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On a hike to Upper Joffre Lake near Pemberton this summer, I saw a dozen people frozen in the same pose. In one hand, they held out crumbs. In the other, they held smartphones, waiting for the moment a whisky jack would fly down for a nibble so that they could document themselves playing Snow White.<\/p>\n
Remember that time not long ago when we went outside to get offline? People are now going outside to get online.<\/p>\n
In a decade, visits to Canada\u2019s national parks have jumped<\/a> from 11.9 million to 15.9 million, a 34-per-cent increase.<\/p>\n A big reason for this: the Instagram effect.<\/p>\n The addictive photo-sharing platform was launched in 2010 and acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. In 2018, it surpassed one billion active users, becoming the sixth social medium to do so.<\/p>\n In that time, it\u2019s dramatically changed how people plan, document and share experiences. Shots of nature in particular \u2014 along with pictures of food, fashion and loved ones \u2014 are irresistible fodder for likes.<\/p>\n Tory Michak, who graduated from the University of British Columbia with a master\u2019s in landscape architecture this year, wrote her thesis<\/a> on Instagram and the wilderness.<\/p>\n A climber and trail runner, Michak had wondered: \u201cWhen we seek out nature for play or relief, are we bringing with us the very thing we are trying to escape from?\u201d<\/p>\n Though she notes that, paradoxically, \u201cInstagram inspires many of us to seek out an outdoor adventure in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n For a pre-Instagram explanation of our habits of documentation, Michak turned to Susan Sontag\u2019s famous series of essays published in the 1977 book On Photography<\/i>. Sontag wrote that photography has become a \u201cprincipal device for experiencing something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWith Instagram, the photo has come to represent the experience more and more,\u201d said Michak.<\/p>\n Michak found research, though not on Instagram specifically, that shows using electronic devices in green settings significantly decreases the mental benefits of exposure to nature.<\/p>\n But she also found research that shows photography improves what people are able to remember from their visual surroundings.<\/p>\n This is just one of many tricky questions around Instagram and the wilderness, such as whether there\u2019s a proper way to experience the wilderness, or whether it\u2019s good or bad that Instagram is uncovering hidden gems, such as the Colorado River\u2019s Horseshoe Bend, for people to visit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe negatives can be very obvious,\u201d said Michak.<\/p>\n The influx of new visitors has tested the ability of parks to accommodate their numbers. Many North American parks now have long lines for entry and washrooms, and crowded and noisy trails.<\/p>\n Not everyone is familiar with conduct like \u201cleave no trace.\u201d At Joffre Lakes, there has been trouble<\/a> with illegal parking due to overflow at the designated lot.<\/p>\n Extra aggressive visitors, bolstered by the mantra of \u201cdoing it for the \u2018Gram,\u201d have trespassed through, and as a result damaged, ecological areas.<\/p>\n An Instagram account called @trailfails collects visual evidence of these violations, such as posers dangling from Joshua trees or a crowd in Vermont chasing a moose for photos, only to cause it to drown<\/a> in a lake.<\/p>\n Digital tools might be new, but Michak believes these are old habits.<\/p>\n She points to the ideas of environmental scholar Neil Evernden, who said that people \u201cobjectify the environment and convert it into a thing of only measurable value.\u201d<\/p>\n Our forays into the wilderness are as much about exploring ourselves as they are about the outdoors. What we\u2019re often doing is using the wilderness to \u201csculpt\u201d ourselves, he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been a reason to walk or hike ever since Thoreau declared that he was \u2018yearning for the wild,\u2019\u201d Michak wrote in her thesis. \u201cToday, for all our talk of exploring, there are actually few areas left to be explored\u2026 [and few] experiences not already pictured on Instagram.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of those experiences are also visually rendered in the same way: the same moody palettes and seemingly candid expressions, the same magazine-like poses. Even Crown corporation Destination BC, which has over 471,000 Instagram followers, encourages<\/a> these dramatic images, calling them \u201con brand\u201d for the province.<\/p>\n The controversies around documenting nature and the effects of that documentation aren\u2019t new, though Instagram\u2019s billion-strong user base means those effects are amplified.<\/p>\n Documentation often \u201cdefines what wilderness is for us, what we value and don\u2019t value,\u201d said Michak.<\/p>\n She points to the work of Ansel Adams. Though beloved, Adams, the photographer of American landscapes who began making pictures in the 1920s, had his share of critics.<\/p>\n His romantic black-and-white images inspired conservation efforts, but he was also accused of idealizing a pristine wilderness untouched by humans, erasing, for example, the Ahwahnechee people who lived in Yosemite when he photographed the valley.<\/p>\n Landscape photographers like Adams tend to focus on the grandeur and mystique of wilderness, and are often people with the ability, time and cultural background to venture outdoors. People who associate the wilderness with labour may not see the appeal.<\/p>\n As Michak examined Instagram\u2019s place in the history of wilderness photography, she did notice one big difference: today\u2019s images feature a majority of women.<\/p>\n \u201cRepresentation is one of the great positives,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Women were welcomed and represented in the early days of nature walking and hiking clubs, she found. But they were often pushed to the margins as exploration, climbing and hiking were seen as male pursuits.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a socially negative view of posting a selfie on social media, but it can be an act of activism saying, \u2018I was in here! I was in this place where woman traditionally have not been accepted or encouraged to go,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Michak believes more can be done to anticipate and deal with the flood of media-minded visitors.<\/p>\n \u201cIn landscape architecture, it isn\u2019t something explored often, even though we\u2019re often designing sites to be used for taking photos to be posted eventually on Instagram,\u201d she said. (See Instagram traps<\/a>.)<\/p>\n One of Michak\u2019s case studies is the Grand Canyon\u2019s Mather Point Visitor Center<\/a>, which a firm redesigned in 2016 with the criteria of managing the tricky balance of accommodating more visitors without enlarging the ecological footprint.<\/p>\n While there has been research on Instagram with regard to travel, education and museums, there isn\u2019t much on the platform\u2019s effect on the environment.<\/p>\n Though what Michak found during her research on Instagram and the wilderness is consistent with how the social medium is being used elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cIf anything, it appears that we are spending much more time \u2018sculpting the self.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n **<\/i><\/p>\n You can read Tory Michak\u2019s thesis \u201cBe Here Now : Instagram and the Feminization of Wilderness\u201d in its entirety here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n Christopher Cheung is a reporter at The Tyee<\/a>, where this story originally appeared.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"