This is your sign! (Summer Edition)
As winter fades and leaves spring in its wake a specific type of video seems to worm its way relentlessly into algorithms and subconscious alike; the summer trip. Our screens seem to shout: “This is your sign to go to Europe this summer! This is your sign… This is your sign… This is what WE’RE doing this summer…” The videos beckon viewers with hopeful whispers about a break from the monotony of wherever they’re watching from. Bright and shiny lives call from the screen, free of any disappointment or ghosts that haunt the corners of hometowns.
Most of the videos follow a similar format. They’re free of any drab sidewalks or buildings, appearing to be painted in color. The scenes are compilations of serene landscapes or fast-paced parties and constant motion. Everything is somehow glamorous, able to exist outside the normal vacation hassles of sweltering transports and feet that hurt after lugging yourself from place to place. The cities depicted are almost always already well-known but each creator attempts to capture it as a new discovery.
It’s perhaps this desire to be the one to capture it, to experience it, in a different way that has transformed the depiction of summer travel. Travel content has not been exempt from the ongoing battle of individuality online. To connect with a target audience it joins the inescapable classification of aestheitcs or “-cores” that shuffle not just material goods, but experiences into internet categorization. However, despite the similar shots and color grading, every summer trip video promises to be different all the others.
The videos no longer encourage just a summer in Italy, but detail how to achieve a Call Me By Your Name summer - targetting the romantics that would like to spend their days at an upscale Italian villa eating fruit and writing poetry, possibly interspersed with trips to Rome or Portofino.
The perfect summer trip is marketed in a multitude of ways. This is your sign to have a Call Me By Your Name summer! To book that ticket and fall in love in Paris! To live your Mamma Mia summer dreams in Greece! The influx of this type of travel inspo can be packaged into aesthetics to fulfill and ways to consume it. But, this specificity also hones in on very relatable desires. I too want my own movie-esque dancing and singing Mamma Mia summer - sans father speculation. It offers some fantastical escape from the seemingly unchanging life home offers. Walking down cement hometown sidewalks seems vastly less satisfying than cobblestone streets or sandy beaches a continent away. The travel compilations resemble their very own trailers for what could be the summer movie of your life. It sells a specific experience; one it seductively promises you cannot get anywhere else.
The promise it offers, once easily desired and believed has suffered this coming summer. In many of the videos there is an increasing disconnect between the experience the creator promotes and the viewers reception. Under numerous depictions of city lights and sprawling sunset landscapes with captions of, “this is your sign…” or, “Imagine staying in your hometown when..” are commenters expressing views of the unrealistic quality of the video and how economically infeasible this trip can be. For many people summer doesn’t include the next new summer destination experience. For students especially, summer is not a getaway but a homecoming.
If the time comes and you find yourself without the Mamma Mia trip of your dreams and the sameness of summer is making it feel like life stands still I recommend rediscovering a place in a new way. Like stumbling onto it in a fit of tears, a solo date with an inner child, or letting someone else take you there. I was so entirely sure I knew where I was from until I watched other people discover it. Confronted by the fact that I knew very little about it at all and had let the love and grief of the past I held onto so tightly cloud my vision. If rediscovery doesn’t sound appealing I would also recommend finding something new and really fall in love with it until it seems to love you back. Like going to the same St.Vinnies every week just to wander the shelves, eating every meal in the same park, or taking walks only listening to the album your parents claim saved them and see if amongst the familiar neighborhoods it can save you too. This summer I would like to try and understand the place I call home in a new way. To let my feet meld with the dirt and roots until when I step I can bring the place I call home with me.