Technology moves faster than society. We've been seeing this for at least 20 years now. It's fun and often pretty uncomfortable to watch, as we fumble around trying to figure out what's okay, what's mildly offensive, and what's downright unacceptable.

The most recent battle is over "selfie sticks," those adjustable poles that let people take wide-angle photos of themselves and their friends. I hate 'em. Hate 'em, hate 'em, hate 'em. It's safe to say that when I see a tourist with a selfie stick, I wish I could swat it with a baseball bat. But it's really important to understand why. Maybe that way we'll be able to get rid of them.

The Self-Service Culture
Selfie sticks are most popular at tourist attractions, because people are trying to get both the attraction and their faces into the shot. Most recently, our local tabloid paper, the New York Post, drummed up some outrage because tourists were waving selfie sticks around at the site of a rather spectacular fire and building collapse in the East Village of New York City.

Tourists are using selfie sticks for the same reason that they used to ask strangers to take photos of them: they're trying to create unique memories. There's nothing wrong with that; maybe it's a little dorky in the moment, but only a tiny amount of the joy of travel is the actual traveling (I say, as a travel writer.) Maybe you'll spend a week in New York, once in your life. But you'll spend a year planning it, and the rest of your life remembering it. The photo proving that you were at the top of the Empire State Building (and that you didn't just buy a postcard) is not actually "narcissistic." It's a way to defy the haziness of memory and put time in a bottle.

There's been an ongoing trend in our culture, for decades, away from people helping and serving each other towards an atomized self-service world. Think about those self-service kiosks they just installed at your grocery store. I was recently talking to a friend who lives near a dramatic cliff, who said that periodically, people taking selfies tumble backwards over the cliff trying to get the right shot. This is sad because if they had a friend to take a picture of them, the friend would probably tell them not to step backwards over the cliff.

"It's one thing to take a picture at arm's length, but when it is three times arm's length, you are invading someone else's personal space," the Met's chief digital officer told New York Times.

And as that old quote says, your right to wave your selfie stick ends at the tip of my nose.

Solving The Selfie Stick

Because I live in a crowded city where everybody values their personal space, I'm hoping that selfie sticks are a temporary solution to a problem that could be solved more elegantly with technology. HTC, for instance, has had wide-angle front-facing cameras for a while, and they've been spreading across Nokia's and Sony's lines, too. With a wide enough angle on your front-facing camera, you don't need to jut your phone out into the middle of a crowd.

The wide-angle camera needs to be a simple, one-shot affair, though. Samsung showed how to do it wrong on the Galaxy S5, which made you pan your phone around to take a wide-angle selfie. Nobody can find those camera modes.

I'm reminded of another mobile faux-pas solved by technology: that moment from about 2006-2009 when "Bluedouches" were wandering around yelling into their Bluetooth headsets on the street. While Bluetooth headsets are still a thing, the rise of smartphones made it much easier to text and email on the go, and people quickly transitioned their usage to these more quieter means of communication. Most people don't actually want to be annoying, if given the chance not to be.

Hopefully, we'll see the same transition away from selfie sticks. For now, though, where's my bat?