Ban needed to stop me droning
The highly annoying craze for using aerial gadgets to record memorable holiday footage is leading to a backlash ... and not before time.
Ihate drones. And not just because the military-owned ones kill people. The smaller, peace-loving drones that are becoming all too common at tourist sites are teethgratingly annoying.
Buzzing about, ruining what’s left of the ambience and the chance to grab a nice picture. Always just a stone’s throw away – or just beyond a stone’s throw, as I never seem to hit them.
And it seems I’m not alone. Just last week the authorities that look after New York City’s Statue of Liberty joined a growing list of drone-haters.
Officially, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says the move to ban them within 120 metres of the iconic statue and also at Mount Rushmore was due to a request from the US defence department citing ‘‘security concerns’’ but I’m willing to throw it out there that a couple of New York pen-pushers had just about had enough of the constant buzz of a swarm of tourist drones that poor Lady Liberty couldn’t just swat away.
The FAA and New York City join the many destinations trying to clear the air of drone activity.
In Santorini over the summer I stumbled on a number of signs telling tourists to keep their drones in their backpacks – and seeing the prices on the menus at bars and restaurants whose main selling point is the sunset view, I can understand why local businesses don’t want drone footage of their town clogging up the internet.
Other landmarks keen to delete the drones include England’s Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey and Italy’s Colosseum. The latter made headlines recently for fining one unlucky tourist more than 100,000 euro ($165,980) for breaking the strict rule.
You could argue it’s easier to outsource your photography to some little flying robot taking a holiday snap every half second. But some results of this new habit of tourism videography don’t back that up.
A 2015 study from Dinhopl and Greztel in Information Technology and Tourism found that rather than outsourcing our footage-gathering tasks to machines (such as drones and wearable GoPros) and relaxing, tourists’ ‘‘performances for photo-and video-recording moments became … much more deeply embedded in the experience than less’’.
Basically, the owners become obsessed with curating footage. Well, they might be but what about us extras just lurking among the crowd?
Having a drone buzzing about has, in some tourist spots, created a modern day Foucault Panopticon, or prison watch-tower, effect. You can see a recording device suspended in mid-air near some tourist trap; you have no way of knowing whether it’s recording or not; you assume it is and perform accordingly. And – like when your friend catches you on camera and tells you to do something funny – it turns out a bit forced.
Obviously, throughout my travels I’ve been awkwardly making faces in the background, ruining a few tourist photographs, but it’s a whole other matter to societally sign off on some stranger recording your family day at the beach from a drone perched above the waves.
So what’s behind their rise?
That high-angle, long-range drone footage is a bit of a tourist marketing board’s dream – because any park, beach, or cityscape can look alluring when you see it from bird’s-eye view. We are ground-dwelling mammals, easily impressed when each heavilyedited shot we see is from a high angle and often from vantage points that we could never recreate.
I don’t know about you but I’m not yet filthy rich enough to see every landmark or secluded beach by private helicopter tour so it seems a touch exaggerated to entice us with footage so unattainable; the result of which is not a spike in private helicopter tours, but just another drone added to the swarm to get the exact same footage as the last tourist clip they saw on YouTube.
Bring on the bans so I don’t have to keep droning on about it. Email if you have a travel issue you’d like Josh Martin, a London-based travel journalist, to write about.