By Hannah Johnston ’16
Opinions Editor
The ‘selfie’ has become the icon of today’s pop culture. Everywhere you go there seems to be yet another person snapping a picture of themselves with the front facing camera. People stop straight in their tracks simply to take a picture of their duck face/good hair day. The selfie tsunami is flooding the streets of our towns, ruining an otherwise perfect night out with an extended arm shoving obnoxiously just to get the perfect shot. It did not seem as though it could get much worse, but with these kinds of things they always do. The newest invention in consumer culture marks yet another downfall in today’s society. The super original name paints the entire picture: the new hottest gadget is called the selfie stick.
What is this selfie stick you may wonder? Well it’s exactly what it sounds like: a selfie on a stick. Users attach their phones using a wire connected to the headphone jack. The phone then rests at the end of a 12″ to 27.55″ long stick. Pretty exciting, I know. The lengths we take just to please the “inexhaustible appetite for self-portraits from a slightly better vantage point than the length of the human arm allows” (Adam Pasick of qz.com) are quite astounding.
The selfie stick has already managed to put up a red flag to society. This gadget is now being banned in most museums, as well as Wimbledon and Churchill Downs. Although organizations and establishments are saying no to the selfie stick, the problem still remains elsewhere. Why is no one questioning the people walking down the street with a three foot long stick in their hands simply to take a picture of themselves? Apparently iPhone 6+’s attached to a giant metal rod are just becoming the norm.
It may not seem like it at first, but selfie sticks are inherently antisocial. Previously, in order to get a family photo on vacation someone would need to ask a passerby to snap the shot. Nowadays, a family member can just whip out a selfie stick and take it themselves. This may seem like a very insignificant elimination of a common social practice, but with the rise in social media these types of details are very important. If we rid ourselves of the small conversations that take place when asking for a photo then who knows what could come next. Social media and its counterpart, the selfie stick, are contributing factors to the increasing distance between individuals and the real world, the real world being a place where glamourized selfies and Twitter updates are not the focal points.
Let’s not forget about the underlying narcissism embedded in these new selfie sticks. Time Magazine explains that the selfie has “been demonized and held up as the latest and most egregiously obvious symptom of a narcissistic society.” And these narcissistic tendencies are doubled when dealing with the selfie-stick. We are willing to buy a contraption that ranges anywhere from 15-40 dollars simply to enable our self-portrait taking abilities. As much as you may be in love with your perfect winged eyeliner or your obnoxiously gelled hair, nobody stinking cares.