This photo was taken last summer, during my keynote speech at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral” festival, which is a kind of Central Asian equivalent of TED Talks.
I also gave some smaller talks, including a “Travel Storytelling” session to a room full of young Kazakhs. The crowd was smart and engaged, and they had tons of questions about travel writing, the most humorous of which was something along the lines of, “I loved your talk, and you clearly understand travel and writing well, so why is it that you only have 4000 Instagram followers?”
Having cut my travel-writing teeth on the dialup-era internet, I’ll confess that my social-media chops haven’t really grown in tandem with the explosion of social-media itself. I’m grateful that, over the years, my writing (and my book Vagabonding in particular) has been influential, but I don’t know that I would qualify as an “influencer,” at least in the social-media-metric sense.
This is fine with me, in part because it feels like Instagram isn’t the best way to evoke what travel is really like – in part because it invariably bends the visual narrative toward static moments of hypothetical beauty or idealized familiarity. In reporting from a recent journey across Asia I turned many of my Instagram captions into little mini-essays about the idiosyncrasies or ironies that underpinned the image, but these posts attracted far less engagement than (a) a fairly standard image of something beautiful or delicious-looking, or (b) an image that included a picture of me in a travel context.
One generation ago, a big critique of travel media was that, in an attempt to court travel-industry advertising, glossy magazines favored unrealistically beautiful images of distant places over engaged, outward-looking cross-cultural reportage. Platforms like Instagram seem to have proven that this wasn’t a conspiracy by editors and advertisers: it was the result of what audiences, in far greater numbers than not, want to see.
Given the choice between an unrealistically tourist-free vista of Sri Lanka’s Sigiriya rock-fortress and the (fascinatingly) tourist-clogged vision of Sigiriya as I actually experienced it, people seem to have preferred the former; given a choice between an interesting Indonesian person in my “People of Sumatra” series and an arms-length photo of myself with a sunburn, folks seem to prefer the latter.
This is all fine; I don’t mean to pass moral judgment on Instagram, or the way we use it. But I will point out that (as Marshall McLuhan pointed out more than half a century ago) the medium is the message – and Instagram is a medium that favors hypothetical visions of beauty and experience that often have little to do with what one actually sees and does at these places. Invariably, “optimizing an audience” means bending the narrative to these expectations.
I now have more than 5000 followers on Instagram, which works well enough for me. I welcome tens of thousands more, should they be engaged by what they see there, but I’d reckon I’ll continue to tell my best stories elsewhere.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
Share This
