The Geotag

The Location-Obfuscating Geotag

Joseph Bensimon

In November 2018, the Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board debuted a new geotag for their region. Intended to solve the problem of overtourism, this new digital marker was designed to supplant the regular geotags for individual areas within Jackson Hole that had begun to receive more visitors than could safely be accommodated as a result of increased online visibility generated by their geotags. The new catchall marker created for Instagram use was named “Tag Responsibly, Keep Jackson Hole Wild”, and was hailed as “the world’s first generic location tag.”1

The Jackson Hole “generic geotag” (source: Instagram)

To promote the new geotag, the Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board (JHTTB henceforth) ran an ad campaign in print and on social media. The print campaign appeared on posters in the Jackson Hole Airport and heavily trafficked areas around town. The social media ads ran on Instagram and were geotargeted at users in the Jackson Hole area, making the campaign one of geotargeted ads discouraging overly-specific geotagging.

The “Tag Responsibly, Keep Jackson Hole Wild” geotag caught on, and was used thousands of times by the year’s end. Soon, similar geotags were created for Bend, Oregon (“Tag Responsibly, Keep Bend Beautiful”), Aspen, Colorado (Tag Responsibly, Take the Aspen Pledge”), and beyond. But while the campaign was considered by many to be a success, it stemmed Jackson Hole’s problem rather solving it. For while the generic Jackson Hole geotag receives wide use, so do the more specific geotags within Jackson Hole that it was meant to replace. And, in needing to run an advertising campaign on Instagram to discourage the geotagging of specific areas, JHTTB is effectively paying the platform to alleviate a problem it’s helped facilitate.

Instagram ad campaign (source: Colle McVoy)

Furthermore, the language of Jackson Hole’s generic geotag – “tag responsibly” – is an example of responsibilization, explicitly placing the onus of avoiding negative outcomes from Instagram usage on the platform’s users, rather than the platform itself. This is a questionable solution when one considers how Instagram is designed to be a platform of scale, making information posted on it widely available. In Jackson Hole, this model has proven to be unsustainable. Yet Instagram has no provisions in place for the problems that arise when people use the platform in the way it’s designed. Perhaps it’s worth asking what kinds of data and knowing are generated by Instagram, and whether they’re worth producing in the first place.

In the case of Jackson Hole, Instagram’s knowledge is both incredibly specific and completely blind. In providing highly precise geographic information about hard-to-find locations in a vast area that can be difficult to navigate, Instagram offers knowledge that was previously only available through those who were intimately familiar with the landscape. In the case of Delta Lake, a particularly scenic area in Jackson Hole, traffic went from one or two hikers a day to as many as 145, and transformed the lake from a tranquil location to the site of commercial photo shoots. In other instances, visitors have plugged a geotag into navigation software and followed a route with challenging terrain that they were unprepared for. Prior to the Internet and the particular ways in which Instagram has put its possibilities to use, the necessity of interacting with a source knowledgeable on Jackson Hole meant it was unlikely for a visitor to receive geographic information without contextual information, such as details about a journey and how interact with the space. With Instagram, all people receive is the former.

Jackson Hole, discussing responsibility (source: Instagram)

JHTTB’s Executive Director, Kate Sollitt, explains the problem like this: “What we don’t want to have happen is people who go to a location based on a geotag not knowing what they’re getting into. We would rather they talk to a visitor services agent, or a local, or even a park ranger and do some research to get as much information as they possibly can before embarking on a big adventure. What we don’t want to have is a bad experience at the very least and, at most, an accident.”2

Jackson Hole’s recent experience contending with the results of Instagram-generated visibility is a note of caution regarding what happens when a digital grid is placed on a landscape, and an illustration of Julie Livingston’s theory of ‘self-devouring growth’ – that pursuing economic growth at all consequences can lead to unsustainable levels of environmental destruction. It’s currently a given that Instagram and other digital platforms of scale can employ geographic information as they see fit. But in Jackson Hole, there’s a case to be made for reconsidering which entities have the right to map a space, and what are acceptable forms of doing so.


1 This claim is made by Colle McVoy, the creative agency who produced the campaign for Jackson Hole. (https://www.collemcvoy.com/work/jackson-hole/jackson-hole-stay-wild). In researching the claim I haven’t found definitive proof of it, but also have yet to come across an officially-sanctioned generic geotag predating it.

2 Quoted in Pope, Kristen. “Tag responsibly: A new campaign encourages thoughtful geotagging to protect wild spaces”. Roadtrippers. 22 April 2019. (roadtrippers.com/magazine/generic-geotagging-national-parks)

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