We can’t hate on Instagram too much.
After all, as the world’s single largest dedicated platform for photography and video media, it’s a powerhouse and a necessity for the professional lives of most photographers.
And it offers an opportunity for exposure that’s pretty unparalleled.
Plus it has brought in a whole new generation of people into photography and in a big way.
But we’ve also covered some of the more negative effects of this growth, chief among them being an overload of “Insta” celebrities and the bad behavior that can often be associated with people constantly attempting to take the best selfie possible.
Whether it’s travel agencies specifically putting together “Instagram-able” vacation packages or restaurants banning smartphones because someone put one on a sushi conveyor built, it seems like everyone needs to chill out.
Especially if reports about the destruction wrought on natural “beauty sites” by hordes of people seeking the perfect capture for their profiles are to be believed.
One example cited by Peta Pixel is the Figure 8 Pools in Australia, a once off-the-beaten-path nature preserve that makes for great Instagram pictures and is now absolutely overrun with tourists – and all the problems that brings.
Many nature sites are delicate locations that, in many cases, take thousands of years to develop. Becoming an “Insta-famous” location can, however, end all of that in the geological equivalent of seconds.
Another example cited by Peta Pixel, Australia’s Helensburgh abandoned railway tunnel, was once famed for its glow worms that lined the tunnel at night. Those worms have mostly been killed off by Instagrammers taking burning torch shots in the tunnel at night, a tunnel that is now cordoned off with a fence and which will reopen upon the worms’ recovery, but only to limited public access.
But let’s not blame Instagram for travellers acting badly. After all, this is a tale as old as time and, last we checked, the child that wrote on the walls of the Great Pyramid was not doing it for the ‘Gram so maybe all of it is just a case of people being people?
What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
