I am ashamed to admit that there is a selfie stick lying around my suburban home at this very moment. It is silver and black and has probably been on more family vacations than I have.
Flash back one year ago to when my own mother made the devil’s bargain on the bustling streets of Shanghai: Out of all the sights and sounds and knockoff merchandise one may find on a thriving urban avenue, it was the selfie stick which caught her eye for a "steal" of 45 RMB (enough American dollars to purchase seven and a quarter items off the McDonald’s Dollar Menu).
It was at this very moment that I realized the unavoidable nature of the selfie stick. It has finally and forcefully infiltrated the Last Frontier/Alaska (another place the selfie stick has been without me) of technological acceptance: the target population of LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com, which includes my mother. Quite frankly, this transcendence terrifies me.
To be clear, I have nothing against selfies, yet the physical manifestation of an invention designed purely for taking them is frightening.
The selfie stick, which took a spot as one of Time Magazine’s “25 Best Inventions of 2014” among various renewable energy initiatives, world health-promoting technologies, and a high-beta fusion reactor, has no other function than to elevate the selfie without increasing photo quality in any measurable way. Yet this technology is not just the neutral waste of seven and a quarter McChickens that I’ve made it out to be -- let the record show that the selfie stick boasts relevant, detrimental effects on society:
1. Selfie sticks are dangerous. I have been poked in the eye more than once by a selfie stick in New York City.
2. Selfie sticks are annoying. The human arm is of a length where, even fully extended, it does not fully impede the view of those behind the arm. Yet give this same arm a three foot extension, and it is now the perfect tool for blocking any given portion of the people in the row behind yours’ line of vision.
3. Selfie sticks are antisocial. Any self-respecting tourist knows the intrinsic social value in asking a stranger to take their picture. The selfie stick, however, compels us to take these mediocre portraits on our own.
3.5 Selfie sticks are unreliable. Technology this simple should at least work. Technology this simple should be consistently useless. I can understand if you are a high-beta fusion reactor and you glitch a little, but the selfie stick inexcusably has one single function:
Just last week my friend Caroline and I discovered the family selfie stick, and as any shameless person would do, I clicked her iPhone into the stick’s wire holder. What began as an innocent attempt to find the appeal in such a technology ended in unadulterated tragedy when the phone fell three feet out of the frame to its demise. In short, I broke a phone using a selfie stick and that’s something I’ll have to carry to the grave.
So that last point was more of a shameful account of my own actions than a direct criticism of the selfie stick. But regardless, I maintain my conviction that the selfie stick is a detriment to society that just shouldn’t exist. As we move forward in the year 2015, let us limit selfies to the scope of our own limbs, and take group photos the proper way -- by having someone else take them for us.
