People, The Original Selfie Stick

If you’re like me, you’ve been sitting here, counting the hours until CES is over so you can get back to non-CES business next Monday (T minus five hours). Beyond CES, it’s been for all intents and purposes a harrowing, tragic week for the news business (Je suis Charlie).

Awkward CES selfie stick images like the one above are a particularly small hairball in this week’s heinous media enchilada, but annoying nonetheless. In many ways tech brings us together (#JesuisCharlie), in other ways it makes us even more isolated, more removed from our fellow humans. And it can also make us look like dorks.

As much as I love technology, I’ve never seen someone use a selfie stick in the wild without laughing inside. If you need a picture of yourself (or your behind) taken so badly, so immediately, why don’t you simply ask another person to do it?

That’s what we did back in the day, before the proliferation of selfie sticks, before hotels started handing them out for free like umbrellas and vendors at the Colosseum and the Eiffel tower added them to their roster, in addition to fractal versions of the monuments themselves and $4 water. Before Beyoncé used one in a music video. Before they were a gleam in some Japanese inventor’s eye.

I know it’s asking a lot of you dear readers, but next time you consider whipping out a selfie stick, please save me and the general public’s secondhand embarrassment and just ask someone else to take your photo.

(If you’re afraid someone will steal your phone, approach someone who looks like you can take them …)

You might make a new friend, or meet the love of your life. I mean, who knows, you might even land a portrait by Mark Zuckerberg?

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Top image by Roberto Baldwin.