Icons, for now

Increasingly, places feel seen before they’re visited. It happens so easily these days, suffice to put in a few prompts or search words, or mention a destination in passing to someone you know, and most of your devices will flash up with eager tips, must-see instructions and articles about it. What started as a farfetched idea can quickly lose its charm when you are inundated with listicles, social posts and video blogs.

Even when we knowingly throw ourselves into the depths of travel research, it tends to reveal too much and mess with the joy of spontaneity. When expectations appear, the pressure builds to follow and conform too.

“Is that really what that looks like?”

“Did they just have a bad experience?”

“Is it worth trusting these reviews or shall I just go see for myself?”

Inevitably we start forming those deeper pre-conceived ideas, which seldom paint the full picture nor an accurate story.

History offers clear markers for why certain landmarks earned their status and cause for visit. Often they signified important moments in time where engineering achievement, religious presence, symbolism, architectural beauty or cultural meaning played a role. Some of the destinations now flocked to, were once structures serving functions before history decided they mattered.

Overtourism has made top destinations far less accessible and diluted the travel experience. Many places even present like a cookbook with studio photos. Photo angles, and perspectives of landmarks are instantly recognisable and practically dictated for visitors. The Trevi Fountain, the Fushimi Inari Shrine, Notre-Dame de Paris, La Sagrada Familia; universally considered iconic, they can feel familiar before you even set foot there. Different wonders in different places, yet the same choreography is repeated everywhere. Key landmarks no longer feel like destinations you arrive at. Instead, they’re moving targets you briefly spot between shuffling crowds all pointing their screens in the same direction. As if repeating the same angled photos has become part of how places have to be consumed. When an image has been repeated enough times, the memory of such a visit can remain equally superficial, even when the setting was extraordinary.

Sightseeing can be quite exhausting. The overstimulation of too many people, too much input, not enough space to actually take anything in. Seeing something in peace has become an exclusive concept, a matter of privilege, timing, patience, and luck. What we’re able to observe is inevitably shaped by circumstance; access, timing, and context, as much as by place itself.

The TikTok effect shows up around mealtimes too. A single dish goes viral and suddenly a small restaurant is asked to cater to demand and attention it was never built for. Physical and electronic queuing, phones buzzing when it’s your turn, booking systems with timeslots over capacitated for weeks on end. The spotlight phenomenon moves fast, often peaks temporarily leaving nearby places to fade into the background, few able to sustain the fleeting halo effect. With small businesses already being short-staffed, it seems unfair to burden them.

All this changes the atmosphere of a neighbourhood without anyone really deciding that it should. There’s also an intense pressure woven through it all. To document. To validate. To take the photo you’ve already seen.

When so much of a place is previewed, the risk isn't that it disappoints, it's that it never quite gets the chance to introduce itself. Following someone else’s route can be efficient, even enjoyable. Increasingly though, city centres have one street packed wall-to-wall with a standstill queue, while the surrounding streets echo empty. It raises a simple question: If the experience is fully rehearsed; what’s the point of travel? Where does the personal quest and discovery fit in?

It seems icons now are made through algorithms, social pressure and repetition. But what has enough lasting power to be iconic today; the physical object, or the image of it? When images circulate online endlessly, the cycle of what’s “in” and “out” moves faster than we can humanly keep up with. If this is how travel has been spun; previewed, pre-photographed, pre-consumed; can iconic landmarks be preserved under such scrutiny? How might this change their iconic status over time? Equally, with so little attention given to the broader context of a landmark, what remains in us after seeing it live?

Today's icons — overphotographed, overcrowded, over-burdened — are being excessively tested. With patience thinning everywhere, what is the tipping point before this is no longer sustainable? Perhaps the next generation will have to seek tomorrow’s icons elsewhere, or want to redefine them altogether in quiet streets, overlooked corners, and places not yet captured.

Looking beyond what’s man-made and directed by humans: What happens when AI can generate the icons people want to experience; perfectly curated, perfectly lit, perfectly composed?

We're living in a reality where real and artificial coexist. Virtual concerts draw huge crowds. Drone light shows can replace fireworks. Digital art installations have become destinations in their own right. Not tangible replicas but rich, conceptual experiences that people already travel to witness. So, what's to say future tourism won't include artificial landmarks that achieve iconic status through their innovative or conceptual existence? Could AI-generated structures; projected, holographic, or otherwise immaterial, one day become as culturally significant as, say, the Eiffel Tower, simply because enough people collectively decide they matter? Is it possible, that we are approaching a fork in the road of travel: one path leading back to history, and another toward artificially mediated icons that exist only as long as we engage?

Whether AI invents icons or not, iconic permanence is challenged. Can landmarks rooted in real history and physical structure continue to endure, or will they too become subject to the same cycles of virality and obsolescence?

Iconic landmarks will keep drawing our attention.

What counts is the intention we bring when visiting.

Arriving without the limitation of a full picture, leaving room for another angle, choosing a different time or a less busy street. The places not yet captured have plenty to show.