Where do we stand on... Selfie sticks

Wimbledon has banned them, so too Disney World and nearly every major European cultural site. And now they’ve been spotted, being wielded by a British tourist, at the site of the Tunisian beach massacre (“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” he said). So just where do we stand on selfie stick etiquette?

A tourist uses a selfie-stick to took a picture at the site of a shooting attack on the beach in front of the Riu Imperial Marhaba Hotel in Port el Kantaoui 

Selfie sticks get a bad rap. They are shorthand for all the worst excesses of a crass, modern civilisation.

In fact, the devices are rather clever: a telescopic monopod (as opposed to a tripod) with a button in the handle, allowing the user to take a picture of themselves with their phone. The stick can be held far enough away to get a decent bit of the background in frame. We want to see the winged horses at the Trevi Fountain, not just the top of your head.

If you must use them – and they are less bulky than travelling around with easel and brushes as Victorian tourists did, I suppose – do so discreetly. Keep it in your pocket. Do not perambulate while wafting it at eye-removal height.

The problem is not the £10 gizmo, of course. It is those using them.

Only in the last decade has a completely self-obsessed generation started inserting itself into every, single shot. As if a picture of the Colosseum or the Terracotta Army is somehow devoid of meaning without the owner of the phone being centre-frame.

Before engaging your selfie stick, you need to ask yourself two simple questions. One: will my picture be just as good without me pouting in it? Search your corrupted soul before answering this.
Two: am I at the site of some terrible human suffering – Auschwitz, say – or a horrific terrorist atrocity? If the answer to either is 'yes’, put it away. Pronto.