These INFLUENCERS who RUIN travel: but are they really to blame?
Well, yes.
“The tourist is assumed to know nothing,” Paul Fussell wrote a few years back, “a tradition upheld by American travel magazines” like “Travel &Leisure,” among others.
Actually, some of those magazines — remember Horizon, or Banana Republic’s short-lived “Trips”? — assumed that potential tourists both knew stuff and were curious to find out more. Today, though, one of the most obnoxious things about social media “influencers” is (lack of education aside) their insistence on assuming that the tourist knows nothing. Therefore, you’ve got the likes of Kacie Rose, another one of those Yankee gals who thinks she’s the first girl to ever set foot in Italy, who thinks it is necessary and charming to make a video of herself saying the word “spanakopita” as if it is something that was just invented, and expressly for her, so she can impart her experience of eating some to the illiterate masses. This is the dumbing down of travel in action — and it seem unstoppable, and is horrible.
It used to be easy enough to just ignore social media, hope it might go away like Kamala Harris or every Taylor Swift song you’ve ever had to bear. But now these little Kacies and Jareds and Jacquis are clogging things up, bigly. I recently spent a miserable two days in Valletta, not because it wasn’t pretty, but because there were self-styled “influencers” at every turn, on every patch of cobblestone street, in front of every old building, forcing the few non-zombies like me to have to duck out of their way to not get hit in the face with their damn selfie sticks. Or wait every six footsteps while they took a picture of something because it was old and/or because they felt compelled to keep up with other peoples’ Instagrams. This is addictive/sociopathic behavior, and must be called out as such. I imagine this is happening all over the world, but in Europe it’s approaching the proportions of disaster.
Short of nuking Facebook/Meta’s headquarters (not that such a pernicious thought would ever cross anybody’s mind, after all, everybody loves the Zuckerbergs, especially their neighbors!) I’m not sure there’s much anyone can do — accepting the status quo though is not a viable option.
One solution would be to make it so that the fake word “influencer” becomes as pejorative as any racial slur. In fact, if someone tells you they are an “influencer”, I envisage a time when they can be reported to the social media equivalent of ICE, with deportation being replaced by TLADB — total lifetime account deactivation, bitch.
I don’t think anyone who can remember struggling to get a look at the Eiffel Tower or unobstructed view of an Oia sunset would not want to get on board with this. Speaking of ICE and stuff, another thing to consider is — wait,
…anybody got a light?