A visitor eats an edible balloon at the Museum of Ice Cream across from the Whitney Museum in New York City, July 29, 2016. Photo by: Kena Betancur/Getty Images
The city of George Town, in the Malaysian state of Penang, has long drawn tourists to its streets. The sherbet-colored shophouses, intricately tiled courtyards, and historic temples and mosques prove irresistible photo fodder. But in recent years something else has been attracting camera-toting travelers: dozens of street art murals that practically beg to become selfie backdrops on Instagram.

Penang is one of a number of cities capitalizing on the wild popularity of photo-based social media apps such as Instagram, which has 800 million users (more than a tenth of the world's population). It's part of a wider phenomenon of public and private spaces being designed to appeal to users of such apps. This phenomenon is subtly changing our visual landscapes -on the streets, in restaurants, in stores, in museums and more. Call it the "Instagramization" of the world.

Restaurants have been at the forefront of Instagramization. Since social media mentions can make or break a restaurant's success, owners have become attuned to what visual aspects of food and décor appeal to customers. This means restaurants have become lighter and brighter, and chefs are creating dishes specifically designed to go viral, what some call over-the-top "stunt food."

Retail stores have the same incentives to get their spaces and products on social media. In an era where some say social media is killing traditional retail, they're doing what they can to harness its power by creating picture friendly spaces.

Social Media Gets Wider Attention

Laureen Moyal, the designer behind some of New York's most-Instagrammed restaurants, says businesses have been paying attention to how things will look on social media for several years. But it's ramped up "very aggressively" over the past year or so, she says.

Museums have gotten in on the game, too. Large-scale, immersive exhibits, such as "Wonder" at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery two years ago, have become Instagram hits. Nora Atkinson, the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Renwick Gallery, says, "It's impossible to prevent (photo-taking) so why not get with the program and the 21st century and allow it as much as you can?"

Their popularity has inspired a rise in similar exhibitions - large, colorful, interactive. Even museum building design and architecture is becoming Instagramized. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, rearranged mirrors in its decorative arts gallery to make mirror selfies easier. On its website, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama describes its summer art series as "Instagram gold" and offers an online slideshow of the top places in the museum to take a selfie.

Perhaps the culmination of Instagramization is an entirely new category of cultural institution, the made-for-Instagram "experience." The best-known example is The Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco, California, (#museumoficecream, 93,000+ posts), a series of rooms that basically function as photo sets. The "museum" has been wildly popular, with six-month runs selling out in 90 minutes.

Instagram Provides A Second Look

Patrick Janelle is a famed Instagrammer with 460,000 followers and counting. He's just gotten back from a trip to The Museum of Ice Cream. He's been Instagramming professionally for about two and a half years. These days, everything is experienced twice, Janelle says, first in real life, and second when we share it on social media. "So even if something isn't designed especially for social media I think there's always an emphasis on 'how does this render digitally?'" he says.

Instagram seems to be changing the aspects and elements of a city that travelers find worthwhile. Travel writers are increasingly producing stories with titles like "The Most Instagrammable Street Art in LA" and "The Most Instagrammable Places in London (England)." Notably, these lists often include places well off the standard tourist track. One such list in Hong Kong featured a public housing estate with bright colored towers and a cargo pier known as "Instagram pier" (#instagrampier, 9,500+ posts) for its photogenic sunsets. These aren't places that people, either tourists or locals, would have necessarily visited before Instagram.

Michiel de Lange is a professor of new media studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He says many cities are trying to brand themselves through visual storytelling. One increasingly popular strategy is so-called "pop-up urbanism," where a city turns empty lots into temporary beer gardens or makes a busy street into a pedestrian playground for a weekend. Such events are often irresistibly Instagrammable.

But some say the Instagramization of the world is leading to a troubling homogeneity, or sameness. Kyle Chayka of The Guardian writes that social media is spreading a generic look across the globe. You can travel from London to Los Angeles to Hong Kong and find similar coffee shops, hotels, and offices with the same Instagram-friendly traits.

"Why go anywhere if it just ends up looking the same as whatever global city you started from?" he asks.

Planet Of The Sheep?

Then there's the idea that social media encases you in a bubble. You see where people like you are going, what they're eating, what they're liking, via Instagram or Facebook, then do the same yourself. As de Lange points out, this opposes the values of urban theorists like Jane Jacobs, who believed that one of a city's greatest purposes was to bring diverse groups of strangers together.

Then, of course, there's the belief that viewing the world through your phone's camera is an impoverished way to live. Instead of snapping pictures, you should simply be looking, critics say.

Janelle, as big an Instagram booster as they come, does think there's value in not always trying to snap a picture. "Ultimately what we want are really wonderful experiences," Janelle says. "And sure we want to be able to document them on social media, but we also crave things that are just really wonderful and special in real life."

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