Straighten up the Leaning Tower of Pisa; Camera, Action… and Pout!
It’s not that I don’t ‘get’ the Selfie Stick. I really do. It’s an ingeniously simple and quite revolutionary invention… if you are needing to take a snap of yourself for an important purpose and there is nobody else (or nobody else capable of taking a blur-free shot) around, that is.
So from a practical point of view it’s a revelation.
We are creatures of online media and require gazillions of profile pictures. It’s a bit boring if they all look the same. The sleek Selfie Stick can be tucked away in our desk drawer ready for our self-created professional masterpiece with specs on the tip of our nose, sipping a latte and pondering about the meaning of life. It also saves us on shelling out for professional snaps.
Kārlis Dambrāns
But since when did it become as essential as passport, tickets and money?
Since my recent city break to Seville. That’s when. The streets were awash with – it has to be said – mostly teens and twentysomethings with their just-a-tad-pathetic paraphernalia. But the Selfie Stick Circus isn’t just happening overseas, in London it’s recently been banned from The National Gallery for being a danger to the artefacts. Heck, I hadn’t even considered it from that point of view! Next thing you know they’ll be reporting on ruckuses at the doorways of pubs and clubs throughout our Green and Promised Land. Tottenham Hotspur FC was one of the first football grounds to decline them. I guess they had a foresight along similar lines.
Selfie Sticks kill conversation.
Now you don’t have an excuse to ask the hot girl/guy to take a picture of you when you’re backpacking around New Zealand. And who knows where that could have led!
Not living in The Now is nothing new…
We’ve been there, done that and worn the T-shirts with camcorders first, followed swiftly by our beloved mobile phones.
But ultimately, we are watching life on re-play.
We miss out on the smells, sight, sounds, colour, feeling and emotion of our current setting. We are so hellbent on capturing the perfect image of a moment that we’re pinching ourselves off from even experiencing it in the first place! It’s insanity. And all to prove what; that we have a fabulous life? Look at me, I’m in Paris and my blusher is enhancing the dusky pink of the evening sun! We’re even losing our memory processing skills, each triggered by these the five senses we deliberately put on hold. It’s like being at a Lady Gaga concert and putting on a pair of sunglasses… as well as a set of headphones… as well as a paper bag to listen to her on iTunes instead.
And the irony is we’re at our most beautiful ‘au naturel’…
Like when we put the apparatus down and stop getting so fixated on whether our mascara has withheld the test of time after the log flume at Alton Towers… and we just happen to get snapped by our friend. And when Barcelona’s 38 degree heat wave has caused our foundation to run, but we are too engrossed in the wonder of the Sagrada Familia to give a damn that our dad has just taken a sneaky pic for the family album… These are the moments when we are captured in un-staged, organic and real snapshots in time. And they are priceless. No Selfie Stick on this earth could compete with them. Not even Simon Cowell’s.
And Selfie Sticks look like walking sticks.
When I was wandering around sunny Seville, I wasn’t so sure where one started and the other ended. So do yourself the biggest favour and put yours down. Unless you want to be escorted across the road by a kindly Boy Scout, or mistaken for a Litter Picker who should be back at work in the park.
You’d also be saving yourself $$$
What was the point in splurging out all of that hard earned cash on a long weekend in NYC to spend those precious hours pre-occupied with whether or not your moustache is showing (whether you are a lady who likes to look sleek, a guy who’s been straining to grow it, or a bit of both…)?
Ultimately, perfection is a false idol.
And the Selfie Stick is yet another product which puts all its focus on vanity and ‘the ideal’. As if the covers of our fashion magazines aren’t airbrushed enough, now we are literally airbrushing ourselves. Is that what it takes nowadays to permit ourselves to enjoy being in the mud at Glastonbury, lying on a beach in Phuket or climbing Snowdon?
Well you won’t see me joining up for Selfie Stick Circus… except when I use one to trip up a Selfie Stick acrobat. It wouldn’t exactly be my fault, would it? They weren’t looking where they were going…
