Sarah Buitendach: Life (and lizards) through a lens

An artfully dishevelled bed and your pedicured toes protruding from beneath a corner of Frette linen — and what is that in the background? Why, if it isn’t Piazza San Marco!

Congratulations, you’re on holiday in Venice and all 2 600 of your closest Instagram followers and that guy you went to junior school with who likes all your Facebook posts now know it. I applaud you for skilfully getting up at 5.55am to miss the square’s surging crowds buying R400 coffees at Café Florian — otherwise they’d have been in your beautiful boudoir shot too. Likewise, that you’ve managed to keep the posts of your hedonistic Venetian vacances going all day. You eating a plate of cuttlefish risotto, you whizzing about in a Serenella water taxi again, you on a private tour of the Arsenale spaces at the Biennale. Indeed, we are living in the age of maniacal travel documentation by way of social media.

Snap a southern eland on the Serengeti and bam — it becomes an Instagram story. Sip tea in Tangiers and TikTok knows. Has the age of tech turned us into monster braggers? Was the urge to be the type of person who holds gatherings to show friends slide shows of holiday snaps just dormant, and iPhones our intuitive enablers? “Pics or it didn’t happen,” went the mid-2010s mantra. The world, it seems, is chanting that in unison.

As I write this, there are 654-million Instagram posts with the hashtag “travel”. That’s a lot of potentially poor photos of Positano. The endless stream of travel influencers who make money off this stuff proves that it’s big business, but studies and surveys on the topic show that social media has completely changed how we travel too. Take, for example, 2019 research by travel behemoth Booking.com, which revealed that one in five global travellers admitted that they chose places to stay that they could style in holiday photos to look more expensive than they were. And 28% of these travellers said that staying in “attractive properties” that they could photograph and use on their social-media accounts was a consideration when choosing where to stay.

A colleague says that seeing all the posts by her friends on travel trips makes her feel disgruntled about her own life. My takeout is that a) I know a couple of people who don’t do much work, b) marrying rich is underrated, and c) I am a total hypocrite — I lambast the travel boasters and then upload an image of a macchiato snapped in Machadodorp that not even my mother would find interesting.

Recently, LA copywriter Emily Bernstein did a skewering series of posts on Instagram captions that she’d like to see the back of, for digital brand Overheard LA. One of them was the trend to caption holiday posts with the phrase “woke up in…”. The descriptor is, I guess, meant to be charming and quirky. Bernstein begs to differ. “Between 46 Mykonos boomerangs and the literal geotag, everyone knows you’re on vacation. Let go of redundancy and tell the people something they don’t know, like a fun fact about lizards,” she wrote.

It made me think that this holiday season I’m going to have to up my Instagram game. I’m not going to go all holier than thou and proclaim I shall henceforth forgo posts of sea vistas or sunsets. Pu-leez! I definitely want you to think my life is vastly cooler than it actually is. But I am going to endeavour to be smarter and less gratuitous on the Gram. Fewer close-ups of caffeinated drinks, for example. Now, to that point, did you know that the impossibly rare Mexican bearded lizard is thought to be able to survive on only three meals a year?