Selfies have been popularized by the development of digital technology and social media, and selfie sticks have made them even more convenient. However, the use of selfie sticks has reduced opportunities for interaction with others and created new ironies in self-expression and interaction on social media.
Selfie is a neologism that combines the English words self and camera, meaning a camera that takes pictures of oneself. With conventional cameras, it’s hard to take a picture of yourself because you can only see what’s in the lens from behind the camera. In the 2000s, digital cameras that could display the image in the lens on the screen, camcorders that could rotate the screen 180 degrees, and cell phones with front-facing cameras with the lens in the same direction as the screen made it possible for many people to take selfies.
Advances in digital technology have contributed to the proliferation of selfie culture. For example, early digital cameras and cell phone cameras had low image quality and small storage capacities that prevented them from storing many photos, but as technology improved, it became easier to take and store high-quality photos. This has made selfies more common, and more people are taking them in a variety of situations. Especially with the rise of social media, selfies have become an important way to document and share their daily lives.
However, there was still a problem: the distance at which you can take a selfie is limited to the length of your arm. That’s where the selfie stick comes in. By clamping your smartphone to the end of a long stick and adjusting the length of the stick, you can take selfies from as far away as you need. It’s safe to say that selfie sticks have become a must-have for traveling and casual outings. Selfie sticks have overcome the limitations of the selfie, allowing for more creative and diverse ways to take photos.
The popularity of selfies is not unrelated to the spread of social media. Social media has made it easier for people to share what they want to say and how they want to say it with others, and the ability to quickly snap a photo of themselves has naturally made selfies mainstream. Various social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, make it easy for users to upload and share photos, which has made selfies even more popular.
But there’s a bit of irony here. In the days before selfies, if you wanted to capture yourself in a photo, aside from an unwieldy tripod, you had to either risk not being in the picture with your group or ask someone else to do it for you, and it wasn’t uncommon to actually ask for a photo. It’s a glimpse into the warmth of human interaction, even if it’s a brief and forgettable one. The selfie stick is an attempt to avoid even these small encounters, and while it offers convenience, it also has the side effect of reducing the opportunities for direct communication with others.
On the other hand, these selfies are used as a tool to showcase yourself to your social circle on the internet. Unless you set it up otherwise, it implicitly implies that you want to show yourself to acquaintances you don’t know in person, or to a large number of random people who happen to see you. It’s a small irony of the Internet age that we try to avoid even the smallest connection with people we pass on the street, but we want attention from strangers on the Internet. This phenomenon shows how personal identity and social relationships are changing in modern society. With the advancement of technology, people are expressing themselves in new ways and seeking different forms of connection.
