Invention of the year? The selfie stick

Filipinos have a way of pushing things to the ultimate limit, whether it’s how many chrome horse teams you can mount on a jeepney hood, or how many variants you can come up with to surpass plain old food (sisig pizza, anyone? Or how about the “ramen burger”?), and this habit showed no signs of abating in 2014.

But while the world tabulates the top trends of the past 12 months, my mind knew immediately what the invention of the year was for Filipinos: the selfie stick.

What could be more Filipino than the selfie stick? First, someone had to come up with the “selfie,” which had already grown to epidemic proportions on local Facebook and Instagram feeds before Ellen Degeneres even thought of turning it into something that people did automatically, reflexively, at every gathering of two or more bodies, even if the bodies weren’t famous Hollywood actors huddled together at the Oscar ceremonies. Before the Ellen move, selfies were just an annoying daily reality of looking at Facebook posts; Filipinos just happened to take way more of them. Then, after that televised uber-selfie, every living Filipino took or was involved in a selfie shot.

So where do you go after that? I’d like to think people would become more creative with their selfies, maybe start taking close-ups of their internal organs (surely there’s an x-ray selfie app under development somewhere?), or maybe posting selfie shots of their own colonic systems.

But, no: instead we got the selfie stick.

The selfie stick, while not a Filipino invention, manages to one-up the selfie by a factor of about three feet. This means more warm bodies crowded into selfie shots, more satisfied grins that register to the world “We are here!” and more exposure, we presume, of the background locale being perfunctorily featured in the shot. The selfie stick shows, once again, that Filipinos are a restless bunch. They are not content with being the country that posts more group shots on Facebook than anyone else on earth; there is always a way to push technology further.

This past week, on a beach in Puerto Princesa, I watched a pair of seniors, a lolo and lola, standing ankle-deep in the surf, wind tossing the waves roughly around them. And then the selfie stick came out, and the male senior extended it out manfully, even as the wind whipped both their wide-brim hats off repeatedly, even as they wobbled a bit in the surf; he just kept reaching for the hats, replanting them on their heads, and going for that ultimate selfie.

There’s a determination about each new technological advance that seems to appeal to Filipinos: they want to “get” it first, to master it, and to document it if possible. Remember how texting was something done only by young Filipinos, because it was cheaper than calling somebody in the old preload days? Now, everybody in the western world texts. It ain’t no thing. On the same Puerto Princesa trip, my brother-in-law recently became fascinated by a laser pen device he saw being used by a firefly tour operator to point out star constellations — so much so that he had to purchase one, right there at the tour site, presumably to be one of the first Manilans to be able to target skyscraper windows eight kilometers away with a thin green beam. Whatever it is, Filipinos want it first.

So it didn’t come as a complete shock to me when Time magazine and National Public Radio (NPR) in the States both seized upon the selfie stick as the invention of the year. After all, I’d been noticing the rise of the device throughout 2014. It turned out to be one of the biggest corporate giveaways during Christmas parties here (that and portable gadget-charging batteries, or “juice packs”),

While some call it the monopod, and some refer to it as the “idiot pole,” Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, notes that the selfie stick “really took off in Asia first and now we’re seeing it in the United States. It’s a gadget that’s sweeping the world, really.”

But you saw if here first. The question is, how long will it last? And where did it come from? And who invented it? Truth is, nobody really knows who first thought it was a great idea to rig up a camera on the end of a stick and sell it, but its arrival seems ideally suited to Filipinos. It fits this country’s “the more the many-ier” mindset, in which fitting more people into a selfie requires increasingly longer-than-human arms.

While the selfie stick wins, hands-down, as the device of the year for Filipinos, close second honors probably goes to the ubiquitous “ice bucket challenge,” which somehow got thousands and thousands of Filipinos interested in finding a cure for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or at least swept up in a craze that purportedly helped raised money to cure the condition by posting short YouTube videos of themselves being drenched in ice-cold water. Like the selfie shot, it was the thing that seemingly most Filipinos had to do in 2014, whether it was out of genuine concern for ALS victims, or mass FOBLO (fear of being left out).

But other than the “me, too” nature of the ice bucket challenge, is there anything more silly-looking than a prosthetic device extended outward above a collection of leaning, grinning faces peering into a camera lens? Probably not. And have we finally pushed the selfie to its outer limits? Again, probably not. In the future, we may actually have tiny personal drones that hover around us, 24/7, documenting our every posed grin for perpetuity. And you just know Filipinos will be the first to adopt them.