On 23 July 2024, 11,000 tourists disembarked from cruise ships on the Greek island of Santorini. Famed for its seaside architecture yet home to only 20,000 people, the wave of cruise tourists on Santorini prompted the municipality to post a warning for residents to remain indoors. Locals responded with fury, arguing that tourists were given free reign of the island in exchange for their confinement. As the municipality deleted the post, scenes of streets crowded to the point of being unwalkable surfaced on TikTok, drawing press attention and renewing calls for tourism regulation.

This hapless Tuesday on one of the Mediterranean’s most famous islands would be shocking if it wasn’t already so familiar. Summer 2024 saw a renewed eruption of protests against overtourism, or the phenomenon of runaway tourism growth “leading to overcrowding in areas where residents suffer” (Milano, Novelli & Cheer, 2019, p. 354). Before COVID-19, overtourism was already a policy issue in many European cities and the subject of long-running debate in Hawaiʻi, but with the United Nations forecasting that 2024 will see tourist numbers exceed the 2019 record of 1.46 billion, the nerves of locals at many popular destinations are strained past the breaking point.

When the carrying capacity of a tourism destination is exceeded, today it is usually because that place was made social media famous. While Santorini has long been renowned, it was in 2013 – right when Instagram began to attain widespread usage – that visitor numbers started to sharply increase, reaching a total of 3.4 million tourists in 2023. Widely hailed as Greece’s “Instagram Island” with 8 million posts tagged #santorini on the platform, in no small part it has been the lure of photogenic blue-and-white architecture that has flooded the island with tourists. Like so many other overwhelmed destinations, overtourism results from Santorini becoming a viral landscape, when digital images of notable geography or a place-based feature undergo a viral uptake across platforms and global networks (Smith, 2024).

What do we see in a viral landscape? What is so powerful about iconic images that, when seen on a social media platform, local communities and economies can be upended as people from around the world rush to take a picture they have already seen? These are essential questions for developing a long-term solution to the problem of overtourism.

Overtourism: chasing viral landscapes

There are many ways to visualize overtourism. The most apparent is the city or village crowded with far more people than the street was ever built to accommodate. Next to Santorini, we can think of Venice, O’ahu, or Amsterdam. But beyond the sheer volume of visitors, we can look to the climbing real estate prices and loss of housing to short-term rentals which increasingly force locals out of the places where they grew up. Or we might picture the air polluted by cruise ships, which in the Mediterranean emit four times as much toxic sulphur oxide than all of Europe’s cars combined. We can also envision that resource most precious to both humans and the animals and plants they eat – water  – which may be used by tourists in quantities exceeding five times the usage of the average resident.

Perhaps more tangibly, in 2024 we can regularly open the news or a social media platform and see people protesting overtourism. In January 2024 in Oaxaca, hundreds of residents publicly demonstrated against what amounts to a 77% increase in visitor numbers since 2020, which has spurred a wave of gentrification and forced people from the city center. Then, in April, an estimated 57,000 residents of the Canary Islands came out to the streets to demonstrate, calling for a cap on the number of tourists and for taxes to be introduced which can boost environmental protection. A few months later in July, around 50,000 people on the island of Mallorca demonstrated for new models for tourism as well as access to affordable housing and environmental regulations. In Barcelona that same month, tourists found themselves on the sharp end of water pistols wielded by protestors.

Long before overtourism protests were making headline news, however, tourism was known to dramatically upset socioeconomic relations and ecologies. In her ethnography of tourism in the Yucatán Peninsula, anthropologist Matilde Córdoba-Azcárate shows that tourism reshapes space to prepare “places, bodies, cultures, and nature for global consumption, crafting commodity-centered landscapes” (Córdoba-Azcárate, 2020, p. 187). Not only can tourism turn just about everything in a place into something for a tourist to buy, but residents can often not escape this vortex, as working in tourism becomes the most economically feasible way forward amidst rising prices.

The process of tourism development, argue the geographers Jennifer Devine and Diana Ojeda, is often one of violence. As industry constructs an “imaginary picture” that is marketed to tourists (Devine & Ojeda, 2017, p. 606; also see Salazar, 2012), both tourists and capital are enticed to consume or invest in “postcarded” places at the expense of residents. As land and water are seized for tourism development, locals are pushed out of their homes and experience “the destruction of the relationships that sustain life” (Devine & Ojeda, 2017, p. 609).

Where do these “imaginary pictures” that wreak so much havoc come from? Today, it’s mostly social media. The most magnetic imaginary pictures – the viral landscapes – are capable of drawing tourists in such numbers that, like Santorini, residents are overwhelmed and even displaced from their own homes. It is no small irony, then, that a social media trend helps us understand the violence of viral landscapes.

Instagram vs Reality: what’s in a trend?

Beyond videos of disturbingly crowded streets, among the most captivating illustrations of viral landscapes is a social media trend which makes fun of the phenomenon. Usually posted to TikTok before being poached for Instagram Reels, what is widely termed “Instagram vs. Reality” started to circulate widely in 2022-23. Generally, posts following this trend begin with a stunning shot of a trending destination – like Santorini, as in this TikTok with 22.9 million views. The viewer feasts – at first – on images of white stucco houses and blue domes perched above an immaculate sea beneath a text banner of “Insta Vs,” accentuated by the pulse-quickening notes of the viral Jain song “Makeba” (2015). The almost painfully picturesque village is empty, except for a woman whose face is to the landscape, sitting in a bubbling jacuzzi or walking down steep stairs in a backless dress.

And then everything changes. The familiar notes of “Makeba” disappear, replaced by a (presumably) male voice croaking “ooh-we, ma-ke-ba” to scenes of thousands of tourists cramming the formerly empty stairs and alleyways. Above, the banner of text reads, depressingly: “Reality [shocked face emoji]”.

Of course, Santorini is not the only viral landscape; TikTok is brimming with such letdowns. According to the trend’s form, the most iconically “Instagrammable” shots of a destination are contrasted with images no tourist imagines when they book their tickets. An unscientific survey of TikTok thus turns up a motorbike traffic jam in Bali, a herd of rats on the streets of Paris, crowds of swimmers at Gili Menos, a net beneath the Buddha Hand in Guangdong Province, and – yep, Santorini again, packed with tourists. In the comments, TikTok users voice what is probably our collective distress at seeing dreams stampeded to death by the tourist masses. As one commenter writes, “is this just me or does it really feel like there ruining the land, like instgram version is what its like before they tell ever one[?]” Another commenter says, smugly, “so glad I visited santorini before social media was a thing lol”. Lurking beneath our horror at the destruction of overtourism, however, we may find a small voice that whispers: “Am I part of the masses?” 

Instagram Vs Reality tells us a lot about social media, the imagination, and overtourism. First, and this probably goes without saying, no one wants overtourism. Not locals, and not tourists, although not necessarily for the same reasons. Next, tourists indeed travel in search of an “imaginary picture”: a social media video, a dream, an envisioned experience. The earlier observations of sociologists John Urry and Jonas Larsen hold true today: “What is sought for in a holiday is a set of photographic images which have already been seen” (Urry & Larsen, 2011, p. 179). 

And third, while these imaginary pictures have evolved such magnetism for historical reasons, a key reason they are so powerful has to do with the way social media platforms are structured. Part of our revulsion at the sight of so many tourists thronging a viral landscape is that, when we finally have the opportunity to ourselves take the picture we imagined, it’s too crowded for us to be the only person in the frame. And pictures with only one person – that lone figure, subsumed within a viral landscape – get far more likes.

Social media, social capital

Another thing that probably goes without saying is that media, and especially social media, is now fundamentally intertwined with our lives. From the minor details of daily living to the most sweeping political and economic forces, what we do and what we believe is now conditioned by social media platforms. This means so much more than just how we talk to family and friends almost exclusively through WhatsApp, use Google Maps to move through the world, catch up with what’s happening via TikTok, or seek inspiration on Instagram. Rather, from the way algorithms use our data to show us particular information to the systems that goad us to post and to like, social media platforms have changed the way we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the phenomenal world.

Never ones to miss coining a new multisyllabic term, scholars have conceptualized this change as an outcome of mediatization and of platformization. Respectively, this means that the structural operations of media drive social and cultural change (e.g., Couldry & Hepp, 2013), and that massive platforms like Meta and Alphabet are now cultural and political institutions (e.g., Van Dijck, Poell & De Waal, 2018). The lynchpin of these theories is that social media platforms are profit-driven. Societies and cultural practices are therefore shaped by these platforms’ imperative to make money, typically although not exclusively by harvesting our activities on social media as data that is sold to advertisers (Zuboff, 2015).

However, not only are these platforms centered around the pursuit of profit, but they center user experiences around the pursuit of profit, too. As part of the strategy to keep us online as much as possible so as to harvest more of our data, platform pathways and operations – platform infrastructures – revolve around users being enticed and cajoled into chasing forms of capital.

For example, when you make a post on just about any app, most of us hope that it will be “liked” – that other users will see it, and perform a tiny form of labor in tapping the little heart. If it isn’t liked, we’re left with the feeling of shouting into a void, or worse, of losing face to a scrutinizing public. But if our post is liked, and liked a lot, then all kinds of doors open. We might attract more followers, and see our social star rise as not just our digital networks but friends and colleagues look to us with respect. We may become more attractive to prospective employers, or romantic partners. And – the ultimate promise – we might be able to monetize the attention created by our posts, as brands pay us for advertising collaborations.

Writing about this economy of attention early in the history of Instagram, media anthropologist Crystal Abidin observes that the creation of a “crafted persona” on the platform enables one’s self-presentation to become a valuable advertising space (Abidin, 2014, p. 120). In the quick span of a decade, social media platforms have become indispensable to the activity of “self-branding,” when individuals develop “a distinctive public image for commercial gain and/or cultural capital” – increasingly seen as a necessity in a neoliberal and increasingly precarious market (Khamis et al., 2017, p. 191).

So what does all this have to do with tourism? 

Perhaps the biggest reason tourism and social media are today so synonymous is that tourism, too, is all about the pursuit of profit – as much for tourists as for hotels and tour companies. While we might claim that by traveling we’re working to “broaden our mind,” it is not just the promise of learning about the world that made pre-pandemic tourism a $10 trillion USD industry, employing an estimated 1 in 10 people. The tourism industry is so enormous because travel is a surefire way to craft a compelling self-brand and accumulate social capital.

“I’m a traveler, not a tourist”

We can think of it this way: Who is more likely to have interesting conversation starters at social functions, to get the job, or to attract potential partners? On one hand, we have the person who spent the summer in their local parks and bars. On the other, we have someone who went to Greece. Who’s more conventionally attractive, who has a higher class status? And we can make another comparison: between the person who went to overcrowded Santorini, and the one who traveled to Kazakhstan. What then?

If this sounds elitist, that’s because it is. Modern-day tourism began as a practice for the rich, when from the 17th century European aristocrats sent their sons (it was always the sons) to the capitals of Continental culture, as a way of completing their educations and giving them the necessary shine so they could assume an esteemed place in upper-class society. The Grand Tour, as it was called, became an institution – but at the cost of becoming cheaper. By the end of the 18th century, Rome, Paris, and Venice were overflowing with rich – and increasingly, not-so-rich – young men from abroad. And when “everyone” has already been to Venice, how do you get any of that precious cultural capital?

The answer, writes historian James Buzard, is that beginning in the 19th century one stepped “off the beaten track.” By going to places where other tourists could not be found, self-styled “travellers… displayed marks of originality and ‘authenticity’” as a way of being seen as more cultured and distinguished than the tourists who never strayed beyond Venice (Buzard, 1993, p. 6). Of course, it took more money, time, and experience to get off the beaten track, so fewer people had the opportunity – but that was the point. Ever heard that weary catchphrase, “I’m a traveler, not a tourist”? In various forms, it’s been around since the year 1820, and it has always been a way of separating oneself from “the masses.”

Today, although 1.3 billion tourists were counted in 2023, this only represents around 16% of the global population – and one tourist is “counted” every time someone crosses a border, so the same person may be counted many times. In other words, going to Santorini does set you apart from the “masses,” even today.

But of course we’re not sold the picture of Santorini crowded by other tourists. Instead, we’re led to imagine a stunningly beautiful yet quietly remote village, which only the occasional traveler – not a tourist! – visits in a life of peregrinations through the ancient Mediterranean Sea.

No one can be blamed for believing in this ideal Santorini because, before Instagram vs Reality, that’s all we ever saw.

#Santorini: overtourism and the imaginary picture

If you want to know what it’s like to want to visit Santorini, check out the content by influencer Loukia Tranou (@lucyintheskyy on Instagram and TikTok; 315k IG followers). Her feed of Greece and other Mediterranean hotspots is a masterclass in the “imaginary picture.” One of her posts was also the eleventh on my For You page when I searched #santorini on Instagram, so it will provide a handy example as any.

In her 27 June 2024 Instagram post geotagged Santorini, Tranou can be seen in a series of 10 photographs sitting beside a pool, walking down a veritably fairy-tale-esque stairway, and gazing out over the harbor from high up in the town. What cannot be seen are other people. I’m not exaggerating; despite zooming in on these 10 images, I can’t spot another human – although I do see a cruise ship anchored in the harbor. Not only are the pictures superbly composed and Tranou’s outfits perfectly matched to the scene, it is a technical feat that no other human, tourist or local, disrupts her solitude.

These pictures also promote the idea that Santorini is not crowded, and that visitors will have the chance to take these kinds of images themselves. We could post these images to social media, showing ourselves traveling to a stunningly beautiful place – a place where the “masses” do not go.

Anyone who has consumed some form of travel content in the past decade is likely familiar with pictures like this: of a person, alone, in a magnificent landscape. These promontory witness compositions are one of the most “liked” representations of travel on social media, and its symbolic value makes it a highly sought-after tourist commodity (Smith, 2021). As visual proof that one is indeed a “traveler,” these are the depictions of landscapes that go viral. As we encounter these images on social media, with their worth quantified by likes and follower counts, we are disciplined into searching for such socially-profitable images ourselves.

Such images are hard to get. As an established influencer and master of the Instagram genre, Tranou is probably all too acquainted with this Reality. Aware that many of her followers are too, she draws on an emerging social media trend in her TikTok with 2.2m views:

The opening shots of the TikTok show Tranou sitting in a dress matching a blooming bougainvillea next to Santorini’s iconic architecture, beneath text that reads “Santorini is great, but have you been to…” With the next frame begins a montage of tantalizing images from “CHANIA, CRETE,” showing Tranou walking on a beach, eating at a harborside restaurant, and taking in the views from a vantage point (performing the promontory witness, of course). With this TikTok posted in June 2023, Tranou anticipated (or helped spur) a shift in the market; so do we find a January 2024 Forbes article that reads, “Step Aside, Santorini: Crete’s The Next Island Hot Spot In Greece.”

With the formula of this trend, “[viral destination] is great, but have you been to [relatively unknown destination],” we see a pattern that will only aggravate the problem of overtourism. While more and more tourists escaping “the masses” and heading for Crete or elsewhere may reduce pressure on Santorini, this shift is still arbitrated by the logic of viral landscapes. Tranou’s promotion of Crete uses similarly gorgeous imagery as her Santorini content, and – crucially – she is still the only one in the landscape. Why wouldn’t tourists follow, chasing an imaginary picture before Crete, too, succumbs to Reality? And as global tourist numbers are set to continue growing each year, how long until overtourism protests are seen in places considered to be relatively unknown today?

Disrupting viral landscapes

There are concrete and immediate reforms that can be implemented in places suffering from overtourism. A cap on tourist arrivals and banning short-term rentals like Airbnb are just some of the strategies currently being implemented. Tourism scholar Freya Higgins-Desbiolles outlines a more complete agenda for tourism reform, which includes giving preference to local businesses over multinational corporations, assurance that the commons will not be privatized, and local communities rather than investors deciding upon pathways for tourism development (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2021, p. 618-19).

But when social media infrastructures are combined with the imperative to get “off the beaten track,” a fundamental ingredient in the recipe for overtourism remains unchanged. What we see in a viral landscape is the opportunity to fulfill a dream: not just of traveling somewhere special, but of being the kind of person who travels to special places. This isn’t because we’re all hopelessly self-interested, but because social media and every other part of the neoliberal market is telling us we need to optimize and capitalize in order to survive in an increasingly unequal world.

One way or another, the economies of value that make viral landscapes so magnetic need to be disrupted. With little prospect that social media will cease to operate on the basis of a monetized attention economy anytime soon, for now this can only be enacted as resistance. This first means listening to the protesters mobilizing to protect their communities. If traveling to an overtouristed place, research what forms of tourism locals are suggesting; in some cases, they may even be asking tourists to not come.

Next to this, it’s essential to recognize just how commonly places are depicted as imaginary pictures – and just how violent the effect of these pictures can be. As the scholars Hōkūlani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez write in Detours: The Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, images of beaches and palm trees support the continued US exploitation of the Polynesian archipelago that has been ongoing since the 19th century. “Unless we actively work to… refuse the tourist imaginary” of  Hawaiʻi, they write, “we will (wittingly or unwittingly) contribute to reproducing the occupation and colonization of these places, people, and practices” (Aikau & Gonzalez, 2019, p. 3). 

Truly refusing an Instagram vision of the world further means decoupling the pursuit of social capital from the practice of recreational traveling. How we represent our travels, in conversation and in social media, is in this sense just as important – just as political – as where and how we spend money as a tourist. While it is unreasonable to expect that people will stop traveling, the issue of overtourism can initiate important conversations about tourism and a whole lot more besides. Overtourism, after all, reflects systemic inequality: what we don’t see in a viral landscape is the Reality that only a fraction of humanity gets to be a tourist.

References

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Aikau, H. K., & Gonzalez, V. V. (2019). Introduction. In H. K. Aikau & V. V. Gonzalez (Eds.), Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (pp. 1-13). Duke University Press. 

Buzard, J. (1993). The Beaten Track. Clarendon Press. 

Córdoba Azcárate, M. (2020). Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatán. University of California Press. 

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Smith, S. P. (2024). #Nature is trending: Social media, viral landscapes, and digital environmental activism in Oman. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1-20. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779241268090  

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