Selfie stick fad sweeps US, but in Asia it’s so last year

AT the Consumer Electronics Show the scene stealer was the selfie stick, but it conquered Asia long before.

The unstoppable selfie stick trend ‘invaded’ American shores.

FOR all the hi-tech gadgetry on display at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the scene stealer may well have been the selfie stick, that protruding metal monopod which garnered breathless coverage from the assembled tech scribes.

“How many selfie sticks are too many?” asked TechCrunch. “There are whole booths filled with selfie sticks at CES,” added Business Insider.

“The selfie stick has taken over CES 2015,” reads the headline on Mashable. “CES is bursting with selfie gadgetry,” Quartz reports. “The unstoppable selfie stick trend has invaded American shores,” adds NPR. Even The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times got in on the act.

Please, sigh Asia’s billions, the selfie stick was so 2014. Like the phablet before it, the trend appears to have begun somewhere in Asia, conquering the continent before spreading across the Pacific to the rest of the world.

And Google’s here to supply the evidence. Inputting “selfie stick” and 16 linguistic variants on the word through the search engine — which, admittedly, has limited reach in countries like China and South Korea, where it lags domestic rivals — shows the selfie stick trend sweeping across Asia early last year.

Stacking the northeast Asian countries against the US shows the search trend first emerging in force in South Korea in the late winter, with selfie stick fever creeping over to Japan around October and peaking near the end of the year.

China, which shows up the earliest before petering out, never really joined the craze — at least not in a way that Google can quantify.

And the US, meantime, doesn’t really start to get going until, well, last week.

But if you really want to capture the sweep of selfie stick trend, turn your gaze to Southeast Asia, where the true pioneers of the phenomenon reside. Malaysia and Indonesia may have been first to the draw, but The Philippines really took it to the next level. There, the trend exploded early last year, peaking sometime before the midway point of 2014.

Even at its much reduced strength, Southeast Asia remains on a par with the peak of selfie stick mania (so far, anyway) in the US.

In smaller places, like Hong Kong where there’s seven million people, it’s easier for something to go viral than in a country like China with 1.3 billion people, where a trend has to be enormous to make as much of an impact on Google’s scale. (Sure enough, Taiwan and Hong Kong, two Google-friendly markets in China’s orbit, fare much more strongly in these results.)

For further evidence that the trend is hitting the US from across the Pacific Ocean, look no further than Google’s regional interest chart for the “selfie stick”, which shows ground zero is in Hawaii, with California and Nevada — home of CES — close behind, and immigrant-rich New York and Washington, DC right up there as well.

In Australia, the first Google search for “selfie stick” didn’t take place until March last year, according to Google Trends. Here, there was next to no interest until about September. Interest heightened in December with 100 searches and this continues into 2015. But interest in Australia lags badly behind Asia time-wise.

Is this whole “selfie stick” craze a fad? In parts of Asia, the backlash has already begun. In November, South Korean authorities said they would crack down on selfie stick vendors hawking uncertified products, threatening them with fines and even jail time.

And in London, leading concert venues including Wembley Arena and the O2 Arena have banned selfie sticks. Venue bosses fear the monopods block the view of the stage and could injure other gig-goers.

Robin Moroney, a Singapore-based Google spokesman and selfie stick enthusiast who helped crunch the numbers, isn’t so sure.

While some of the countries show a clear peak followed by rapid drop-off, suggesting interest fades as quickly as it arises, Moroney argues that online searches for “selfie stick” tend to be made to answer the most basic questions: What is a selfie stick? How can I get one? “Once you’ve got your selfie stick, what are you going to be checking for after that?” Moroney said.

That makes Google a little less useful for answering the question of how long the selfie stick will be a thing — though if you believe Vanity Fair, another publication newly hip to the selfie stick, the selfie, and maybe the stick too, may not be going away anytime soon.

While the idea of the world’s most populous continent using collapsible poles to take photos of themselves may seem absurd at first, “they often give us a sense where the world is heading”.

The Wall Street Journal