Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So Selfish and Disrespectful

Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So Selfish and Disrespectful
petapixel.com

Whenever I see this kinda stuff, I can't help but think of the "Ugly American" trope and how it seems like it's an insanely (and desperate to be) visible minority of the whole world now

From the section titled “The Interface Culture”:

We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people’s minds.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were.

A few weeks ago, we had a friend from the US visiting, and we decided to take him there. We hadn't been there in about 10 years now, and it was insanely busy even though it was just a random Wednesday. The road from the town of Lake Louise up to the actual lake was a traffic jam the entire way (about 5km), and there was no parking at all anywhere near the lake or in the town. I ended up having to drop my wife and our friend off at the top and drive back down, then down the highway for almost 10 minutes to the "overflow lot" to find anywhere to park (and it was almost totally full too, even though it's huge).

We've talked to some people about it since, and apparently that's just how busy it is all the time now. The amount of over-tourism to some of these Instagram-famous places is getting ridiculous, and (like it goes over in the article) they're just really not able to handle it and it turns into a huge mess of people behaving selfishly because once they're there, they're not leaving without the photos they want.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Louise_(Alberta)