The Coming Tech Backlash and What It Means for Travel
Photo Credit: What kind of travel has the rise of social media fostered? Is the experiential travel trend really just about better bragging rights so we can share these artsy photographs on Instagram? Visualhunt / Phil Roeder
Skift Take
While the larger world is asking questions and turning on Silicon Valley, and the tools and culture it spawned, it is time for everyone — including us in travel — to pause to account for the society we are creating. The tech and social media backlash happening right now is a test for us in travel, as well.
Exactly a year ago, as we sat down to write our flagship travel Megatrend for 2017, Humanity Returns to Travel, little did we realize the coming year would play out in such a way as to make the underlying message resonate even more today: The whole world IS crying out now for a return to humanity.
As we sit here at the start of 2018 and within touching distance of 2020, we are at a reckoning point, socially, culturally and politically, where social platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube and others are facing a backlash from various constituents, including the users, media, regulators, politicians, governments and, in some cases, even founders and early executives who built these platforms.
The ill-effects of a constant-dopamine-hit society that has been created over the last decade is now apparent worldwide, and we are all reeling from the effects of it. One of these effects is what we termed earlier this year as Permanxiety, this never-ending anxious state of the wo
