When people talk about how the internet has changed the way we travel, they typically lament the way our compulsion to document removes us, somehow, from the actual experience. In an article for Backchannel on Medium earlier this year called “Instagram Is Ruining Vacation,” Mary Pilon wrote about social-media dependency and how the “fight for the perfect Instagram” was influencing where — and how — people decided to spend their time. “At times, it felt like destinations were morphing into mere photo sets,” she writes about tourist behavior on a trip to Angkor Wat.
But that same urge to share has created what is, for me, the best travel resource on the web: using location-based searches on social-media apps, especially Instagram, to drop in, like Dr. Beckett, to different destinations. Looking at the raw feed of geotagged posts offers a graphic map in real time, which you can comb through to make your own guidebook. I like to think of it as akin to a surf cam. But instead of tuning in to see if the waves are too mushy, feeds give a feel for a place that you can use to decide if a place feels fun and seems safe — whatever that means to you. And this has become my compass, my way of navigating the world. Rather than obsessing over travel sites or print guides or bothering friends for recommendations, I check a new city or town’s location tag right before I get there and see which recent posts are most popular. What I see there is wildly unfiltered, refracted through multiple perspectives — and much more revealing than any other guide.
Before I went to Senegal in March, I spent two days watching the location tags for Gorée Island, a landmark famous for its horrible history. It was there that captured Africans were imprisoned before being shipped to the Americas to be sold into slavery. The feed on the Gorée Island location tag was cluttered with tourists’ selfies. Worried that such cluelessness would ruin the experience and heighten the impact of the island’s historical trauma, I decided to see the island some other time and have dinner with a friend and her family at their home instead.
