Questions about Travelling

Recently I was reading various articles around the internet about travelling and it's impacts, how tourism changes culture and many other questions.It reminded me of a question I asked myself when I was in Venice last month. As we were taking the water bus I watched numerous gondola riding tourists pass us by. Indeed, Venice is a city mostly populated by tourists and I wondered what affect that has on the culture as a whole. Will things like gondola rides, which are largely outdated, become part of, or stay part of Ventian culture again?  Will they become/stay relevant in a non touristic sense? Or is that too pedantic a question. Furthermore, I often hear people from North America griping about how where ever they go in the world there's a McDonalds and a Starbucks and this is certainly true, but is it arrogant to claim that these things  are damaging other cultures? Do we feel that other cultures are weak enough to collapse under the impact of McDonalds? Or are the naysayers correct? Continuing on this line of thought, what does this say about how we, as North American's, feel about our own culture? Do we see it as too unimportant to be threatened, do we look down on ourselves and what our countries have to offer? One of the things I hear from Europeans (since that is mostly where I travel) and North American's alike is that we have new countries and we're not as cultured. But I think it is time to change our thinking, I think that Canada, for example, is a great country and as a new country we have many things to offer, culturally and otherwise. And being a new country may be to our advantage in many ways. What is the point of all these comments and questions? I guess it is that, as travellers and as a larger society we have a a kind of mass travel that hasn't been seen before. As a fellow Canadian traveller pointed out to me recently "our parents didn't travel as much as we do now, they didn't have the chance." And she's right, my mother has said the same thing. Our generation is priveleged to be able to travel as much as we do but we are also changing the future and the world and while I'm certainly not predicting something horrible for the future, I do think it is good to think about these things.