Eight cartoons demonstrating why we hate selfie sticks

This summer you will doubtless have seen plenty of tourists using selfie sticks, and perhaps just as many street sellers trying to persuade you to buy one. The advance of the devices for taking cellphone self-portraits seems unstoppable. But they also continue to arouse controversy, as shown in this cartoon by Joan Cornellá, which received over 250,000 likes and was shared almost 80,000 times on Facebook in a single day. It has also been retweeted more than 8,000 times.

Cornellá isn’t the only cartoonist to depict the invention’s use, and above all, misuse. We’ve collected a few examples of other panels that satirize our mania for taking photographs of ourselves with a cumbersome pole that on occasions can also be dangerous – selfie sticks have already been banned from many museums and music festivals. The Russian government has gone so far as to publish a guide to avoiding selfie-related accidents (with or without stick) after a woman was injured when the gun she was posing with accidentally went off.

“At last a useful invention!”

The Oatmeal sums the issue up with a short guide for assessing whether or not we ought to buy a selfie stick. It concludes that the only two excuses for purchasing one are if you have given up on life, or are Japanese. If you had any doubts, note that the self-satisfied selfie stick user in the panel is wearing Crocs.