors parked their motorcycles carelessly, then [the vehicles] were gone. The people who stole their bikes probably weren’t even residents of Way Muli,” Dahlan, a resident of Way Muli Village said.
This disaster-selfie phenomenon was well recorded in The Guardian’s now-viral story, titled “Destruction gets more likes’: Indonesia’s tsunami selfie-seekers”. It chronicles some “selfie-seekers” who visited areas affected by the tsunami in Banten province.
‘Destruction gets more likes’: Indonesia’s tsunami selfie-seekers https://t.co/qxISnW7NAc
— The Guardian (@guardian) December 26, 2018
In the article, the selfie-seekers say they actually went to the disaster site to donate clothes. But one said the selfies, taken in front of ruins and debris where tsunami hit, served “as proof that they were really there and gave the aid.”
“Pictures of destruction will get more likes. Maybe it’s because it reminds people to be grateful,” one selfie-seeker named Solihat told The Guardian.
Some others traveled from Jakarta to “see the destruction and the people affected” while taking a lot of selfies for social media.
Ego-inflating aspect for selfie-takers aside, the Sunda Strait tsunami is among Indonesia’s deadliest natural disasters this year, with the official death toll currently standing at at least 430 and thousands more injured.
Nearly 22,000 people have been evacuated and are living in shelters.
As morally repugnant as they may be, we hope that the selfie-takers at least have the decency not to explicitly depict images that show real human suffering, such as dead/injured victims or evacuation shelters, as the backdrop to their selfies.
