1) Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it
Capturing an experience while you are having it alters the way you experience it, as Wendell Berry’s poem “The Vacation” describes. It tells the story of a man who films his entire vacation with an older technology, the video camera. On a boat in a river, “He showed the vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light.” Berry pinpoints the man’s motivation to preserve the experience: He filmed “so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be.” The poem ends with a sharp reminder of the cost of this documentation: “But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.” When we become habituated to viewing new places through the shrunken images on the screen rather than through our own eyes, we tie ourselves to the mundane world and its devices instead of the new experiences in front of us. A kind of visual fatigue takes hold because of our relentless consumption of such images, the “reality disappointment” many writers have described.
2) Our screens prioritize vision and sound over touch, smell, taste, and place
The screens through which we consume an increasing amount of our pleasurable experiences elevate vision and sound over touch, smell, taste, and place. …Pleasure — and our memory of it — is more intense when it is connected not only to sight but also to sound, taste, and smell. It is the difference between feeling your lover’s hand on your skin and looking at your lover’s naked selfie. Today we can do both. How does having that option change the way we understand either experience?
To understand a new place, you must smell it. One of the great pleasures of travel is experiencing the weird odors and new sounds of a foreign land: the sharp scent of a new city’s tap water, telephones whose rings sound odd to your ears or police sirens whose syncopated wails seem off-key, coffee that feels unusually thick on the tongue.
3) Getting away from your routines (and feeling anxiety) is an essential part of travel
“Whereas travel is about the unexpected, about giving oneself over to disorientation, tourism is safe, controlled, and predetermined,” write Amherst College literature professor Ilan Stavans and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison. Contemporary technology is tourism’s ideal handmaiden; it promotes control, convenience, and safety and promises to alleviate anxiety. It places the safety net of contact in the traveler’s hands if the adventure goes awry. An overeager climber trapped on a mountain is no longer abandoned to his wits and the elements; he summons a rescue helicopter with his satellite phone. Adventurer David Roberts views the “epidemic” of such search-and-rescue operations for inexperienced backcountry explorers (or “yuppie 911s,” as some rescue workers refer to the distress calls) as evidence of a profound shift in attitudes about exploration. Dilettante day-trippers now view dangerous rescue not as a rare luxury but as “an inalienable right.” The tourist craves predictability and convenience; the traveler understands that, like a grace note in music, anxiety is a small but important part of travel, and that being removed from one’s regular routine is precisely the point of getting away.
4) Travel is so rigorously self-documented that “adventure” becomes a performative act
Now that travel is so rigorously self-documented, the bar is set quite high for calling something an adventure. Wandering around Tibet for months hoping for a glimpse of a snow leopard is too tame. To be a real adventurer, you must be the first American tween to kayak the Amazon or the first octogenarian librarian to summit K2 and you have to document the experience in real time on social media. As the tag line for one of GoPro’s wearable digital cameras urges, “Be a hero.” Most of us aren’t “heroes,” nor do we want to be. So we don’t explore. We pose. We prove that we have been there. We make “photograph-trophies,” as Susan Sontag once described, or GoPro videos we post to YouTube. Our relentless documentation leads to a world where selfies at Machu Picchu are as ubiquitous on Instagram as McDonald’s is on American highway exits.
5) Digital maps don’t just provide information; they harvest information about us
Technology companies are eager for us to embrace the worldview those platforms foster, a worldview that values efficiency and a seamlessly engineered experience of travel. As well, companies such as Google and Apple make maps not only to provide information to us but also to glean information about us as we travel. As cartographer Lucy Fellowes reminds us, “Every map is someone’s way of getting you to look at the world his or her way.” Technology companies’ maps are a way for them to get a good look at us; consider the sometimes bizarre images of people captured by Google’s Street View cameras as they map the world’s roads.
6) Places once defined us, not just physically, but also emotionally
Place used to define us not only physically – as a Southerner or a New Yorker, as an immigrant or an explorer – but also emotionally To leave the place where you were born was to disconnect from far more than geography. It meant taking on the exhilarating challenge of forming a new identity. Today when we think of being disconnected, we think of losing Internet; and our identities – tracked , ranked, measured, and parsed with more precision than at any time in history – follow us from the moment we first appear on a social media platform, which for many young people today happens right after they are born. Identities that used to be firmly linked to a particular place on the map (a city or town, a region) have given way to online profiles that offer world the curated digital presence we most want others to see. The place you are from matters less than the way you present yourself in the space available to you online. We are in the process of trading the spatial and social cues that once defined a particular place – a public square, for example, or a local meeting spot – for a more seamless and less physically bounded experience of space engineered by technology companies. The promise is a more efficient delivery of ” engineered serendipity, ” but the reality may end up being a more predictable homogeneity.
7) Sense of place is like terroir in wine. It requires cultivation.
Sense of place is like terroir in wine. It requires cultivation. It’s alchemic properties are not reducible to a simple formula or even a sophisticated algorithm. Today we seem more concerned with the maintenance of our online image than the maintenance of the integrity of the public square. And as a result we have engineered our public spaces…to embrace the value of the digital world.