Many of us have been there: sitting in the middle of some beautiful destination on a much-anticipated getaway, on the beach or in the mountains or wherever strikes our fancy, and … staring at our phones. The little screen so often trumps the giant screen that is real life, even in moments when the intention is to take a break from the little screen and the day-to-day stress it brings with it.
There are plenty of ways our phones make travel easier. We have fast, immediate access to reviews, ratings, and recommendations to help guide our decisions. We snap pictures to capture memories and share them with others. And, of course, there’s GPS — truly, we ask ourselves, how did anyone ever find anything before the existence of Google Maps? The truth is, they did find things, and everything turned out fine.
For all the ways modern technology can improve our vacations, it can also make them worse. It’s an obvious point that checking your work emails when you’re supposed to be off sucks. What’s perhaps not so obvious is that posting to Instagram when you’re on a boat floating by a glacier in Patagonia kind of does, too. When you’re back at the hotel, Instagram and the picture you just took will still be there for the posting, but the glacier won’t (not only because you left, but also, eventually, because of climate change).
Living and dying by internet recommendations sometimes means that we all end up in the same places and have a miserable time for it, and we’re so focused on checking off the prototypical what-to-do boxes that we forgo more niche activities we might enjoy more. We stare at Google Maps for the majority of a 20-minute walk to get to the restaurant a handful of YouTube influencers say is a must-try, missing the 15 restaurants that might have been great in the interim. Getting the picture for Instagram may help us enjoy and remember the visuals of a place more, but that can come at the expense of the rest of the experience. We often pull out our phones to entertain ourselves during some downtime, not realizing that the exercise might actually make us more bored.
I’m not saying we all need to throw our phones into the ocean when we go on vacation, but it is worth pausing to ask whether we’re accidentally ruining our time away a little bit because we just can’t quit the portable internet device we carry around with us 24/7.
“People primarily use their phones for leisure, that’s how phones are marketed, that’s how they’re sold. They’re lifestyle enhancers, they’re leisure devices,” said Andrew Lepp, a professor at Kent State University who studies the impact of mobile phones and social media on behavior. “The question then is: Do they enhance our leisure or do they distract from it? It can do both, but if we’re not careful, it can diminish our experience of leisure.”
https://www.vox.com/money/23662213/smartphone-instagram-vacation-pictures-distract-holidays
