If Jack Kerouak were alive in 2011, he would never write On The Road. Instead, he would write On Facebook, writes Iona Salter.
Gone are the days when a man (or woman) can hit the road alone, hitch a lift with someone they will never hear from again and escape from everyday life completely.
Social media on tour
Not when there are friends back home to PM and photos of last night’s pub crawl to upload.
Yes, social media is changing the way we travel.
A sense of escapism, having long been one of the main propellants pushing the global wanderer forward, is becoming about as elusive as a hostel without wi-fi.
Run off to Rome to escape a bad break-up? Your once-beloved’s relationship updates will still be splashed across your Facebook news feed. Slunk away to the Seychelles to prolong career decisions? Your neglected LinkedIn profile will sit as a reminder of all you are not achieving.
Because to escape assumes a concept of place the digital age has rendered extinct. Namely, where you are – in a purely physical sense.
Travel + Leisure’s Peter Jon Lindburg recently summed it up perfectly when he wrote, of being in a room full of travellers on their laptops, “it was the weird sensation of being with a bunch of strangers who had all come to this spot to connect – yet not with each other.
“Here we were, a roomful of fellow travellers: tweeting, IM’ing, video chatting, sharing slide shows, and virtually bonding with people in other rooms, some halfway around the globe.”
It’s not all bad
Though, to be fair to Lindberg’s point of view, he had many a good thing to say about our age of communicative abundance.
And it is true that the era of the pre-digital traveller is much romanticised, perhaps naively so. Digital media does make things a lot easier for folk on the road, not to mention those who have to deal with them. Think of the poor post office staff who once had to spend 10 minutes involved in a transaction for a stamp each time a befuddled foreigner made their way in the door.
And often it is once you have said goodbye to the road and everyone you met on it that social media can have the most value.
Keeping in touch and sharing photos with your travel buddies has never been easier than it is today. In many cases it means the death of the fleeting encounter, but it also means a hell of lot a more couches in far-flung places are yours to stay on.
At the end of the day there is nothing stopping those truly determined to get lost in the world’s nooks and crannies from doing so by ditching all electronic media. But, as anyone who has ever tried going Facebook-cold-turkey will attest, this can prove harder than finding a suitable stamp in a peculiar post office.
Travelling… socially
Bjorn Troch, a Belgian social media consultant recently on a short stay in Melbourne, understands the value of social media for the globally mobile. The Social Traveler, as he is known online, is on a 20-months-and-counting jaunt around the world, using only social media to plan his trip.
He says he is closer to his parents than ever before, now that they regularly dedicate time to sit down and chat on Skype. His profiles on sites like Facebook, Google+ and Foursquare have helped him to connect with people to hang out with along the way.
That said, he does not understate the value of offline interaction.
“We are very social online, it’s easy to ‘poke’ and ‘like’ and all that. But I think we should have that offline more,” he says.
“Of course you have to bring it to offline or to real life to reinforce it, to get a real, valuable friendship or connection with somebody.”
