Venice Notebook

Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, or take the vaporetto to see Palladio’s astonishing church. But it’s harder to sneak inside the doors of the monastery in San Giorgio, one of the city’s 118 islands. It is now home to Fondazione Giorgio Cini, a cultural institution and retreat sufficiently magnificent and isolated to have hosted the G7 meetings of 1980 and 1987. Last week it hosted the Alpine Fellowship, a gathering of philosophers, artists, writers and musicians. This year tackled the question of self-expression in the age of instant communication. A millennium-old monastery is the perfect place to consider what’s going right, and wrong.

Many of the speakers identified one of the plagues of the digital age: selfie-stick-wielding tourists who swarm Venice like the mosquitos in August. As Roger Scruton put it, ‘That the selfie-taker in Piazza San Marco regards herself as so important that Venice should be in the mere background of her image is the sort of intelligent judgment that the selfie-taker cannot cope with.’ The smartphone camera is the root cause, Scruton argued, in that the selfie has become the modern form of self-portrait without criticism. In using the pen, we are conscious of an instrument that has been used — and practised by great writers — through the ages. Not so with the camera smartphone.

Who to blame? Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat — and the other websites who make so much money from the boom in digital narcissism. As someone who spends time with the founders of technology companies, I was there partly to defend the twentysomethings of Silicon Valley. If things look bad now, I argued, just imagine ten years hence.