The World in a Selfie
by Marco d'Eramo
Verso, March 2021
Hardcover | 6-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 288 pages | no illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781788731072 | $29.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
We’ve all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise?
The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D’Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures.
D’Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters—from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain—before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the ‘UNESCO-cide’ of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.
Marco D’Eramo is an Italian journalist and social theorist. He worked at the newspaper il manifesto for over thirty years. He writes for New Left Review, MicroMega and the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung. His books include The Pig and the Skyscraper, which has been translated into several languages.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
As a self-employed freelancer donning numerous hats — author, editor, and tour guide, among the occasional other one here and there — most of my trips around the world have been work-related: heading to Venice every couple of years for the Biennale, going to Chicago for its newer Biennial, or making it to Cairo on a press junket. Yet like many other so-called business travelers, I have not taken a trip since 2019. The coronavirus pandemic, it goes without saying, postponed or canceled the events I would normally attend and made the prospects of simply getting on a plane to go from point A to point B complicated. It will probably be 2022 before another such trip happens, though for a few weeks this year, before the Delta variant took over, it optimistically seemed like it would be sooner. Whatever the timing, the only thing clear is that tourism in its many forms will bounce back once people feel like it's safe to travel and gather — the industry is too big not to.
With the pandemic hitting tourism harder than any industry over the last eighteen months, Marco d'Eramo's new book on the "tourist age" arrived a few months ago with remarkable timing, although it was first published in Italian in 2017. Given the circumstances, the English translation has been updated to address the impact of COVID-19. Nevertheless, the pandemic does not figure dramatically in his overall thesis, at least in terms of the industry's future prospects. As he points out more than once in the book, tourism in its modern form was enabled by "two immense revolutions: a technological revolution in transport and communication that made travel shorter, safer, more comfortable and cheaper; and the social revolution that allowed increasing numbers of the world's population to enjoy paid leisure time." It will take equally dramatic changes to dethrone tourism from its place atop the global economy, d'Eramo contends, not a once-in-a-century pandemic.
The World in a Selfie starts in the past, in the nineteenth century, with the appearance of the Thomas Cook travel agency, the publication of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, people touring the sewers of Paris, and other elements of what he calls the "leisure revolution." The travels of the few — the rich — eventually turned into mass tourism, derided by many but involving most people on the planet: we are all tourists at some points in our lives. D'Eramo explores various aspects of tourism in the first half the book, including the impact of UNESCO on cities, the search for authenticity, and some machinations of tourism as an industry; the last is explained exceptionally well in the context of Las Vegas. Then, in one chapter just past the book's midsection, d'Eramo unexpectedly veers into zoning, a modern phenomenon with only a tenuous relationship to tourism, as much as the author tries.
The chapter on zoning is a hinge in the book, which shifts from tourism and its effect on the city to foreseeing the end of the "tourist age." The latter, in d'Eramo's mind, must involve undoing the two revolutions mentioned above. Although he doesn't spend much time on the environmental impact of airplanes and other carbon-spewing aspects of tourism and how they could undo cheap travel, he does address shifts in work culture, including the one I embody. If a 9-to-5 job with paid vacation days is increasingly anachronistic, replaced by more and more variations on the gig economy, how will people travel? Will tourism's various forms — business tourism, sports tourism, religious tourism, medical tourism, and sex tourism are some d'Eramo explores in an early chapter — be pared down considerably to just one or two types, as costs increase and opportunities decrease? That's likely, but it's hard to say how long that will take. People interested in tourism's end, as much as its past and present, will find much to savor in d'Eramo's smart, enjoyable book.