No More Geotag!

: The Double-edge
impact of geotagging on tourism in
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Indonesia are known as one of the top destination for tourists to enjoy endemic
traditional cultures, unique foods, and series of magnificent landscape. For the latter, the
famous destination to have all different landscape experiences in just one place is at the
Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (dubbed DIY or Special Region of Yogyakarta).
Furthermore, DIY consist of five different administrative regions: Central Yogyakarta,
Sleman, Bantul, Kulon Progo, and Gunung Kidul. Each region offers beautiful yet
different landscapes: the karst-mountain range, tranquil waterfalls, exotic caves, crystal
clear springs, unique man-made landmarks, and vast white-sand beaches. This multi-
dimensional landscapes is the reason why Yogyakarta are famous among the
international as well as domestic tourists.

Most of the landscapes are not widely recognized or even intended as an options for
tourist destinations in the first place. However, there are series of “exploration” effort
from the local residents (mostly youngsters) with the help of social media applications,
which play an important role for the discovery of many new tourist destinations. With
social media culture that already embedded in present society, people are “indirectly”
encouraged to travel and explore more of unique places in order to share the photos and
experiences to gain popularity among their friends in social media platforms. In
addition, this “photo sharing” experience in social media are further extended by a
feature called “geotags”. Furthermore, the existence of geotags feature in social media
are the exact reason why new destinations are popping up and eventually recognized by
the public.

According to Chung and Lee (2016, p. 126), “geotags” is a feature in social media
platform that derived based on the system called Global Positioning System (GPS),
which already installed in most of smart phones available in the market nowadays. With
this service, the social media users are able to share their photos and the exact location
from which the photos were taken. The shared location subsequently will be recorded
and integrated in the GPS database for later can be used and accessed by different users

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of any social media platforms for free. Although the reasons behind this service are
intend to broaden the scope and deliver more comprehensive information about
particular place for every social media users, the results in the field are often mixed with
positive and negative impacts.

There are one condition that notably makes geotags service often resulted in a disaster,
which is the status of carrying capacity of the new tourist destinations. Based on
Zelenka and Kacetl (2014, p. 642), the core concept of carrying capacity in tourism is
based on the rate of resilience of given natural or social system to cope with the external
influence after or during the activity of external influence. In this sense, the ‘external
influence’ that caused by the geotags activity is the over-exposure of certain place that
could resulted in ‘tourist booming’ phenomenon. In some cases, the newly discovered
destinations that appeared in the geotags service could handle the “tourist boom”
because it already have the required amount of carrying capacity to accommodate the
surge numbers of activities and visitors that wants to explore the place, usually followed
with only a few adjustment or improvement. If this happens, it could significantly
improve the economic as well as the capacity building of local people that directly
affected by this. In the other hand, if the amounts of external influence surpass the
carrying capacity of the place, it could potentially disturb the progression of natural
cycle of the landscape and eventually destroyed it completely. This is when the geotags
service are considered as a double-edged sword in tourism context.

As for Yogyakarta case, geotags are often followed by massive land transformation in
order to improve the carrying capacity of the place to accommodate the tourist demands.
For instance, the unique landscape of tropical sand dunes (gumuk pasir) of Parangtritis ‒
located only two in the world, the other is in Mexico‒ has experienced a massive land
alteration from once a natural black sand dunes, eventually become a large flower
garden that considered as invasive and unnatural to the habitat (Sucahyo 2018). This
activity are actually allowed and encouraged by the local government in order to attract
tourists to visit this place to collect revenue from the paid gateway retribution. This
chain reaction are undoubtedly started by social media platform with the help of geotags
feature in which it could easily exposed the exact location of the flower garden. Despite
the imminent danger of habitat loss, the practices would not stop if the “social media
effect” still remains.

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The role of government are crucial to address this “social media effect” issue, especially
on geotagging. There are few possible solutions to alleviate the effect of this
phenomenon without strictly banned the tourists to visit the newly discovered
destinations. First, the government must active in social media to understand the new
tourist spots in order to study the capacity building of the place before its too crowded
with tourists. Second, the government can employ a top-down approach such as quota
mechanism for tourists to limit the visitors that suitable for carrying capacity of the
place. Third, the government can provide education and training about sustainable
tourism for local people to manage the newfound place so that the place are well-
managed (bottom-up approach). Fourth, a prior notification about geotagging can be
given to the visitors during the time visit so that the “social media effect” are not
quickly spread.

Reference
Chung, N & Lee, H 2016, ‘Sharing economy in geotag: what are the travelers’ goals
sharing their locations by using geotags in social network sites during the tour?’,
International Journal of Tourism Cities, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 125-136.

Zelenka, J & Kacetl, J 2014, ‘The concept of carrying capacity in tourism’, Economic
Interferences, vol. 16, no. 36, pp. 641-654.

Sucahyo, N 2018,’Gumuk pasir dan tantangan besar untuk melestarikannya’ (Sand

dunes and the challenges to preserve it), VOAIndonesia, 21 July, viewed 14 June 2018,
https://www.voaindonesia.com/a/gumuk-pasir-dan-tantangan-besar-melestarikannya/
4492414.html.