Have you ever visited a really touristy location?  There’s one thing they all seem to have in common: People selling stuff.  Whether you are at the Great Wall of China or Eiffel Tower in Paris;  you’re bound to find groups of people wanting to sell you key-chains, post cards, mini replicas of whatever you’re visiting and of course the I heart (insert place name here) t-shirts.

But the game is changing my friends!  There’s a new kid in town and he’s coming in hot!  It’s the selfie stick.

That’s a lot of selfie sticks for sale!

If you have no idea what I’m talking about let me enlighten you, because I just found out myself.

It’s probably safe to say that most of us know that a selfie is a picture we take of ourselves with an extended arm, while we’re holding the camera.  I completely understand the idea of wanting to capture one’s self in the moment. I’m not shy of the odd selfie either.  We all want to photo document cool places we go and exciting things we do.

The selfie stick is an extendable pole or arm that attaches to your phone.  You connect your phone to blue tooth, holding one end of the pole in your hand, while the other is extended out at full length so you are able to take a photo of yourself from a greater distance away than you could with your arm alone.

Recently on a trip to Rome I witnessed for the first time a ‘selfie’ being taken to a whole new level.  The selfie stick was for sale on what seemed like every corner.  I thought it might have just have been Rome that was invaded, but over the course of a month I’ve seen it for sale and being used in 4 different countries.  The selfie stick is either following me, or there’s an outbreak.  I am forced to believe it’s the latter.

When I first saw this contraption in action there were two schools of thought that instantly ran through my mind.

1.  Have we really come to this?
2.  I want one.

The selfie sticks seems to perfectly represent the height of vanity.  I’m not as disturbed when I see a family using the selfie stick to get a group shot.  I get that.  It’s hard to fit everyone in the picture from close up.  What I find far more disturbing is the women I see having full on photo shoots with themselves, or creating what seems to be full feature films of themselves walking along the beach, boardwalk, or city centre.  I’ve seen them stop to touch up their makeup with a handheld mirror, and strike more poses than Madonna vouging for a music video.  It is behaviour that as teenagers, we’d have been embarrassed to be caught doing in front of our bedroom mirror, yet the amount of grown adults(mainly women) that I have seen doing this in public during my last month of travel is blowing my mind.

People can see you!  You are not an attention seeking adolescent, and you are not in front of the mirror behind the closed door of your bedroom.

But I can’t judge too much, because deep down I secretly wanted to try one the first time I saw them for sale on the street.  I wasn’t actually going to buy it, but a tiny part of me wanted one, just to test it out.  I knew better than to actually make the purchase because if I came home with a selfie stick in my possession my husband would bop me over the head with it to knock some sense into me.

I can’t help but wonder if it just seems so strange because it’s new.  Like skinny jeans, will I loath them and cringe whenever I see them for the first two years, and then suddenly own nothing else.  I guess I can think of the selfie stick as a social experiment.  In 365×2 days will I be trotting around with a selfie stick poking out of my handbag?  Will I refer to life before the selfie stick?  Or will I fight the good fight against vanity and narcissism.

There’s no way to tell really.  Never say never, but from where I’m sitting now, I want to stand up and shout, ‘Come on people, we’re better than that!’  Go back to the days where we interacted with our fellow human beings.  Walk up to a stranger and politely ask them if they will take a picture for you.  You might even meet someone you like, other than yourself staring back from the screen of your phone.

Be gone selfie stick!  We don’t need you and your go-go-gadget arm polluting the backdrop of every famous monument and beautiful place in the world.