A visitor eats an edible balloon at the Museum of Ice Cream across from the Whitney Museum in New York City, July 29, 2016.
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 make for great photos. 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 taking advantage of the wildly popular photo-based social media apps. Instagram, for example, has 800 million users, which is 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 changing our visual landscapes on the streets and in restaurants, stores, 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 decor appeal to customers. This means restaurants have become lighter and brighter. Chefs are creating dishes specifically designed to go viral, what some call "stunt food."

Promoting Photo-Friendly Spaces

Retail stores have the same incentives to create photo-friendly spaces. While some say social media is killing traditional shopping, stores are doing what they can to harness it.

Laureen Moyal is the designer behind some of New York's most-Instagrammed restaurants. She says the value businesses are placing on a social media look ramped up "very aggressively" over the past year or so.

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

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, the hashtag #museumoficecream has 93,000 posts and counting. The exhibit is a series of rooms that are basically photo sets. The "museum" has been wildly popular, with six-month runs selling out in 90 minutes.

Experiencing Everything Twice

Patrick Janelle is a famed Instagrammer with 460,000 followers and 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 (Los Angeles, California)" and "The Most Instagrammable Places in London (England)." These lists often include places well off the standard tourist track.

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 tactic is so-called "pop-up urbanism." Cities turn empty lots into temporary beer gardens or make a busy street into a pedestrian playground for a weekend. Such events often prove to be very Instagramable.

But some say the Instagramization of the world is leading to a troubling 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 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.

Doing What Everyone Else Is Doing

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 city experts like Jane Jacobs. Jacobs believed that one of a city's greatest purposes was to bring diverse or different 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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