Travel is a more recent flavor of conspicuous consumption (and conspicuous leisure) which has spurred from the permeation of social media into many aspects of our lives. For this blog, I’ve decided to delve into a few trends that stand out on my social media feeds (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to see if I can highlight some of the driving reasons behind them.
After lightly looking into it, the following really resonated my interest.
Conspicuous Leisure
Thorstein Veblen (who died right here in Menlo Park for all those living in the South Bay), came up with the concept of “conspicuous leisure.” In summary, it is a social indicator that your position in society allows you to be free from the necessity of having to completely dedicate yourself to work in order to make ends meet. To be a bit more accurate, this type of leisure is primarily focused on its social significance rather than to say that you were interested to a particular location and wanted to immerse yourself in it. To summarize using slides from a travel analyst’s slides I’ll dive more into in a later post:
“Conspicuous leisure: Signaling social status through consumption of experiences rather than material goods.
…the rise of social medial enhances the value of experiences as they become social currency used to define and communicate status.”
Inevitably, even pictures that seem carelessly taken have been crafted to force a particular idea about a person. As far as I can tell, a picture of a plate of food or a selfie in front of a historic piece of art is meant to say more about you than anything else. Under these narrow circumstances (which I feel many of us thread through quite easily), many of us are modern day examples of conspicuous “leisur-ers.”
“This is a culture where the ultimate expression is photographing ourselves in front of a masterpiece, in front of Auschwitz, in front of someone jumping off the Bay Bridge. ” ~ Andrew Keen
Things tend to then break down into a passive aggressive arms race of whose life is the most desirable on social media platforms. It usually plays out in such a way that we all get depressed and become motivated to make more money. That’s just the nature of it all. The substance of the experience is gone. The best vacations regress to be defined as the ones that are the most marketable.
Social Products
Our experiences are transformed into social products that we sell online and advertise on social media. At the core of it, the experiences themselves are just the outside packaging of what you’re really trying to sell: yourself.
Being too general or average is not very exciting or socially marketable. Due to this, it’s common to see a polarization of travel preferences. From my personal experience, it breaks down into two camps: the ultra luxurious traveler and the minimalist traveler.
The ultra luxurious traveler is the 5-start hotel, Michelin restaurant, yacht adventure, splurge in the city kind of person. On the other end of the spectrum, the minimalist traveler is distinguishable by the his or her disinterest in the fancy hotels, city life experience, and expensive food. More hostels, more country, more local, more off-the-grid. At the end of it all, it doesn’t really matter. Both types have the leisure and the finances that enable both types of travel.
It costs money to travel.
Perhaps a better way to frame my point is to ask questions. Why share this information? Are you trying to passively tell the world: you’ve got free time, you’re open minded, you can lodge in a local village rather than a hotel, you’re just an average person who has the time off to explore the world (which is an oxymoron by the way), you’re…*shudder* “cultured?”
There are many other reasons why people post pictures, event updates, and the works. I realize that. So just to throw it out there, this entry is a focus beam on narrow circumstances. However, I feel the above questions, if answered seriously shepherd us right through the narrow thread I mentioned earlier.
Where do I fit?
It’s easy to sit down and commentate on other’s behavior in a critical way without stating where you fit into all of this. To answer: I am guilty of conspicuous leisure. Most of the trips that I have taken as indicated by the pictures I post on social media send a passive “look at where I am at” feel to them.
I cannot really say that most of my travels have been solely for leisure, but there have been an occasion or two that I have traveled out of the state to visits some friends and experience what it’s like in a particular place. I’ll blog about those trips later.
However, I’ve been trying to do something new. I have been slowly taking steps to remove as much information as I can from the pictures that I post. I’ll label it with a general location, but that’s about it. Less pictures of food I didn’t make, less specific names of places, and more general scenic pictures. I believe a cold, apathetic detachment from the photos I take leaves more room for people to taken in the content of a photo than saccharine statements of humility such as: “so lucky to be able to take such a beautiful shot of X place! Wow, fantastic. So much sweat a blood to take this shot of the X”
It’s difficult to be critical of ourselves and the decisions we make because it questions our moral integrity and brings into light the motivation behind why we do the things that we do. Let’s face it, most of us waste our food, leave the lights on, take longer showers, act selfishly, etc. Most of those vices are difficult to change, but the first step to change is the critical recognition of those flaws.We have to be more self-aware and less passive in our lives in order to address the problems that we as a species face.
*******Photo blogs documentaries with richer descriptions and commentary are different*****
tangent
To be honest, I love the state of California. I was born and raised here. I don’t understand why some people pay lots of money to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to experience beauty elsewhere when the beauty encompassed in California itself isinexhaustible. Most of us haven’t even explored all the parts of our own cities, let alone our own state.
Preview of the next blog post, pt 2:
Pt 2: Big Business Knows
Chris Fair, President of Resonance Consultancy, Data, Trends of Millenials