Thoughts on (over)tourism and relentless content creation

Why do we allow social media to warp how we travel and experience culture?

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Perfectly selfie-able

I recently returned from a long trip to South Korea and Japan, a dream holiday which I feel so lucky to have had the privilege to take.

But wow, the amount of tourists was absolutely staggering, especially in Japan. As one of those tourists, I spent the entire trip with the simmering feeling that I am ✨part of the problem✨.

Skipping the queue on Mount Everest

In Japan, the main problem is that all the world-renowned sites are so overrun with tourists that it becomes completely pointless to visit them in the first place. The most egregious example of this was Arashiyama Bamboo Grove in Kyoto. It’s one of the most famous bamboo forests in Japan, and is touted as a must-see for travellers.

I took one photo at Arashiyama and posted it on Instagram. The picture was angled to cut out the heads of all the other tourists milling around me. I shared it on my story and got loads of 😍 reactions - but there was nothing 😍 about the experience. If I am going to post on social media, it’s almost impossible for me to avoid an editorial-like procedure where I need to make things look aesthetically pleasing. Taking a photo with other tourists in the shot? Nope, there’s something really displeasing about that. The intended outcome of sharing a picture that is so divorced from reality is not fully clear - even to me, the person sharing it.

Step 1. Crop out fellow tourists. Step 2. Bump up the exposure and vibrancy.

When there are thousands of tourists shoving their way through the bamboo, any sense of magic is well and truly lost. You feel stressed, rushed, and can’t enjoy the wonders of nature due to the sheer amount of people concentrated at the location. The paths through the bamboo have massive currents of people moving back and forth like a giant anthill. Everybody is taking pictures or filming themselves.

This isn’t unique to Japan: I think we have all felt the grating creepiness of an area ruined by tourism. That instagram vs. reality moment of turning up at a location only to find that it looks nothing like the photos. Mykonos looks incredible on Instagram: a town built of eye-wateringly white stone with vivid purple flowers tumbling over the balconies and doorways. Spoiler! It doesn’t really look like that. The streets are dirty and stink of bodily fluids. The once-traditional hora is filled with Starbucks and Gucci stores.

These days, there’s even a queue on the summit of Mount Everest. Yes, a queue. At the extreme altitude of the Mount Everest summit, the highest point above global mean sea level.

Of course, tourism is a double-edged sword. Many countries such as Japan and Greece depend hugely on tourism to support their economy. Promotion on social media is intrinsically linked to the livelihoods of many people. Influencers create content as a full time job, and who I am I to judge anyone who earns their money this way - we all have to pay our rent. All I’m saying is, maybe its time to show some restraint.

Content creation > culture

Content creation has mutated the way we experience culture, making it more and more narcissistic. It’s as if culture is no longer something external to immerse oneself in, but rather something you embellish onto your constructed digital image. In Seoul, many tourists rent hanboks (Korean traditional dress) and take pictures of themselves in the hanok village with professional camera equipment. Meanwhile, Korean people are literally employed to stand in the hanok village (which is a residential area) and hold up signs asking all of the white people dressed up as Koreans to be quiet when they are taking pictures. I can’t help but wonder how many of these tourists made an effort to have a conversation with a single Korean person during their trip. The same spectacle is visible in Kyoto: tourists clomping around in wooden sandals dressed as geiko. To me, it feels like such an artificial way to experience culture.

Plastic outfits, plastic trinkets, plastic phones

There are many reasons why we are driven to document our experiences. After all, immortalising moments in memory feels very human. It is genuinely enjoyable to edit pictures and videos, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share highlights from our lives with friends and family - I get it, it’s not always that deep. However, whenever social media is involved, it is that deep. That insidious need for validation undercuts it all, triggering the most primal parts of our brain which seek validation from the tribe. These platforms are designed to consume as much of your attention as possible. Even if we claim it’s just for the memory or to share with my friends, we are kidding ourselves to some degree. I think it’s important for us to have continual conversations with ourselves and each other about our relationship with social media. I passionately hate how social media has turned many forms of creative expression into content - it gives me a feeling akin to seeing bananas wrapped in layers of plastic at the supermarket. Even the terms content and content creator give me the ick.

That’s what it’s all about though: harvesting as much content out of a location or experience as possible and then moving on as your drone flies overhead. The ritual goes something like this: wait at a beautiful vista, jump into place when there’s a break in the crowd, snap dozens of photos in a matter of seconds (usually while the next set of people waiting to take a picture watch like hyenas). The phone descends, and you walk away with your head down, face illuminated by the screen, scrolling through the images with manic concentration in order to find the most perfect one to post. I see so many people at beautiful locations experiencing it through their phones the entire time. If thousands of people around you are taking photos and videos of the exact same thing, who is the content even for?

In recent years, I’ve fallen into the habit of not tagging the location of many instagram stories or posts. I rarely post in the moment. Instead, I curate a selection of five to ten images from the past ~48 hours and post them in one go, fooling myself that this slightly erratic usage somehow makes me less dependent on the platform. Sooooo edgy and refined. Commodification of culture isn’t new, but I feel it is accelerating at such a pace that this becomes the sole purpose of why we travel. This inspiring post from Totally Recommend perfectly captures how this pervasive hyperindividualism affects us all, even if you choose to ditch social media:“Years after I deleted my personal social media, my camera roll still resembled a curated archive, as if I were crafting a personal "brand" or "aesthetic," striving for marketability or commodification. There were many photos of empty places that I thought looked better without people, way too many photos of myself, and a heavy emphasis on the things I consumed rather than the people I loved.”

I’m not a tourist, I’m the main character

Travelling really brings out the worst in some people. Aside from obvious things like littering and supporting cruel tourist traps (did someone say micropig café?), the most worrying behaviour I observe is how some tourists lose any sense of self-control or humility.

In Kyoto, the Japanese government recently took new measures to tackle this bad behaviour. Tourists are now banned from several areas of Kyoto because of visitors groping the geiko who work in Gion as they walked on the street, as well as trespassing on private property in search of content. I can’t understand what overcomes people that they feel that it is okay to do this. It’s as if this is the thought process: I am on holiday, therefore the rules that would apply to be at home don’t apply here, and I can treat this country and its people like a Westworld-esque amusement park to interact with as I please.

I saw something similar in action in Vietnam in 2018 on a beach where starfish naturally gather in the shallows. I watched in horror as tourists picked up the starfish and placed them on their bodies, placed the poor creatures on the hot sand to spell out words like LOVE, or flung them far out into the water like frisbees. When these kinds of behaviour are exhibited by other travellers, I feel a sense of guilt even if I’m not an active participant. And while I’m sure tourists have always behaved this way, I can’t help but feel that social media has exacerbated this behaviour.

What’s the alternative?

I’ve spent some time reflecting on how I can adapt my behaviour in future to approach travel in a less individualistic way.

The line where cultural experience ends and personal brand begins is very grey.

1. The obvious one goes first: travel less. It’s something we should all do, if not primarily for environmental reasons. I want to spend more time staycationing. The pandemic taught us all that we can do this, but this option is falling further and further down on the priority list these days.

2. Explore a country or city that isn’t often posted about. Go somewhere you know literally nothing about, even somewhere unpopular or unglamorous.

3. Ask the locals what to do. Don’t depend on social media, youtube videos or online sources to tell you how to experience a location. Reinvest the time saved scrolling into learning phrases in the local language.

4. Challenge yourself not to share your holiday on social media. As an extension, try not to over-document it for yourself either. Just enjoy it for what it is and reconnect with what travel means to you without the infectious influence of social media or cultivating a personal brand. Ensure the only photos in your camera roll have your partner, your family or friend’s faces in them.

Corny but true: the best experiences are the ones social media can’t influence

We’ve all seen those posts on social media - frenetically paced, narrated by that syrupy text-to-speech voice: Three things I WISH I knew before going to Japan, or Don’t miss this *insert quirky concept here* bar in Japan. I watched a lot of these, yet absolutely none of the memorable parts of our trip were sourced from these supposedly hot tips. Every truly memorable moment occurred when my was phone shoved deep in my bag and I spent time drinking it all in: the lady in Kyoto who explained sake to us in fascinating detail, a terrifying face-to-face moment with a wild boar in the forest, the friend of a friend in Seoul who showed us some traditional Korean food, the locals in Tokyo who struck up a conversation with us in an izakaya, and then secretly paid for our dinner and drinks! This is the real value of travelling for me: the opportunity to reinvigorate your life with a sense of adventure, sharpen your interpersonal skills, and open your mind to new cultures and customs.