This post was inspired by my friend Wade — the current envy of our office — who’s driving across the country and documenting the whole thing in near real-time at 26days.tumblr.com. (He also took that picture above)
Stop for a second and consider what traveling looked like a decade ago: The internet (then known as “The Internet”) helped us find good deals on airfare and hotels, as it still does. The early travel sites helped us find some basic information about where to stay/eat/shop, but there wasn’t exactly voluminous depth or anything approaching consistent quality on most off those early reviews/ratings databases and message boards. But once you left your house, if you didn’t print something from it, the internet wasn’t doing you a lot of good. Without mobile computing, the ‘net effect on travel was rather narrow.
Then rewind another 10 years to 1989 — pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-digital camera — to the good ol’ days of the travel agent and/or the Thomas Bros. When you hoped that map you were relying on was accurate, or you might be in a world of trouble. When all you had to go on was a hotel’s name and what you knew of its location.
Now jump back to the present, closing in on decade two of this millenium. Most people carry a device at all times that has some sort of GPS or location-awareness, text messaging, mobile web browsing, and just about everything else you could possibly need to access the best the web has to offer in travel-related reviews, guides, and maps, ready to be delivered with a few clicks, customized based on where you are and what language you speak.
Trips in 1989 had a camera, rolls of film, and (if you were lucky) a camcorder, which typically yielded an album and a home movie and/or slideshow of two, in a ritual that took place typically about a month or two after the trip’s conclusion. Today, you take a trip and share the experiences of your trip in real-time, using a combination of mobile photo/video publishing, phone-to-text posting, microblogging, et al to let their networks share in their adventures live from anywhere in the connected world. And your friends participate back — replying to experiences tweeted and commenting on photos and videos on the same day they happened.
How do these shifts effect travel as we’ve known it?
On the trip planning/navigation side, the internet has really just taken information that used to be consigned to travel agents and guidebooks and made it more readily available, and the mobile web has made it that much easier to drill that information down to exactly what you need, when you need it. And while some might argue that some of the serendipity of travel is lost by just “following the big blue dot,” the evolution is just a shift towards a more informed traveler. It’s getting easier and easier to plan a trip and make sure you hit the essential spots at any destination based on your interests and personal networks.
I’m more interested in the other side: the cumulative impact of bringing live sharing to travel.
When I’m on the road, when I’m not using Yelp or Google Maps to perform the functions I mentioned above, I’m usually accessing an app from this quiver: CameraBag, Tweetie, Facebook, and Foursquare/Gowalla. (And in reality, if those apps did what they should (namely (a) GPS data passing from Tweetie to apps like Foursquare and Gowalla and (b) Tweetie letting me monitor/interact with Facebook’s Live Feed just like Twitter’s), I’d be able to bypass all but Camerabag and Tweetie. I’m creating the album and trip journal of 1989 in real-time and sharing it with friends, and it’s had a transformative effect on how I travel.
Sharing where I am or where I’m going to be has opened me up to some advice from someone who’s embarked on a similar path. Documenting photos and stories has enabled me to accurately chronicle experiences that no doubt would have gotten lost in transit had I waited until the end of the trip (or later) to share them. Sharing the spots I’m visiting openly has led me to be more conscious about how I use the precious little time I have on any given trip. I’m sure you could argue the relative gains realized by spending travel time playing documentarian versus investing that time in fully experiencing the trip and handling the documentation later, but from my perspective, the role technology is playing in my travel documentation is becoming less intrusive with every new release of my go-to apps.
Where do we go from here? Are travel blogs and photo/video sharing just the new grainy super8 vacation home movies — the ones that everyone politely watches when they come over to visit, even though they’re bored to tears? Or is “oversharing” actually an important step forward in our social evolution?
