The Imitation Game

Yesterday, a survey commissioned by TUI Musement found that 48% of Gen Z travellers in Spain, Italy, and the UK use TikTok for travel inspiration, putting it ahead of old-school recommendations from friends and family. More than four in ten respondents said a post or video had led them to book a trip or activity, while 39% said they had visited a tourist hotspot mainly to take a photograph or record a video. Among Gen Z (people born roughly between 1997 and 2012), 45% said they felt pressure to make their trips look more exciting on social media.¹

»The audience has become the cast«

Something strange is happening here. Tourists have always followed representations of places. Sociologist John Urry’s »tourist gaze« described how culture teaches us what’s worth seeing before we arrive.² But an inversion seems to be taking place: the photograph used to be evidence that a place was worth visiting. Now photographability is one of the things that makes a place worth visiting.

You go to the beach you’ve seen other people visit, find the angle from which everyone photographs the monument, and upload your own version for the next tourist. The image arrives before you do, and tells you what to do when you get there.

What’s changed isn’t representation itself, but its speed, scale, and participation. Tourists no longer merely consume representations of places. They produce the representations that subsequent tourists consume. The destination is pre-presented before it’s presented.

The selfie makes the mechanism almost absurdly clear. You stand where everyone else stood, make the same gesture, frame the same view, and put yourself into the image. You’re not claiming to have done something unique. You’re demonstrating that you did what everyone else did. The representation becomes an instruction, and the instruction becomes the experience.

Perhaps that’s why the TikTok finding is more interesting than a statistic about where young people get travel advice. The representation is no longer simply describing the place. It’s helping produce it.

Philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued that space isn’t just a container for social life, but is produced through social practices and representations.³ A tourist destination is partly made by what people do there, the images they circulate, and the expectations those images create. TikTok accelerates the loop: a place becomes photographable, then photographed, then recognisable as a place to photograph, then more heavily visited because it’s recognisable. The tourists who arrive because of the images produce more images confirming that the place is worth visiting. They manufacture a little piece of its continued existence as a destination.

Tourism may simply be the clearest place to see a broader cultural mechanism. Imitation is one of the oldest ways in which culture reproduces itself. Children imitate adults. Artists imitate artists. Languages, fashions, technologies, and customs spread because people copy them. Andy Warhol made the mechanism visible in his Marilyn works, repeatedly reproducing an already famous publicity photograph until the reproduction itself became an icon.⁴

Our digital culture has made that reproduction participatory. The audience can now reproduce what it admires immediately, cheaply, and publicly. A familiar thing already comes with an audience, a vocabulary, and a reason to be recognised. The successful thing is copied; the copy becomes more recognisable; its recognisability makes it easier to copy.

This may explain something peculiar about contemporary culture. We’re not necessarily looking for the hidden beach. We’re looking for the beach we’ve already seen. We’re not necessarily trying to do something nobody’s done. We want to do something everyone else has already demonstrated is worth doing. That isn’t necessarily bad. Imitation is how novelty becomes culture. The interesting question is what happens when reproduction becomes one of its primary mechanisms.

Turing’s »imitation game« asked whether a machine could imitate a human well enough to be mistaken for one.⁵ Our imitation game is almost the reverse: humans imitate each other to become part of the same cultural world. The audience has become the cast.

The old tourist consumed the representation of an experience. The new tourist participates in its reproduction, and in doing so helps determine what the next tourist will experience. We don’t just reproduce the destination. We reproduce the destination we expect to find. And then we go there to prove that it was there all along.

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