Cyber: The New Way to Travel?

The last time I received a stamped postcard was in 2004. The postcard came from a Swedish friend who was traveling to Mykonos in Greece.

The postcard took 10 days to cross the world to get to my address, by which time my friend was no longer on that island. Nevertheless, her emotions conveyed via the postcard, although encoded in the briefest of sentences, remained fresh. The postcard is still tucked into one of my shoeboxes, along with hundreds more I keep to revisit my past correspondences.

I feel fortunate to have been part of a generation for which the postcard still served its original purpose. For those born after the turn of the millennium, however, postcards have receded into the vestiges of ancient history, their roles supplanted by more instant and less physical alternatives made possible by advances in technology, most remarkably the Internet.

The closest thing to receiving a postcard from a traveling friend nowadays is looking at your Facebook homepage and being bombarded by a constant stream of statuses, sometimes accompanied with blurry pictures. Instead of one clichéd landscape photo, how would you like hundreds of individually captioned photos, delivered to you not on a weekly basis, but hourly?

Call that fun?

Some do, considering the ever-increasing number of people who while away hours in such activities as staring at their computer screen, reading the latest feeds from their friends and then waiting for yet some more. (Doesn’t the word “activity” imply both an “act” and being “active”?)

I understand all the incessant tweeting and status-updating of people who have to spend up to 10 hours a day in an office. In that case, scrutinizing the minutest details of your friends’ lives online – or posting some details yourself – does seem like major recreation.

Still, I am amazed whenever my friends, whom I know to be traveling, spew forth updates on their whereabouts and activities on a minute-by-minute basis, and still have the time to respond to and follow each individual comment from their friends.

The snowballing popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and the like have introduced a new aspect to traveling that many of us can’t help falling for: the almost-nonstop live reporting of it, with these websites turning into shrines for people to zealously post whatever aspect of their journeys they find broadcast-worthy (almost everything).

What is more essential for us here: savoring all the sweetness and sourness of our journey, or savoring all the attention from posting about it? The balance is tipping toward the latter. Young people today grow up in a fast-progressing, fast-forgetting culture that fosters in us a need for attention in order to stand out from the run of the mill – and few things are more attention-grabbing than the stories of our exploits in unfamiliar terrains.

It is hard for us to be prominent amid strangers, where the real self wears a veil of anonymity that these strangers have little incentive to pull aside. But on the Net, where the only dimension that matters is time, we are always swarmed by hundreds of “friends” regardless of where we are physically. Thus, winning attention is easy. No need to shout: All you have to do is tweet.

And as much as Trip Advisor or Google Maps helps, mindless usage of such technologies can indeed slow you down.

I once overheard a heated conversation between a tourist and his guide concerning the path they were planning to take in the Dieng Highlands in Central Java. The man wanted to follow the directions provided by his gadget; the guide was adamant they pick another course, “for good reason”.

When I met them later, I asked the tourist how his trip was.

“We spent hours going up the path my device told me, but it was one hell of a road to go through. I let my guide show me the way back. We made it in just 40 minutes.”

Unsurprisingly, a smirk crossed the guide’s face.

Long before the GPS, explorers depended on the compass, seafarers on the sextant, and travelers on the consistent shifting of the night sky and other subtle cues from nature to find their way across vast oceans and lands. Now some of us cringe at the thought of having to navigate streets in a foreign city to get to the nearest gas station.

So much for technology. Have we all forgotten our innate ability to talk and to trust other people?

We once knew that the essence of traveling is to travel, and not to slavishly keep in touch with the parties that take no part in the travel itself, except for the occasional “Wish You Were Here” postcard. It’s so much different today. We realize that the only real way to travel is still by doing it physically (no, viewing the 3D rendering of New York via Google Earth is not the same), and yet we end up wasting our precious travel time posting news of our activities and whereabouts to friends and family inside our virtual cocoons.

Let us not relinquish the perfect opportunity to blend in more with our new surrounds. Be at ease with the people we actually face. Log off for a while. Give the GPS a rest. Engage reality; engage real people.

+ Chriswan Sungkono

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