This post is a follow-up (of sorts) to my review of the book The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan. While The New Tourist took a broader look at the tourism industry, its impact, and how we view ourselves as tourists, The World in a Selfie takes an even broader look to consider what tourism says about ourselves and society more broadly. It’s a bit hard to specify because having read the book, everything sort of blends together, but topics covered include:

• The Tourist City – what it is and how it impacts residents
• How tourism has changed (sewers used to be an attraction!)
• The effect of the UNESCO Heritage label
• Case studies of Lijiang (and how its “old town” continues to expand) and Las Vegas (from inauthentic to authentic)
• Food tourism and the search for authenticity

Overall, I really liked the way the book explored the relationship between authenticity and inauthenticity as it relates to tourism. One of the most eye-opening examples was how the city of Lijiang was basically reconstructed to be a heritage spot – contrasting that with the way that Las Vegas became a tourist spot because it embraced its in-authenticness was definitely thought provoking. Essentially, D’Eramo is arguing that:

“the proliferation of markers turns something inauthentic into something authentic, and thus, once its ‘inauthenticities’ have been reproduced an infinite number of times in various media, Los Angeles acquires its aura.”

That actually made a lot of sense when you consider why people have travelled. One reason why The Grand Tour was so popular was because it was a way to show you had the required economic means to acquire the social and cultural capital that signified you were a member of upper class society. Of course, there are other reasons to travel (which Alain de Botton explores in The Art of Travel – review for that coming up!) but travel as a status marker remains a compelling reason. After all, it explains why we try to cram as many stops to noteworthy places in a trip (well, that and the fact we’re used to making our time as productive as possible), and also explains why we want to search out the most authentic and “local” places that mark us as being more than mere ‘tourists’ but people who are ‘in the know.’ Or as the book puts it in better phrasing:

“Yet the disdain which every tourist feels toward tourists, and her anxious concern to differentiate herself from them and conceive herself as a ‘traveller’, is just one of the countless ways in which individuals perceive themselves as taking up a different position from the one they really occupy in social space.”

In other words, we travel (or at least, some of us travel) as a way of marking ourselves as people who are culturally savvy. In order to show that we have travelled, we tend to go to the same spots people have always done because these spots are now “markers” of the country. The Chinese have a great phrase for this: 打卡, or punching a card (the way we used to punch timecards). But as these places become too commonplace, we start seeking our more “authentic” places which become the next “must-go” places and the cycle continues. That perhaps is the reason for travel disappointment. D’Eramo writes that

“Tourists are disappointed because what they go to see are not actual places but rather the guidebooks themselves, in the sense that their experience of sightseeing consists of making a constant navigation between an experience ready-made by markers and the reality of the trip.”

And this quote reminds me of what De Botton wrote about the anticipation of travel. I’ll try to see if I can talk about it more in my review of The Art of Travel or if this will remain one of those little threads that I can never fully unravel to my satisfaction.

The last thing I want to talk about is D’Eramo’s discussion of the “Tourist City”. The book differentiates between three types of cities, but the definition I found most helpful is that a Tourist City is when a city has crossed a certain threshold of tourists so much that locals are now forced to use services that were originally designed for tourists. I thought that definition, as well as the passage that explores the difference between authenticity and quality (as well as what “authentic” means when confronted with the tourist’s palate) made for interesting thinking about the ways we live and interact with those who visit our home country for leisure.

The World in a Selfie was not an easy read, not because the content was difficult, but because the language felt rather intimidating at times. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve been reading biographies which were more narrative driven right before this, but this was definitely a change of pace, reading-wise. That said, I finished the book much faster than I thought I would and found that it gave me a lot of food for thought. I wish I had read this alongside The New Tourist, but it’s never too late to think about the books together.