So, full disclosure: I thought I was onto something with gas prices and National Park visits. I thought that as gas prices decreased, more people would go to National Parks. I ran a bunch of data on this and sat proudly waiting for Microsoft Excel to tell me I’m right and it turned out, no, I was wrong, the relationship was the reverse of what I expected if there was any relationship at all. And that held even when I took 2020 out of the mix.
But, the National Park Service has some cool information available, and we want a blog post out of it, so how’s this:
Between 2013 and 2016—i.e., the years in which Instagram gained popularity but it was still a photo app and not an app designed to steal every one of your waking hours until you desperately crave a metaverse to allow all of your interactions to occur within your phone (follow The Barking Crow!)—NPS visits jumped dramatically. I don’t know if it’s because of Instagram. I don’t know if it isn’t, either, but the correlation is there. From 2013 to 2016, NPS visits jump:
Then, they hold stable until the pandemic.
Here’s the thing, though.
The number of hours we were collectively using in there didn’t change all that much.
It’s subtle, but while the number of visits from 2016 onwards is higher than its 80s/90s/2000s baseline, the number of hours is comparable to what it was back when the Gulf War was a new thing. Put otherwise, the average duration of a visit dropped. More people were visiting national parks, but they were spending less time in there. One interpretation of this is that, if we’re going to credit Instagram for taking people to pretty places in the 2010s, we also need to credit it for making them spend less time there. Get in, get your picture, get out.
I don’t think this is what happened. Hours were dropping through the 90s and 2000s already as visit numbers held stable, which means the average visit duration was dropping well before we started using filters on the output of our camera phones. This feels like it’s probably more a function of camping becoming less popular, airbnbs and nicer budget hotels popping up in the towns alongside national parks, those sorts of things. But it’s fun to blame it on Instagram.
