By now, Percy’s contempt for this cliché — the traveler so busy with documentation that he misses out on some phantom called the “experience itself” — has itself become a cliché. But we are not much closer to resolving the fundamental paradox of travel, which is just one version of the fundamental paradox of late-­capitalist life. On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents — a collection of snow globes for the mantel — we’ll disintegrate. Furthermore, that inventory has to fulfill two slightly different functions: It must define us as at once part of a tribe (“people who go to Paris”) and independent of it (“people who go to Paris and don’t photograph the Eiffel Tower”).

Now that social media has given us a public forum, both theatrical stage and deposit institution, for this inventory, we have brought to this paradox increasingly elaborate methods of documentary performance. But the underlying strategies are nothing new. The most elementary strategy is the avoidance of the Grand Canyon/Eiffel Tower conundrum entirely, but this works only if you’re confident that you’ve identified a satisfying alternative. (As Paul Fussell put it in his 1979 book “Abroad,” “Avoiding Waikiki brings up the whole question of why one’s gone to Hawaii at all, but that’s exactly the problem.”) Another is to forefront our own inauthenticity as a disclaimer. In his 1987 book “The Songlines,” Bruce Chatwin described his lifelong attempt to write a book about nomads as a repudiation of his earlier involvement with art: “I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg — people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end.” People, that is, who had a motive for travel that went well beyond the vanity of documentation.

Even if you understand and sympathize with obsessive documentary travel, summer can make anyone feel as uncharitable as Percy felt toward that poor sightseer at the lip of the Grand Canyon. More than one friend told me that their main vacation in August was a vacation from Instagram, because they’d endured more than enough ostentatious displays of wealth and leisure for one season. I know other people who deliberately switched to Snapchat, but then sent out reminders to that effect; they wanted a contemporaneous audience but felt uncomfortable going on the permanent record. For some reason, the real-time digital exhibitionism of excessive summer holidaying makes me feel generous; the more desperate a bid to be liked, the more enthusiastically I go ahead and like it. I have an acquaintance — someone I like but barely know — who spent what seemed to me to be an exorbitant amount of time doing absolutely nothing at all on the remote Italian island Pantelleria, photographing that nothing at all as though he were on sabbatical inside a Fellini film. I assiduously liked every single post. (I’m not perfect. I still categorically withhold my likes from some classes of image: photos of chefs in Copenhagen; photos of food in Copenhagen; photos of people who have recently eaten in Copenhagen.)