Thanks to its increasing popularity, the selfie stick, which is a monopod used to assist in taking photographs with a smartphone or camera, has established itself as an unstoppable global tech trend.
Selfie sticks first became popular in Asia. The sight of Chinese, Korean and Japanese tourists whipping out their extendable monopods and posing at their smartphones in front of attractions such as France’s Eiffel Tower or Turkey’s Blue Mosque became the norm.
Selfie sticks have now gone mainstream, hitting large department stores like Nordstrom in the US. According to The New York Post, during the 2014 holiday season, a US company that supplies selfie sticks to Nordstrom recorded a 3,000 percent growth in sales in November alone.
So why is the selfie stick so popular? The design is simple and and the technology is practical. The long, extendable monopod which usually extends to about 3ft, clasps onto a smartphone or camera at the end and allows the user to shoot from various angles and incorporates a wider angle. The shutter button on the handle of the stick is usually easily paired with your device via Bluetooth. If you’re travelling alone or would like to take a group photo, you will no longer need to canvas strangers to help take a photo of you in front of a tourist attraction – you can do it yourself.
According to CNN, Attractiontix.co.uk, a UK-based ticket booking site, analyzed 219 million Instagram posts that were tagged “selfie” from October 2010 to January 2015, and came up with a list of the top 10 selfie sites in the World.
Here are the top 10 most popular selfie spots in the World:
- Eiffel Tower, Paris
- Disney World, Florida
- Burj Khalifa, Dubai
- Big Ben, London
- Empire State Building, New York
- Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
- Disneyland Paris
- Colosseum, Rome
- Top of the Rock, New York
- London Bridge, London
