​Google: Jakarta was ground zero for the selfie stick trend

It’s hard to believe the selfie stick has only been around for a little over a year. Also known in Indonesian as the tongsis (a combination of the Indonesian words for stick and narcissism), it’s such a perfect product for our modern selfie-obsessed culture that it seems like it should have been around a lot longer.

But as it turns out, Indonesia, and specifically Jakarta, was ahead of the curve when it comes to the selfie stick. Google Trends, which analyses the popularity of certain search terms over time, says that it was Indonesians from the capital who first flooded the search engine looking for info on the camera cradling sticks designed to let users get the perfect wide angles for their selfie shots.

 

Google Trends shows that queries from the Indonesian capital for “selfie stick” (and other related terms such as “monopod”) started to surge in late 2013. The graph above shows that Malaysia followed Indonesia (as it usually does) with a rising number of selfie stick searches in early 2014. 

But both Indonesia and Malaysia were both overtaken by the Philippines in March 2014 after Pinoys became interested in selfie sticks in a big way. After that, the selfie stick’s search stock rose all over the world. 

What does this all mean? Is Indonesia, or specifically Jakarta, the most narcissistic place in the world? No, of course not. It simply means that we’re becoming much cooler and trendier than other parts of the world, so cool that we are increasingly leading the way on new trends (how many Indonesian topics have become international trending topics on Twitter, for example?). 

So be proud, fellow narcissistic Indonesians, of becoming the world’s tastemakers. In fact, why don’t you take a tasteful photo of yourself looking at that graph to commemorate the moment?



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