Courtesy of The Guardian, here’s another way the Internet is making life better and more fulfilling for all of us (by which I mean worse and more soullessly unsatisfying for a great many of us):
Tourists have always taken photographs. Like graffiti, it’s a very human way of saying “I was here.” But in the pre-digital age, because of the expense of film as well as high shooting ratios, you were lucky if you ended up with one usable picture. Now “influencers” can take as many photographs as they need, photoshopping and filtering until they are able to post the perfect advertisement (for that indeed is what these images are). The centering of the self to such an extent is new too, and at the expense of knowledge, exploration and adventure.
When most travel photographs on Instagram begin to look like fashion editorials you have to wonder whether anyone is learning anything. And when people are taking idiotic risks such as hanging out of fast moving trains or proffering food to tempt wild animals into shot, all for the sake of a photo that isn’t even an original composition, you might start to think that we’re approaching the end times.
It all goes to show how ineffective the internet can be as a lens for human experience, especially within a capitalist system. You might think social media would diversify the range of images we see, yet the most popular users operate according to a strict schema that takes full advantage of the relevant algorithms (creative, fascinating accounts are still there, but said algorithms make them harder to find). And it’s not just travel – it’s interiors, fashion, weddings, food, children. Social media encourages the memeification of human experience. Instead of diversity we see homogeneity. It’s extremely boring.
Full article: “Instagrammers are sucking the life and soul out of travel“