The Wall Street Journal Says Selfie Sticks Started In Malaysia! SURE OR NOT?
This week's Tech Tuesday column has been hijacked by the SAYS current affairs writer Mei Mei Chu. Brace yourselves, you're about to find out if our fifth appendage is truly 'buatan Malaysia'.
By Mei Mei Chu — 06 Jan 2015, 03:59 PM — Updated over 9 years ago
A December 2014 video by the Wall Street Journal discussing Asia's top Google search terms has let slip that the selfie stick was "started in Malaysia"
In this WSJ video that discusses 2014's top tech terms that were searched on Google in Asia, WSJ's Ramy Inocencio and Google's Joyce How revealed with confidence that the selfie stick was started in Malaysia. Calling it a "homegrown Asian innovation", they said that the selfie stick was huge all over Asia, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Let's keep in mind that this is the gadget TIME Magazine declared as one of the 25 best inventions of 2014...
It was also the hottest Christmas gift in the United Stated in 2014.
It is also the same gadget Gizmodo says deserve a permanent ban
"I saw a group of four teens using one of these in the wild, in front of the Buckingham Fountain in Chicago. I considered asking if they just wanted me to take their picture, but clearly they didn't because they bought a stick specifically to avoid that kind of basic human interaction. There are so many different kinds of selfie sticks, yet no one has managed to invent one that doesn't automatically make the person holding it look like a huge dork," Gizmodo writes on an article of selfie-enabling devices that deserve a permanent ban.
So to say that the selfie stick is a Malaysian invention would make half the Malaysian population very proud and make the other half cringe in horror
We should, neigh, must find out if the selfie is indeed * produk buatan Malaysia*. It is our civic duty.
Firstly, Promaster, a US company claims to be one of the first to sell selfie sticks but does not know who invented it
Promaster, which sells selfie sticks, first debuted its product in February, so far selling more than 6,000 units, which Rich Bright, the company’s director of sales, said is “definitely more than was expected” by this point. Bright adds his company was “one of the first in the game for selfie sticks, but I don’t know who invented it.”
skift.com
We then found Alan Cleaver in England who claims that his grandparents were the first person in recorded history to use a selfie stick. The 1926 photo has a stick protruding to the edge of the photo:
That's right: Arnold Hogg is the first person in recorded history to make use of what we now call a selfie stick. Alan Cleaver told the Guardian that he couldn't remember his grandparents ever using the stick, but he said that the self-sufficient contraption fit the mold of his creative grandfather, who died in 1972 when Cleaver was a teenager. "This photo has always been a family favourite," Cleaver said. "Arnold Hogg, my grandad was a very funny guy and it just seemed to sum up his humour."
dailydot.comOn the other hand, we found a book of '101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions' that was published in 2000, way before selfies exploded in our faces, featuring the one and only "Self Portrait Camera Stick"!
With no other solid proof nor Malaysian connection to the invention of the selfie stick, it seems like the question of who created this ingenious gadget may remain as one of the world's unsolved mysteries.
However, we would sleep better believing that the selfie stick is actually a Japanese Chindogu invention. It fits the description:
Literally translated, Chindogu means unusual tool. They are everyday gadgets that are ideal for solving very specific problems. However, Chindogu have no utility at all. They would either cause new problems, be embarrassing to use, or just plain not be practical. They are often described as “unuseless” as they really do solve a problem but there’s something else that prevents them from being put into practical use.
tofugu.comPlus, let's face it, we all know how the Japanese are best at inventing mind-boggling things like the eye drop funnel glass
Malaysians could have just been the one who picked up this little unknown Japanese invention, took a gazillion selfies, and turned it into a worldwide phenomenon
That's one thing we can be proud of.
Search interest in selfie sticks — locally known as tongkat narsis, literally narcissist staff, and its abbreviation, tongsis — began picking up in Jakarta toward the end of 2013, and in the Indonesian capital was seven times that of the US, the study said. Google’s study also noted that the trend spread to Malaysia, where search interest was double that of Indonesia between January to March 2014.
