Here's why tourists need to stop taking selfies

The days of awkwardly asking a fellow tourist to take your picture in front of an attraction are long gone.

Instead we pull out our phones and extend them to arms length in order to capture our face against said attraction as a background.

And that's exactly the problem with most tourists who take selfies: the attraction they're photographing becomes a background.

They're way more concerned with securing the best selfie possible, so they can later post it to Instagram and Facebook and rack up as many likes as possible.

Taking in the actual attraction they've traveled to see clearly comes second.

In other words, selfies are selfish and distracting, and recent incidents have proved that they're causing way more trouble for tourists than they're worth.

Back in May, two men were at risk of facing criminal charges after climbing onto the 300-year-old Statua dei due Ercole, in Cremona, Italy, in an attempt to take a selfie, Mashable reported. Their climb caused the crown of the statue to fall off and crumble after hitting the ground.

But the attractions aren't the only things being harmed in the name of capturing the perfect selfie.

According to Travel + Leisure, a mother and her daughter were on a trip to Yellowstone National Park when they tried to take a selfie with a bison. When the two were less than 10 feet away from the animal, they turned their backs in an attempt to capture themselves with the animal. The next thing they heard was the bison's footsteps coming towards them; the mother couldn't escape quickly enough and was lifted off the ground and tossed into the air by the animal.

This is the fifth time someone has been injured in Yellowstone after getting too close to a bison - there was one 16-year-old girl who was even gored.

Selfies are so ingrained in us that even during a plane's emergency landing people are taking them. Mashable reported that when passengers aboard United Airlines flight 447 from Denver to LA were asked to put on their oxygen masks due to low cabin pressure, three passengers took selfies with the masks on.

The three passengers - one of them being professional WWE wrestler Sheamus - proceeded to post their oxygen mask selfies on Twitter after landing. In the case of an emergency landing, passengers should be focusing on the crew members and the instructions they're giving - and not on taking a picture of themselves. 

If those three incidents don't already demonstrate that the selfie does more harm than good, there's the fact that a whole slew of amusement parks, museums, galleries, and other tourist attractions around the world have recently banned the selfie stick.

Six Flags is the latest, and before that, it was Disney. Others include the National Gallery in London, the Colosseum in Rome, the Palace of Versailles in Paris, and New York City's MOMA, Guggenheim, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The full list of places that no longer allow selfie sticks is long, which isn't a surprise, considering they all house valuable pieces of history that shouldn't be put at risk simply because a tourist wants to add another crazy selfie to their repertoire.