Selfie Taking Claims Another Victim

Digital distraction has been known to pose a serious health risk for less cautious pedestrians, and today it took another victim when a man fell into the sea while taking a selfie.

While the man may have only had his pride dampened, other people haven’t been so lucky. Some past examples have included a 16-year-old boy who sustained a concussion from walking into a telephone pole and a 14-year-old boy who fell 8 feet off a bridge into a rocky ditch.

A study conducted by Ohio State University found that cell-phone related injuries more than doubled between 2005 and 2010, and it was expected to double again by 2015. Jack Nasar, a co-author of the study, said:

The role of phones in distracted driving injuries and deaths gets a lot of attention and rightly so, but we need to also consider the danger phone use poses to pedestrians.

Earlier in the year, a Chinese city started doing just that by creating a special sidewalk lane specifically for cellphone-distracted pedestrians. Hopefully that lane will be free of open manhole covers.