The invention has now become popular but still has disadvantages because to some it is quite annoying. Reports in some news outlets have spoke about the selfie stick was banned in some places such as music concerts and even Disneyland in June 2015 for safety reasons.
Due to this phenomenon many researchers are curious to study selfie culture. Many of research papers I have read about selfie culture, discuss people who take selfies tend to have narcissistic personality traits. However, we cannot assume every person who takes a selfie has such personality, but it does imply a high need for self-gratification, especially if they are posted online on to social media to get social approval, through likes, comments and so on. We can assume that behind the selfie there is a hidden value in need or search for social approval.
According to Jesse Fox who studies the personalities of selfie takers, she said people forget that narcissism is not just about being an egomaniac, it’s also driven by underlying insecurity. During the trip I asked one of the street sellers who was selling selfie stick, why they sell selfie stick and the answer was “it’s a cheap, simple, essential for traveler”. This response highlighted for me how media, particularly social media has driven peoples minds on how to get the perfect picture of themselves with “selfie-angle style”, and when the media tells us how we should look and how we should be. This is highlighted further through a simple search of the hashtag selfie in Instagram, where many of the images with the most likes include a beautiful background and a person, this reinforces the idea of gaining likes by sharing onto social media.
According to Jacquelyn Morie as an immersive technologies entrepreneur and virtual reality researcher at the University of Southern California, she said with selfies you have the authority and autonomy that you don’t have in other parts of your life.
The rise of selfie culture was affect some aspect such as a distribution of selfie stick itself, with this phenomenon and social media increase narcissism in result a high demand of selfie stick then shift selfie stick become the most essentials tools for traveler. It shows selfie stick is on demand by the public for every occasion then with their massive distribution from shops to street seller who catch this phenomenon to gain or increase their profit on it, can we categorize it as a new forms of capitalism? I think we can, there is several factors need to be consider such as selfie culture and the rise of digital narcissism also increased a massive distribution of selfie sticks around the world.
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Taufan Zasya