Instagram and Facebook photos are really efficient ways of letting everyone know what you’re up to and making them wish they were experiencing the same thing. Whether it comes to travel or just a plate of food in front of you, the moment you whip out your smart phone to upload a photo, be honest now, sometimes it’s simply because you just want people to pay attention to what you’re doing.
You want to be that person that, just for a moment, everyone has their eye on.
You want to be that person that, just for a moment, everyone has their eye on.
With it comes this inner sense of entitlement over the attention you expect to receive. I know this because I am willing to admit that I am guilty of it.
I feel genuinely disappointed if I don’t get enough likes or comments to satisfy my craving for social network approval. Why aren’t people clicking ‘like’ on my latest photo of my trip to Angkor Wat or Halong Bay?
Whether we are aware or not, technology has shaped the way we travel. Though I doubt it’s an explicitly conscious decision, we base at least part of our next destination on what looks like a ‘cool place to visit’.
Not all of us choose to take part in the same pattern of uploading photos throughout the trip just to let other’s have the slightest taste of what we’re enjoying. However, we all know that by updating our status or hashtagging our latest location, we’re generating demand. We slyly make people aware of the fact that ‘we are here, you are not’.
We used to send each other postcards from our holiday destinations by snail mail with the simple message ‘wish you were here’. Receiving a postcard in the mail was (and still is) considered a flattering way of letting someone know that they’re being thought of. Now, we instead upload Instagram photos, cheekily implying that ‘we’re not thinking of you but we’re making sure you’re thinking of us’. I don’t wish you were here; I want you to wish you were.
The dynamic works both ways too, like some technological karma. I sometimes wonder if other people want to be on my vacation as much as I wish I could be on theirs. Surely there is no way people aren’t wishing they could enjoy jet skiing on Sanur beach too. Or are my photos not as inviting as theirs? Is what I’m doing not as interesting as I think it is?
Ultimately, the way we travel is always different from the way we want to be seen as ‘travelling’. A picture can only capture so much about what our holiday is actually like. People don’t need to know that just moments before a family photo in front of La Sagrada Familia, we had been arguing over where to go for lunch. We only want to portray the joy in our holiday and all the cool things we got to see and do.
Social media is the perfect PR for the tourism industry.
By presenting ourselves to the social media sphere as only #livingthegoodlife and having a great time, we indirectly promote and idealise our location as the perfect place to visit. It shows how social media acts as the perfect PR for the tourism industry. Embrace people’s constant need to be seen as enjoying themselves and the positive reputation of the place will follow. Or more simply put, the destination will look great so long as we look good standing in it!
