I don't know that all of that is due to social media. It just used to be that people took their photos with Kodaks and forced their friends to watch slideshows of them standing in front of things for which they waited in line.
No, people did not take that many photos, and they especially did not take that many pictures of their own beloved selves. If only because it was much more complicated to frame their own self with a camera than it is now with smartphones. Yes there were family pictures, yes there were friends/party pictures, but that was mostly separated from travel/tourism photos, and if consider the albums browsing and slideshow evenings at relatives and friends, pictures containing their travel partner(s) represented under 5% of the total (and were quickly skipped during browsing because they were generally uninteresting, so people were not wasting film for uninteresting views, a few partner pictures were enough to serve as a testimony purpose).
Today, I was watching a cycling race, and there was a couple, who had been waiting for the racers to arrive for several hours. Did they watch them when they came? Did they encourage them? No, nothing like that. They turned their back on the racers and made a selfie (with a tablet...) with themselves in the foreground and the racers in the background. And they almost caused an accident, as often. And it is like this all the time now.
There was a period when people would not live the event or experience the landscape/architecture and witness it through their own eye because they were too busy photographing or filming it. But now, it has been taken one step further: the event/landscape is only a background decoration for the real important subject: their high self.
And the easiness of taking photos, multiplied by the easiness of taking self pictures is also multiplied by the easiness of spreading them, which means the change in nature is also increased by the change in volume; the result is a fair amount of orders of magnitude higher than in film (or Kodak) time.
Just to add to this, I saw a picture of the parking lot on Clingman's Dome in the Smoky mountains the other day, and thought "Holy shit, that is a lot of people, it wasn't like that when I was frequenting the park". Back then (not even that long ago) I remember the goal was to be on top when no one else was, and I succeed frequently, and have the pictures to show for it.
The population is doubling every 33 years, and that means everything is getting a lot more congested, because new landmarks aren't being created at anything like those rates.
Indeed. I find that the new annoying thing that people do is usually just a variation of the old annoying thing that people used to do. Social media is an enabler perhaps, but annoying people will always find other ways to be just as annoying. It's the people that are fundamentally annoying, the technology is just their weapon of choice in this case.
