What short memories we have. Surely you saw these around. I did. But then I'm 35, and you may be 23. Anyway, the selfie stick isn't new. The BBC tell us how it came about twice:

“Un-useless inventions, also known as chindogu, are the brainchild of Kenji Kawakami, who defines them as things that are almost completely useless, but not quite. “If you invent something which turns out to be so handy that you use it all the time, then you have failed to make a chindogu. Try the Patent Office,” says the website chindogu.com.

An early selfie stick, perhaps the first, was invented in the 1980s by Hiroshi Ueda. At the time he worked for the Minolta camera company, and was a keen photographer. “Whenever I went overseas I took my camera with me and took loads of photos,” he says.

But while travelling in Europe he encountered a problem. He was keen to get pictures of himself and his wife together - but passers-by couldn’t always be trusted.”

Most interesting to me is this bit:

“The concept encountered some resistance - Minolta’s testing department found that women in particular were very embarrassed by the idea of taking photos of themselves. “The idea of taking a picture of yourself was very new back then,” says Ueda.”

If anything, today's selfie is as good at taking photos as it is at checking makeup, hair, spots, etc. This goes for both women and men. And as I said, the simple selfie has been one of the goals of photography since the beginning.

It's just that with front-facing and back-facing lenses and screens, the selfie (and stick) make a lot more sense today than it did 30 years ago.

Via Petapixel: The Original Selfie Stick Was Invented in the 1980s