After reading Ambrose’s great thread on ‘The impact of social media and sensitive mountain locations’, it prompted me to dust off the typing fingers and delve into this interesting topic. As the summer approaches, and glimmers of loosening of restrictions after the global pandemic of the past year (this was written in April 2021), it seems like an ideal opportunity to consider what is happening.

As I come from a Technology sector background (over half of my career working in the telecommunication sector), I was very interested to ponder is it all social media’s fault? That was my key question, as, I’ve found in most cases, it’s never usually one specific reason, but a range. So basing off that, here’s my few different factors below that I think all relate which I’ll discuss first, before delving into what I think are possible solutions (I suspect this will be contentious!).
My goal with this post is to be comprehensive on a few topics, while being comprehensible on the areas I’m covering. Let the discussions begin!

Executive Summary

For those of you who aren’t inclined to read this now-long post, here’s the Twitter/tweet version of it:

Almost everyone now carries a supercomputer in their pocket with a great camera. Those supercomputers are connected to the Internet, which is becoming accessible from almost anywhere at at time. This has enabled new disciplines like social networks, which then enabled completely new industries such as influencers, etc.
The population of Ireland is only growing - this is inevitable. It has grown more than 50% in the past seventy years, and likely will increase by over a third in the next twenty to thirty years.
Assuming these, access to the knowledge of all locations will only become more prevalent - how we manage this, and how we manage our outdoors needs deep thought. Scroll to the bottom for my suggestions.

With that, grab a coffee and enjoy!

Rise of the (digital) camera

Firstly, let us start with digital devices and before we point the finger at social media, let’s also highlight the enabler of those photos, the camera.

Above shows the number of camera sales (predominantly digital) back to 2006. The dedicated camera (i.e. just this one purpose) peaked in sales at roughly 119 million sales in 2008. For those wondering, this is the highest sales of camera, ever, if you go all the way back to their invention: here’s the data back to 1950 if anyone is motivated enough to back and manually transcribe them into a spreadsheet. 119 million sales in one year is a big number, but if we move to the next device…

The only part of really lives on of this device’s original name is in the title: the smart ‘phone’

Alongside this, another device had been created: the ‘mobile phone’ (if anyone wants to read the history of its invention, this book from the inventor of the very first mobile phone is great). In 1979, it was just a telephone without a cable, but my the mid-90’s, individuals were expanding the capabilities of the little devices to become handheld organizers, and, in 1999 the first mobile phone with a digital camera appeared.

While the first digital cameras and the first cameras in phones/smartphones were very poor, each year has seen revolutions in quality and performance. Then, in mid-2007 the revolution occurred with the sale of the first iPhone, jumpstarting the ‘smartphone’ revolution that we all know and live on today. What is easy to forget is that point changed the ‘phone’ into a ‘computer’, and by giving every single user a supercomputer in their pocket, the possibility to take great photos anywhere, at any time, and even if it wasn’t so great, instantly edit that same photo into some amazing.

Smartphone's aren't just computers masquerading as telephones; they're also, increasingly, cameras masquerading as computers
Source: The Atlantic, 2013

So, lets look at what happened to both the smartphone, and digital cameras. As mentioned, digital cameras peaked in sale in 2008. In 2007, the year the iPhone went on sale, Apple sold roughly 3 million iPhones in its first year. Android came a couple of years later and now, when we combine iPhone and Android sales, in 2020, 1.4 BILLION phones were sold in 2020 (and this is down from the peak in 2018 of 1.55 billion). In that same time, sales of digital cameras for the whole planet was 9 million devices in 2020. The last time they were that low was in…1977. In short, the dedicated camera is as niche as niche can be. Here’s the same graph of camera sales overlaid with smartphone sales. Digital camera sales now look like a flat line…

The key takeaway here is: there are 5.5 billion adults on the planet right now. And, 4 billion of them have a smartphone/supercomputer with a great digital camera in their pocket!. Even the worst/cheapest smartphone nowadays (as cheap as $40 in some parts of the world) have pretty decent cameras!

So, this is a key item: we all have a camera in our pocket at all times. Even if the physical camera sensor isn’t particularly good, advances in software mean various filters and editing can be completed to make for very impressive photos and video.

Internet for all

Alongside that, there was another item that enabled the smartphone to become so popular: the Internet. Your iPhone or Android would be wildly less useful if all those apps we depend on didn’t have an internet connection. And it’s both the supercomputer in your pocket and the Internet, that enabled the new mediums that we know as social networks, that didn’t exist before the early 2000s. While they existed before smartphones as we know it appeared, it was making them mobile that truly let them flourish when we could access them at any time from anywhere. For that to happen, mobile phone networks have made huge strides to blanket the main areas people visit, as well as also through economies of scale, dropping the price. As an amusing context, when I got my own first mobile phone in 1998, it was £20 and for that, I got 10 minutes of calls and 20 text messages: for the same money now, you have unlimited calls, texts, and most likely, unlimited data. There is no cost to uploading all those photos to whatever your favorite network of choice is.

Not only that, but coverage has steadily improved (although everyone can think of moments and areas where there is rubbish coverage!), even in very rural areas. And, due to the quirk of mountain peaks giving clear views in all directions, more often than not, there is coverage at the top of every summit as there is a ‘view’ from your pocket-supercomputer to a mobile phone tower. Even many valleys now have good, even excellent, coverage. (by the way, one of the next revolutions coming to mobile phone technology is the use of satellites to fill in any coverage gaps. Alongside this, new products such as SpaceX’s Starlink will be bringing Internet to every single location on the planet).

So this is the second key item: unless you are that ultra-rare exception to all rules, everyone is carrying a device with access to the Internet, more often than not, with very good coverage.

Those social networks

Lastly, before I move on to other items I believe are factors, look at the topic that started off this now-very-long-and-getting-longer post: those social networks. Loved and derided in equal measure and having appeared almost immediately after the world wide web was invented. The WWW is largely acknowledged as starting around 1993 with the first web browsers (Fun fact: I’ve been online since 1994) and the first ‘social networks’ appearing around 1996 with bolt.com. Social networks progressively got bigger until we ended up entering what I’ll call the modern era. Facebook is the global monster with 2.8 billion monthly active users, however, there is a huge number of other networks where people share content, all with over a billion users (many of which you’ll have never heard of): Twitter, WeChat, Line, Tiktok, Reddit, Twitch, Fornite (you thought this was just a game?), Youtube, amongst many, many, others you’ll have never heard of, and yet have millions, tens or hundreds of millions of users.

Amount of minutes spent daily on social network on average. Source: Statista

It’s also worth acknowledging a key item: up until the social network appeared, it was more involved in effort than most were willing to take on to post content online. Blogging existed alongside, but even that took more effort (setting up the blog, etc., etc.). Now, in 2021, we have 320 BILLION photos posted DAILY online by a range of users (and users can be defined as individuals, companies, news - real and fake, etc., etc.). That is a lot of photos, to put it mildly. And absolutely, all those - more often than not, excellent-looking - photos get viewed by those 4-5 billion people are online, either through computers or smartphones (predominantly the latter). There are also not just photos also: 720,000 hours of video daily uploaded, countless blog posts, a growing-quickly number of podcasts, new upstarts such as Clubhouse, etc.

These social networks consume a large part of people’s days now also: 58 minutes on average per user on Facebook platforms! Which absolutely means they are seeing great photos of amazing locations. But people do not follow Dunbar’s Law (the maximum number of relationships anyone can maintain is 150): most people follow a much larger number, and due to this, it leads to the ‘manipulation’ of our feeds so we see what the ‘social networks’ think is most relevant: which doesn’t necessarily mean your local friends and that cool location where they went. What you will see, is what drives the most ‘engagement’ (i.e. making you spend more time on the website), and most likely, bigger sites, and your ‘interests’ (I’m fairly certain anyone reading this blog sees a lot of climbing and outdoor sports accounts).

However, it’s too simplistic to just blame social networks for this ill. See the photo to my right. I visited Siam Reap in Cambodia in 2007 - the year the iPhone was launched, digital cameras were pretty junk, and…..Facebook had only opened up access to everyone in September 2006 outside of university email addresses. I.e. social networks had no material impact on people going to these areas. But books such as Lonely Planet, tv documentaries, magazine articles all had: and really, social networks, are just another link to media and distribution. As long as people have been able to write (possibly even speak?), people have been sharing stories of places and traveling to those locations: the only difference is now there are a lot more of us….

The third key item: social networks exist, but they weren’t the originator of sharing of media. They may be like throwing petrol on a fire, but the fire (which was enabled by many - not just the wealthy/elite - having the means to travel and explore) was getting larger by the day anyway.

The Creator (or Passion) Economy

Lastly, here’s an interesting piece before I move on to other factors impacting our outdoors (and as important, if not more so, I believe): the industries that have been created due to social networks. We call them ‘podcasters’, or ‘bloggers’, or ‘youtubers’, or ‘tiktokers’, and the ‘influencer’. all terms that didn’t exist 5 years ago in 2015. This is now big business, and people even aspire to these as future jobs when they leave school! I’m fully on board with this: if you’d asked someone in the Victorian era what they thought of people getting paid to sit in front of screens, or be paid to bring people into the outdoors, they’d have been as equally dismissive as people are now of the new jobs that exist online.

The problem is, right now, it’s the early days and the whole Internet runs - for the most part - off of digital advertising. These industries are built solely on ‘engagement’ (i.e. the more eyeballs that see the content, the better): the goal of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter is for you to spend more time on it so you see more ads. The goal here is quantity.

But it won’t stay this way.

Social networks are going to change and evolve, especially as they (debatably?) compared to the 21st-century version of nicotine.. And, most importantly, the Creator Economy is only getting started. This creator economy can be seen already and in many ways the recent Covid-19 pandemic may help jump-start it as more people are more comfortable paying online: subscribing to creators so that you’re paying for quality content, not just quantities of content. See simple examples from myself: want to support my writing and production on my writing here, or my suspended-for-now project where I discuss the impacts on outdoors? Subscribe! (the latter of those links is a project of mine where you sign up for a small monthly fee).

Also, if you are a producer of great content, stop just publishing it to Instagram and the other networks, and host it yourself - you own the material there, and people will support you. It is coming. Want to know more on this: I suggest start with the pionneering essay of Kevin Kelly here on 1,000 true fans (written in 2008!), or the updated review of this with 100 true fans and this related discussion.

The fourth key item on technology and digital devices: people and publishers/companies will continue to publish media that shows incredible locations, and people will want to go there. Asking them to stop is…naive, especially when you consider the billions of pieces of content (video, writing, etc.)? there is no way to police this: much of the content is written by people not even in the area they are discussing so have no idea of the potentially sensitive nature of what they are posting.

Population changes: Ireland and Dublin in focus

Moving away from technology, I’m going to dive into a particular item as it has changed significantly: population numbers. This was a great journey and project for myself - I had no idea what I’d find when I did this, only that I believed there may be something…..

Marvel at what has changed over the world:

In 1800, there were 1.0 billion people on the whole planet
In 1900, there were 1.6 billion people on the whole planet
In 2000, there were 6.2 billion people on the whole planet
In 2019, there were 7.7 billion people on the whole planet

Look at that graph right showing the trend. Those numbers are incredible, and as you’ll notice that line of growth is not slowing just yet either (we’re expected to peak somewhere around 10 billion total). What I’m trying to highlight here, is that when people got ideas to travel and explore (and we can look at easy examples like Columbus in 1492, ‘finding’ the USA), there just weren’t a lot of us around (but let’s not get into another tangent discussing the murder of the era, o.k :).

To make this relevant to the country where this post originated from, I’ll focus on just one location for this: population increases in Ireland. We all “remember the good old days” when things were smaller, simpler, quieter, right? Maybe because it was! As it happens, we have a pretty good idea of Ireland’s population back to the 1700 or so (graph to the right). But let’s make it relevant to those of us who are actually alive right now:

Born in 2000, so you’re now 21? The population last year, when you were 20, was ~6.9 million

Born in 1990, so you’re now 31? The population, when you were 20, was ~6.3 million

Born in 1980, so you’re now 41? The population when you were 20 was ~5.5 million

Born in 1970, so you’re now 51? The population when you were 20 was ~5.1 million

Born in 1960, so you’re now 61? The population when you were 20 was ~4.8 million

Born in 1950, so you’re now 71? The population when you were 20 was ~4.4 million

Born in 1940, so you’re now 81? The population when you were 20 was ~4.4 million

So, in the last 70 years, there are now 2.5 million extra people on the island of Ireland. Read that again, there is now TWO AND A HALF MILLION EXTRA PEOPLE on the island in the last 70 years (a more than 50% increase in the last 70 years).

Dublin

Since Dublin is the main urban centre in Ireland, and as Wicklow sees some of the largest challenges with the number of users, let us look at Dublin in isolation. Since 1950, Dublin has grown annually by, on average, 1.12% from roughly 600,000 inhabitants to 1.4 million (2020) - that’s over double. Let us do the same routine:

Born in 2000, so you’re now 21? The population last year, when you were 20, was ~1.4 million

Born in 1990, so you’re now 31? The population, when you were 20, was ~1.1 million

Born in 1980, so you’re now 41? The population when you were 20 was ~ 0.99 million

Born in 1970, so you’re now 51? The population when you were 20 was ~.91 million

Born in 1960, so you’re now 61? The population when you were 20 was ~.9 million

Born in 1950, so you’re now 71? The population when you were 20 was ~.77 million

Born in 1940, so you’re now 81? The population when you were 20 was ~.66 million

If you watch closely, Dublin didn’t exist west of the word ‘Ballyfermot’ in the early 1980’s….

Notice how the push south onto the edge of wicklow hills also occurs.

Source: Google Earth timelapse

Using myself as an example: just another 40-year old

As we know kids don’t use Facebook (thankfully!), we can assume that most individuals joining in the interesting threads kicked off by Ambrose after his post are at least in their 30’s and most likely, 40 and above (for the most part).

I’m 40 so I’ll use myself as an example.

For myself, there are now 2.1 million people EXTRA in Ireland, and 500,000 extra people in Dublin since I was born.

Even if we take it from when I turned 20, there are now 1.4 million extra people, and 400,000 extra people in Dublin alone.

That is a lot of extra people on the island to show an interest in doing activities of all kinds……

People play to their own memories and biases so for many, their memory of the old days IS true - there were a lot less people around.

In short, what I’m trying to say is: even ignoring all the fancy smartphones, and the invention of social media - there’s just a lot more people in the last 60-70 years (from when it was at its lowest). And not only that, but the number of people is accelerating.

Predicting the Future for Ireland population

Let us make sure to predict for both Dublin and the island (I’m too lazy to break it out for the Republic and Northern Ireland, sorry! Anyway, Star Trek predicted the island would be unified by 2024 - fun fact, this piece was removed when the episode was broadcast in 1990 in Ireland - how is that to stir a debate! An aside: I’ve no side/opinion in that debate - I’ve no time for that sort of discussion, we all live on the same planet).

As a reminder, in 2020, Dublin is around 1.4 million people for 2020, and Ireland somewhere around 6.9 million.

Now, let us look at predictions.

The UN predicts that Dublin’s population is going to increase by another 31% by 2036, and Ireland’s will grow by 12%. So - here’s the same graph below again showing those figures.

That means Dublin will go from 1.4 million to 1.76 by 2036: that’s another 300,000 people living near Wicklow in the next 16 years. That also means an extra 1.6 million people on the island - an aside: we roughly match what was our peak population before the famine at that point.

That means Dublin will go from 1.4 million to 1.76 by 2036: that’s another 300,000 people living near Wicklow in the next 16 years.

Dublin, 1960 - 2036 (using UN predicted data)

What if the Famine never happened?

An aside: here’s an interesting thing to consider for fun. At Ireland’s peak before the Famine, there were an estimated 8.5 million inhabitants of the island. If we were to extrapolate that out using the growth rate we’ve seen for all other countries since then, Ireland’s population would now be somewhere between 20 and 30 million……. you think it’s hard to find ‘isolation’ now?

Irish Wealth

Finally, I’ll show one other item that has really changed for Ireland in the past 40 years. Our wealth has significantly increased. Look at that chart below if you don’t believe me, from the IMF. (Anyone working in the Services Industry may disagree, here’s the cold hard figures about the wealth increase…).

Source: World Bank, visualised by TradingEconomics.com

Again, using me as a case study, since I was born, the GDP of Ireland has increased 16-fold. Even you were born only 20 years ago, it has increased 4-fold. While many people may disagree (and the GDP is a very blunt tool for viewing an economy as a whole), the country as a whole is significantly wealthier overall. (Many people working in certain industries, or burned from the the Celtic Tiger crash of the mid-2000’s may disagree…).

So, again using myself as an example, the population has increased by 1.5 million since I was born and gone from a GDP of ~$25 billion to ~$400 billion today.

In addition, as our wealth has increased, we’re also working fewer hours gaining an extra 161 hours in the last 20 years alone: that’s almost 7 days per year to do extra….stuff. We also just have a lot of time for ‘other leisure’ in Ireland (see image right: click to enlarge). We live in a wealthy country and that means we’re not just trying to survive by putting food on our plate, or a roof over our head. We can afford to ‘do stuff’. And as we found last year when the whole of Ireland, couldn’t leave the country, there is a lot of us, and only so many spots that people can do to.

So the key point: there are now a lot more of us on the island of Ireland, and we’re also a lot wealthier. This enables people to afford cars, and aspire to do ‘luxury’ items such as travel and explore.

In review (finally, you’re almost there!)

What I’m trying to highlight throughout all the post above is a couple of things. Firstly, we all now carry a camera in our pocket, and a lot of those cameras are of incredible quality, and as they are really just mini-supercomputers, can edit a photo to look stunning instantly. Alongside this, yes, absolutely there is an impact from social media. When you can post that incredible image out to your 'network’, essentially instantly, of course, there’s a likelihood of more people being impressed and want to go visit that location. For those skilled in social media (or heavily using it for their business), you’re publishing to an even larger number of potential viewers. I genuinely believe that social media is going to evolve (the Creator Economy is only getting started, in case anyone is wondering), but it’s not going anywhere really

However, alongside that, we also have a massive increase in population in Ireland. Our island population has increased by over 50% in the last 60-70 years, and the population of Dublin has doubled (100%) in the same time. We’re also wealthier, with more free/leisure time and that can only mean one thing: people will want to do activities. And in a year such as a global pandemic, we can’t offload our numbers on other countries which means Ireland suddenly starts creaking at the seams. But the thing is: this isn’t a one-off:

What are the solutions?

This is a range of ideas to get a conversation going. I’ve no strong bias that any of them need to happen, but I do have a strong bias we need to take a hard look at them all and really consider

Let me start with one that makes the most of the apps and social networks themselves: Informational Alerts within the apps themselves:
1. A feature I would love built into both social networks whenever a post is uploaded from within a national park: a ‘did you know’ alert highlighting the importance of national parks, cleanliness, outdoor best practices, and so on.
2. Also, potentially even more useful: an alert built into the mapping services (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc.) that most people use to find their way to the parking spots of these areas. Say, someone gets directions to Laragh within Google of Apple Maps, when they arrive at the destination, it pops up with the ‘arrived’ alert, and also a list of best practices within national parks.
There is lots of movement to improve our usage of outdoor spaces. Coillte and its plans to ‘restore’ some forests into recreational areas, and new strategies such as ‘The County Wicklow Outdoor Strategy 2020 to 2025', and various activities from outdoor sports bodies such as Mountaineering Ireland, however, while this is all fantastic, are they thinking about where the puck is (current population levels), or where the puck is going? (as the great saying goes). I’m yet to see the true vision: it’s easy to focus on the ‘now’, now what is needed 10 years down the line. Remember, our population is absolutely growing - this isn’t some hypothetical!
Prepare, prepare, prepare: there will be 300,000 extra people in Dublin in the next 15-20 years. that means 300,000 potentials (likely?) extra visitors to our scenic spots. How about, you know, planning ahead? We’re making shit of some of our hills, and with an inability to put in proper, well-maintained, trails for all those individuals, it’s only going to get worse. We can stick our head in the sand and pretend that people aren’t going to want to visit pretty, popular areas, but I know even the most ardent people who are most passionate (selfish?) about keeping areas empty, know the cat is out of the bag and he’s not getting back in…
More people does not mean building bigger wider roads to the areas though: that’s the worst possible idea and we’ve been beating that idea to death since the early 1900’s. As we enter the new mobility era where essentially every form of transportation is going to be electrified, how about building out amazing cycling and walking network that feeds out from Dublin out across Wicklow, allowing people to get into the hills using electric propulsion. And I mean get to the bottom of hills in this method, not drive them up the hill! Picking an arbitrary starting point of Marley Park, it’s 30km as the crow flies, or 40km by the current road networks. Electric bikes can comfortably cruise at 30km/hr - that’s an hour each way. Secondly, improve public transport options, or I don’t know, take the rental scooter/bike model like Bleeper in Dublin and ‘drop’ options all over the wicklow roads? Anything that gets users away from driving 1-3 ton vehicles with only a couple of people in them.
Out-there idea #1: Permits: this will upset a lot of people… Like it or not, I suspect this needs to happen for some areas at some point in time. There are just too many people going, and this number will only increase. Personally, I’ve seen permits in action (New Zealand, Spain, USA, Iceland) and while it’s a hassle by having to pre-plan, it noticeably improves the experience for all.
Out-there idea #2: Demolish a bunch of the one-off housing that has ruined our countryside and make some more ‘wild’ areas. Seriously, why not? (if you want to see an excellent discussion on how much of a shitshow we’ve made of this, I highly recommend EcoEye from January 2021 where the present discusses his own mistakes and what we need to do about it. here. But really, we have broken our countryside and if we spent all this time wrecking it in the past 50-60 years, why not spend the next 50-60 years undoing as much as it as we can for the benefit of us all?
Out-there idea #3: Why do we think we have to right to ‘isolation’ in all locations? How about we just take a couple of areas, and shut them off to humans. We’re pretty abusive on the planet so what thinks we can just go for our space?
Talk to the Influencers and ask them to either stop posting from the cool locations such as Lough Ouler, or ask them to put a message underneath each of their posts asking people to respect the area. Maybe I’m getting too old and crusty however, I genuinely believe that will never happen - half the people posting aren’t even from the areas so have no idea of what they’re talking about!

That should be enough options to stimulate debate - there’s lots of other options we can look at and I hope to see some replies. If you want to reply to me, you can comment below, or else hit me up via the contact form on this site. (sorry, it’s unlikely I’ll be checking Facebook….).

Finally….

This is kind of off-topic…. The other trend I saw when I did open up Facebook for the first time this year was what can be dumbed down to ‘people are dumb, won’t learn, feel entitled to just park where they like and trample/go anywhere, etc’. I’m not even going to play this game: there’s a sense of arrogance and we-know-better attitude here that just isn’t helpful. If I took the same approach as someone much more knowledgeable of the Internet than most, I could apply the same thinking to all: do you know in the tech sector that the general consensus is that people who use Facebook are dumb, won’t learn, should educate themselves, etc.? Sound familiar?

With that, anyone who read this far, fair dues! Look forward to hearing from you.

A camera in every pocket and a rising population: is it all social media's fault there is damage across our hillsides?