Surrogate Tourists on Instagram: An(other) Kind of Mimetic Gaze

Abstract

From influencers to established travel brands to casual consumers, there are a number of existing organisms in the online ecosystem of Instagram simultaneously producing and consuming content. At first glance, the nature of these relationships seems simple—sharing and engaging via a visual medium—but upon prolonged review, deeper questions about the interwoven complexity existing between these organisms and their content emerge. The authors illuminate several discernible patterns through a deep theoretical framing of the gaze, mimetic reproduction, and ownership followed by a conceptual modeling through a review of everyday Instagramic practices. What becomes apparent are a number of stages of development in this process. Firstly, the practice of photographic mimicry becomes a form of consumption in which the consumer "consumes places" vicariously across space and time, making image reproduction an embodied practice. Secondly, the Instagram feed of an individual consumer (or influencer) becomes a sort of living autobiography, curating and aggrandizing the glossiest images that form a projected extension of self that is not grounded necessarily in authenticity, but in reproduction. Finally, the proliferation of communication between consumer and consumer reproduces a surrogate type that creates a constantly evolving circular content loop where the flow of influence and information becomes muddled and originality becomes less distinguishable. This article critically explores how Instagram has collapsed traditional influence and consumer relationships, particularly in how tourist experience and imagery are shared, resulting in a complex online community that resembles a cultural colonial organism fed by communication feedback loops. The result of this article is the positioning of a surrogate tourist embodied within a collection of individual entities performing specialized tasks dependent on other individuals in the community in which the function and nature of the individual recedes in importance to the relationship existing between organisms.