Very rarely do you see the entire world both embrace and revile a person, place or thing. Yes, we make a habit of building up the star, enjoying their fall and rooting for the comeback. That very rarely happens all within a matter of months.
Yet that is the very thing we've seen over the past six months with the selfie stick, a sensation that has gone from viral to virus in a flash of an iDevice. But I am not here to join the current wave of haters. As much as it pains me to do so, I am here to defend the honor of the stick.
When Hiroshi Ueda invented his first extender stick in the early 1980s, his vision was the same use that has exploded the product today.
The Minolta camera company employee patented the extender stick, which screwed to the bottom of the newer, smaller cameras of the time. Just extend the stick, look in the provided mini-mirror and click.
The world was not ready for the narcissism behind the product in 1983. The product did not sell well, in large part because women tested said they were embarrassed by taking their own picture.
Ueda's patent ran out in 2003. Even without the current boom of the selfie, the self-made photograph has been a goal going back to the 1800s. Enter Wayne Fromm, a Canadian inventor who, like Ueda, was trying to evolve past the timed photograph that never seemed to work.
Fromm's Quik Pod technology was far from an instant success. But the addition of a front-facing camera to the iPhone made short-distance photos too easy and too tempting not to take.
Very rapidly, society's shyness was overtaken by its vanity. Fromm's invention went from a late-night QVC gimmick buy to a must-have product every marketer across the world wanted to "knock off."
And they have - to the point that the travel market has been flooded with the product. We came more and more brazen about capturing the perfect selfie. It became a game of one-upmanship on Facebook. Who went where and who did they take a selfie with.
The product went so viral that sticks were overcoming tourist attractions. I remember standing in Gwangwamun Plaza in Seoul, watching three locals fight a group of tourists, all using selfie sticks like swords. Not shockingly, Seoul banned the use of selfie sticks soon after.
Just as quick as it was the product of the moment, selfie sticks became Public Enemy No. 1. Everywhere from Churchill Downs to Disney World to The Colosseum in Rome has stuck it to the stick in the past few months.
Even with the bans, there's still hundreds of thousands of sticks being used across the world. Fromm and the knock-off army will be making millions off the invention for years to come.
I have lamented as yet another salvo in the war against human interaction has taken hold. But today, I am here to say the hating on the selfie has gone a little too far.
Conde Nast Traveler reported this week that selfie sticks are more deadly than shark attacks. Mashable backed up the numbers - when a Japanese tourist fell from a Taj Mahal staircase attempting a selfie, that raised the 2015 worldwide death toll to 12.
Compare that to eight shark attack deaths across the world this year and it would appear the math works. And yet, the logic is far from sound.
A shark kills a human. A selfie stick doesn't kill people.
The true grim reaper is an uncontrollable wave of narcissism and self-importance that has overtaken our civility.
Can you imagine anyone being embarrassed to take a selfie these days? As much I deplore the concept, I admit it - I've taken them too to seal a memory. I did it with the Eiffel Tower in February, I did it with Dr. Seuss on a Carnival cruise ship and I did it with a sheep in the farmlands north of Seoul.
It's easy for me to sit here and long for the days where we formed connections with strangers asking them to take our picture. But have you actually tried to do that recently?
We are so paranoid about stranger danger that you're more likely to get sprayed with mace or charged with pedophilia than you are to find a human willing to take your picture with nothing to gain for them.
There is a good in selfie sticks, a true value, that we have exploited and polluted with our vanity. So please, let's cut it out with the selfie vs. shark dead pools.
Conceit is the true culprit here. Unless we turn off the front-facing camera, look ourselves in the mirror and face the depths of our self absorption, the selfie stick will continue to be used in evil excess.
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