Technology enables us to make better informed, faster decisions and hopefully saves us some money as a result, but sometimes as a traveller I wonder how this all impacts on the intrinsic value of travel.
Do we really need more search technology ? Do 3D images and augmented reality applications have the ability to improve “real travel”? Does all this new technology enlighten us, or spoil us?
Yelp's Augmented Reality (iPhone 3GS) / Flickr photo by hawaii
Researching the net, joining discussions on travel forums, analysing and appraising with others online are common steps many of us now take prior to reaching a decision on travel plans and ultimately making bookings. Our voracity for technology is endless: “travellers on the move (as distinct from “stationary travellers”?) require immediate access to quick and simple-to-use booking solutions while away from their office or home”…we do?
I found the following information much more helpful than any technological gadgetry on offer: ‘Is Twitter the greatest source of travel intelligence?‘, ‘Top 10 travel gadgets under 50‘
Are we killing the joy of travel by over talking it?
Do we need to be walking, talking, interactive encyclopedias for all and sundry in the places we visit? Twitter enables this behaviour but are we confusing a deeper personal need for cyber notoriety with our passion for discovery and personal enlightenment? Reporting and broadcasting our whereabouts and experiences by cataloguing content and images we share with our ever growing “friends & followers” is surely a distraction from the essence of travel.
Motility Not Compatible With Mobile Technology / Flickr photo by JulianBleeker
Controlling what we experience before we experience it
It seems as though the buzz is in the ever evolving technology we use to travel, rather than in the travelling itself. Has travelling become a voyage of meticulous research and a pursuit of mistake-free sanitized experiences in increasingly predictable destinations? Have we lost along the way our sense of pioneering… the awe of travel? Where has the spontaneity, the personal voyage of discovery, trips full of missed turns and falls gone?
“On the road learning” is disappearing
My best travel experiences have always been the ones I least expected, they were a succession of mistakes, accidents and surprises by the bucket loads, challenging my resourcefulness to make the best decisions I could in the situation I found myself in. This “on the road learning” is one of the most influential and valuable factors in personal development and looking back, I would not change any of it, the good and the bad days… just like one’s love life, you learn as you go, the more practice hopefully the more you learn… (well that’s my excuse, but my wife doesn’t agree).
I never travelled with a guidebook, but on occasions a map. Travel for me is the ultimate quest for adventure into the unknown, it’s that premonition of not knowing what will happen next that I find so exciting. Walking wherever I could, I always wondered what the next corner would reveal to me, my guidebook was the local man or woman I met at cafés etc. on the road, telling me what was interesting in their neighbourhood… it’s amazing how thrilling macro-travelling can be!
Must we share everything?
I like to discover places by myself (or naturally with a loved one) and pretend I/we are the very first to see that view, taste that dish, or experience that dance. Preparing a trip down to the very last detail, or dialoguing on Twitter in order to share travel moments reminds us that thousands of others have seen that view before, or have sat at the same chair and eaten the same dish, or have witnessed that dance before. It is my/our experience, no one else’s. To think of sharing it with a multitude of others I don’t know devalues my intimacy with that moment, that place, or those people that I have just shared a brief space of my life with. That’s one reason I don’t get Twitter as a travel forum.
Flickr photo from the World Bank Photo Collection
How travel used to be
Travel is not a right, it is an exhilarating privilege that many will never experience, it should be slowly enjoyed like one’s childhood. It should be given space to be discovered patiently, and time to be appreciated in its entirety.
Travelling for pleasure is part real and part escapism, above all it should be very personal, discovering oneself by intentionally diving into as many different environments as possible to your own, the deeper the plunge, the deeper the emotional connection with that moment, and hopefully the more memorable. I guess there are a lot of questions about what is happening to travel which I cannot find answers to, it’s a revolution of sort, the further we dissect travel, the more different motivations we find for travelling. After a life in the tourism industry I am still surprised by the reasons people travel!
Travel experiences are slipping away like the innocence of childhood
Maybe I am a romantic old fool, but there are times I wonder why must we remove all life’s mysteries before we experience them? I pity the young, their childhood and adolescence, a time of discovery and wonder, but in modern society it might as well be a fast food combo meal, for the value that is placed on it. They are informed of more things I ever knew before I was three times their age, but have no life experience to connect with. One may say “how can they miss something they never had?”, true. Are we also facing a future where travel suffers the same loss of innocence prematurely due to technology?
This is a great read John. I think you probably echo a lot of other people’s concerns and observations on the way technology has started to take a leading role in the travel experience, not always for the better.
I remember writing ‘Unplug, enjoy the journey and the experience of travelling‘ last year about similar frustrations, and vicky baker also picked up on it with her ‘Going Unplugged‘ piece.
Technology and science are both areas that we continue to advance in at breakneck speed, often so quickly that the wider repercussions of our innovations are unconsidered or given minimal thought I think.
The irony is that we feel we need to participate in new technologies for fear of falling behind as individuals and missing out on new experiences. All of which is happening anyway in many ways at the expense of our quest for progress.
Great article John. I completely agree with your sentiment and thankfully we still have some off the beaten track destinations that do let you “unplug.”
I have been thinking about this sentiment for some time now over the past few years as i was doing “tourism development” work in some far reaching places in Africa and kept thinking to myself, why am I doing this? Am I contributing to spoiling the experience? Its hard to say….
I always enjoy your perspective John.
Nice post John. The dilemna of our times I think.
The story reminds me of the tyranny of money. The more money people have the more they seek to insulate themselves from inconvenience, discomfort and the annoying little things one encounters in life’s journey. They travel first class, stay in classy hotels and eat in only the best restaurants and in the process end up insulating themselves from any real experiences at all. The rush to the use of technology for travel planning is also driven by many of the same motives (removing inconvenience and risk) and hence is also at risk of competely sanitising the journey.
I guess the answer lies in the balance. A little bit of money is a good thing (gives us choices in life) and I guess a little bit of technology likewise.
Cheers…… Len
Completely agree. This is a great analogy Len.
I think the dilemma that follows is that the pace of innovation and availability of free services makes it very difficult to know which little bits of technology actually create value and are the good ones to use.
Thank you Jon for a great post. I initially embraced the technology revolution (multimedia followed by Internet and now social media) out of curiosity and in order to keep up with change. But now I am really disillusioned and the picture used to illustrate your post says it all. How can we be truly present when playing with all our gadgets and fretting about charging batteries? The technology seems to become a means whereby we objectify our experiences and once they are objects, they easily become products and are vulnerable to become commodities. By focusing on capturing the moment with our technology, we actually fail to be present with all our senses engaged.
To take what Stephen is saying one step further is that with all of these “free” services, the end result is that they are often actually supported by ads and those ads are often paid for by corporate tourism entities, either overtly or more often than not covertly…. Which is worse because the consumer doesn’t even know that they are getting their “trusted” information from an advertiser.
I agree with the sentiment of balance and think there is definitely space for technology to play a role in the support of more sustainable travel products.