The "selfie stick", the extendable wand for taking pictures of yourself with a smartphone, has now entered the ranks of great technological feats and has been named by Time magazine as one of the 25 great inventions of 2014. This "cultural phenomenon", like the calls Time, it owes its origin to Indonesia.
Using Google Trends, a program that analyzes the frequency of concepts and words on the web, it can be concluded that the focal point from which the "selfie stick" craze started lies in that great Asian archipelago. In Indonesia the contraption is called “tongkat narsis” – literally “narcissus wand” – and its shortened name is “tongsis”.
The relative frequencies of the word towards the end of 2013 in the Indonesian capital were equal to 7 times those of the USA: the term "tongsis" reached a score of 10 in December 2013, according to Google Trends, while the term "selfie stick" reached rating of 1 in the US in January 2014.
