Saw this topic come up at least once before, in John Bantin's (
@John Bantin ) Undercurrent Blog article,
The Dangers of Social Media. From that article, he noted:
"We are daily regaled with video clips of people bravely doing hazardous things on social media. At the same time we see for example, car ads and motoring programs on television shows where cars are being driven very much unlike the way my mother-in-law drives. Despite mandatory warnings about doing the same however, they might persuade young drivers to try to emulate them.
Like driving, scuba diving is not seen as a spectator sport. Divers actively participate. This can lead some people to think they can do the same as the divers they admire, which often is not realistic."
Publishing foolishly risky diving runs the risk of facilitating the 'normalization of deviance' discussed in other threads on the forum.
One problem in scuba is there's sometimes not much gray area between 'okay' and 'oh, crap.' It's not like standing too close to a bonfire, or spending too much time in the sun and getting sunburned, where you eventually feel some pain, or at least aren't apt to get hurt
too badly the first time. In scuba, we often expect people
not to learn the limits experientially, but rather based on the conventional wisdom of others and industry standards.
But some people tend to rely on experiential learning. Give'em a limit, they'll push it, see what happens, press forward a bit if they get away with it...
Richard.