Travel Connections

Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World

Jennie Germann Molz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136337031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Living in a world that is increasingly 'on the move' means that many of us now rely on mobile devices, social media, and networking technologies to coordinate togetherness with our social networks even when we are apart. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the emerging practices of 'interactive travel'. Today's travellers are more likely than ever to pack a laptop or a mobile phone and to use these devices to stay in touch with friends and family members – as well as to connect with strangers and other travellers – while they are on the road. New practices such as location-aware navigating, travel blogging, flashpacking and Couchsurfing now shape the way travellers engage with each other, with their social networks, and with the world around them.

Travel Connections prompts a rethinking of the key paradigms in tourism studies in the digital age. Interactive travel calls into question longstanding tourism concepts such as landscape, the tourist gaze, hospitality, authenticity and escape. The book proposes a range of new concepts to describe the way tourists inhabit the world and engage with their social networks in the twenty-first century: smart tourism, the mediated gaze, mobile conviviality, re-enchantment and embrace.

Based on intensive fieldwork with interactive travellers, Travel Connections offers a detailed account of this emerging phenomenon and uncovers the new forms of mediated and face-to-face togetherness that become possible in a mobile world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, tourism and hospitality, new media, cosmopolitanism studies, mobility studies and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Tourism, technology and togetherness in a mobile world

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 1994

The rooms in the Sumaryo Guest House where I was staying opened onto a sunny central courtyard blooming with hibiscus bushes and furnished with low-slung lawn chairs. Small clusters of three or four travellers, mostly young Western backpackers, would sit in the lawn chairs late into the night engaging in that casual banter and story swapping that tends to characterize backpacker socializing. Mark made an odd exception to this social choreography. I noticed that he had pulled one of those lawn chairs up against a wall and was sitting there alone, hunched over a black portable computer. Wires spilled out of the side of his computer and snaked up the wall where he had rigged a power converter to plug his computer into an outlet. When I asked him what he was doing, he slowly peeled his gaze away from the screen to look at me and then patiently explained that he was keeping a digital travel journal and writing articles about travelling around the world with a computer. These articles were intended as a kind of ‘how-to’ guide for other travellers who might want to bring their computers along, but were worried about security or weight or voltage. He gestured to one of the wires, which led to a phone jack, and explained that he was occasionally able to connect his modem to the phone line in the guest house to transmit his travel journal to friends back home. ‘All my friends get is a postcard’, I joked. But, I quickly figured out that his friends were not like my friends. They were tech-savvy computer nerds who spent most of their time in a university lab and knew how to make computers on opposite sides of the world talk to one another. He clearly wanted to get back to the task at hand, so I wandered off, fascinated and confused by this guy in a guest house in Indonesia communicating, somehow, with his friends on another continent.

Introduction

I did not realize it then, but I had encountered my first ‘flashpacker’. Of course, in 1994, that term did not exist and would not be coined for another decade or so. At the time, I thought of Mark rather prosaically as the guy with the computer. Like me, he was in his early twenties, from the United States, and taking a few months off to backpack around the world. Unlike me, or any other backpacker I had met so far on my journey, Mark was hauling a heavy, expensive laptop computer everywhere he went. It is difficult to capture in retrospect my initial reactions to Mark and his computer. It helps to remember that, at the time, few people were using email let alone mobile phones or social networking sites for daily communication. There was no Yahoo! and certainly no Facebook. There was no Google. I had still not heard of a browser. The word ‘blog’ did not yet exist. I knew people who owned laptop computers, but it would never occur to them to lug their laptops around the world in a backpack. What Mark was doing with his computer in the courtyard of the Sumaryo Guest House seemed uncanny to me. There he was, his face buried in a computer screen, his back to the communal space of the guest house, apparently alone and yet, at the same time, connected across time and space to distant friends.

The image of Mark bent over his laptop computer and the sense I had that he was both connected and disconnected – socially, digitally, physically – piqued a curiosity that has motivated much of my scholarly research over the past fifteen years. Since then, I have been exploring the way travellers integrate portable computers and the Internet, and more recently mobile phones and social media, into their travel and tourism practices, a trend I refer to as ‘interactive travel’. In this book, I explore some of the questions that Mark and his laptop computer prompted all those years ago. How do we ‘do togetherness’ at a distance? What kinds of connections – and disconnections – do new technologies make available to travellers? What do we gain by being able to connect to places in new ways or stay in touch with loved ones while on the road, and what do we give up? These new patterns of togetherness and sociality that emerge when physical travel intersects with communication technologies are the topic of this book.

In this introductory chapter, I describe the growing trend of ‘interactive travel’ and locate it within the larger debates surrounding mobility, technology and sociality. I begin by showing how the rapidly evolving context of new mobile and media technologies has made interactive travel an ever more significant element of modern social life, especially in a mobile world. As interactive travellers use mobile phones and the Internet to upload blogs, post photos and videos, network with other travellers or navigate through tourist spaces, they are not merely rewriting the social and spatial significance of travel, they are pointing to significant shifts in how we use mobile technologies every day to engage with each other and the world while on the move. I then situate this discussion within the debate between social cohesion and fragmentation that often arises when new technologies appear on the social scene. Here, I expand in particular on Andreas Wittel’s notion of ‘network sociality’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid love’, using their critiques of the frail and fleeting nature of social life to frame the questions I ask about mobile sociality. I conclude the chapter by considering how new communication technologies afford certain forms of togetherness on the move, and how the anxieties and aspirations travellers attach to these new technologies shed light on the imagined limits and possibilities of this mobile sociality.

Taking technology on the road: the rise of ‘interactive travel’

Interactive travel looks quite different today than it did when I met Mark at that guest house in Indonesia. Mark’s seemingly idiosyncratic travel hobby has, in fact, become a massive trend. What began as a marginal activity is now central to backpackers’ experiences, and to the general practice of travel. By 2000, hundreds of round-the-world travellers were publishing websites similar to Mark’s digital travel journal. By 2011, the term ‘round-the-world travel blog’ had become so commonplace that a Google search returned more than 89 million results for this keyword. According to the annual ‘State of the American Traveler Survey’ from Destination Analysts, Inc. (2009, 2010, 2011), travellers in the United States have become increasingly likely to use the Internet and mobile technologies to plan and coordinate their journeys. In 2011, more than 43 per cent of travellers surveyed reported that they consulted user-generated online content, up from 30 per cent in 2009. In 2009, only 8.5 per cent of respondents used social media and photo sharing sites while planning their trips. By 2011, this number had risen to 25.8 per cent. That same year, significant numbers of respondents reported taking laptops with them on leisure trips, as well as using mobile devices to access travel or destination information online and to download destination-specific podcasts, locative tools and interactive guides.

Over the past decade, the proliferation of Internet cafés, portable computers, mobile smartphones, wireless Internet, connected hotspots, online social networking sites, user-friendly social media platforms and photo sharing sites has normalized ubiquitous access to the Internet among mobile and geographically-dispersed social groups, not least of all interactive travellers. Travellers’ tales from the road reveal the assumption that blogging and flashpacking, a neologism that refers to packing digital devices like laptops and smartphones in your backpack, have become ordinary aspects of most travellers’ journeys. Logging onto Facebook, emailing home, uploading photos or texting friends are now normal, everyday aspects of a travelling lifestyle. BootsnAll.com, an online network for independent travellers, notes that ‘To blog or not to blog?’ is now a common question for prospective round-the-world travellers.¹ It is so common, in fact, that the website has published a guide to help travellers decide which blogging tools and smartphone applications to use while on the road. The author of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site, a popular travel blog that I will discuss in depth later in the book, observes that most of the backpackers he encounters are toting iPods, smartphones and laptop computers. He asks on his blog, ‘Are we all flashpackers now?’ As we will see, the answer to this question is less about the statistical significance of a trend than it is about the new patterns of sociality that emerge when movement, communication and technology converge.

To explore these new social configurations, I focus in this book on three interrelated practices of interactive travel, each one a point of intersection between technology and tourism. I describe my methodological approach to these practices in more detail in Chapter 2, but I want to introduce briefly here the three case studies that make up the empirical context of the book. First is a study of mediated walking tours in the nearby cities of Boston and Cambridge. Curious about the way interactive technologies shape visitors’ connections to the urban landscape, I downloaded several of these mobile guides to my iPod and iPhone² and followed them around the city. Afterwards, I contacted the developers who had created these guides and interviewed them about their vision for mobile technologies in urban tourism. In Chapter 3, I describe my experiences with these mediated and interactive walking tours and recount my conversations with the developers, highlighting in particular the way these mediated guides produce a hybrid geography of digital and physical landscapes and reflect the tension between commercial and civic applications of mobile technologies.

The second instance of interactive travel involves the interrelated practices of flashpacking and travel blogging. As I mentioned earlier, flashpacking refers to the relatively new practice of bringing digital devices along on a trip and using them to stay in touch while on the road. The flashpackers I focused on in my study were ones who used those devices to publish travel blogs as they travelled around the world. For several months, I followed these travel blogs online, regularly reading the stories travellers published online, looking at their photographs, watching their videos and paying careful attention to the back-and-forth comments posted by other readers. In Chapter 4, I describe my interactions with these blogs and introduce some of the travellers who published them. For example, I describe The World Effect, a blog published by Beau and Meggan, a couple from Colorado who set off on their round-the-world journey in 2008. Like most of the travellers in my study, Beau packed so many gadgets, converters, chargers and power cords that the inside of his backpack resembled, as he put it, ‘a bowl of spaghetti’. The reason he packed all those devices, Beau explains on the blog, was not just to record his and Meggan’s experiences, but also to share the trip – as it happened – with friends, family members and other travellers. In Chapter 4, I examine the implications of this impulse to stay in continuous touch with a dispersed and distant social group while on the move.

In order to address the specific kinds of sociality that emerge around social networking sites, I selected as my third case study an online network aimed specifically at travellers: CouchSurfing.org. CouchSurfing is an online hospitality exchange network that connects travellers in need of a couch to crash on with people willing to host them for a night or two. Like other interactive travel practices, CouchSurfing has grown exponentially in the past several years. It developed from a handful of founding members in 2003 to a worldwide network of more than 3 million members by the summer of 2011.³ In this case, my fieldwork took place both online and offline. Online, I analysed the CouchSurfing website, browsed member profiles and participated in virtual community groups. At the same time, I surfed with, hosted and interviewed dozens of CouchSurfers in person. In Chapter 5, I describe my experiences as a CouchSurfer and introduce some of the people I met along the way, including Noelle and Marise who hosted me in Montreal, the eclectic group of CouchSurfers I hung out with at an organic farm in New Mexico, and Nico, an Italian artist, who sees CouchSurfing as fulfilling the revolutionary potential of the Internet. My interactions with these CouchSurfers reveal the new possibilities social networking technologies pose for interacting not just with friends, but also with strangers.

Throughout the book, I explore these intersections between tourism and technology in detail, in each case asking how travellers use mobile technologies, social media and online social networking to connect to – and disconnect from – people and places while on the move. My aim is to provide a textured account of mobile sociality as an increasingly predominant form of social life in an ever more mobile world.

Connecting in a mobile world

By most accounts, we now live in a mobile world crisscrossed by intersecting trajectories of people, media, data, goods and risks. Travellers and tourists, satellite images and digitized photos, soldiers and refugees, currencies and debt, voice messages and email, food and clothing, and disease and pollution are constantly on the move. Most people in the world now find themselves living ‘mobile lives’ (Elliott and Urry 2010), whether they have chosen a mobile lifestyle (like many middle-class professionals, including the travellers I introduce in this book) or had mobility thrust upon them (like many asylum seekers, refugees and involuntary migrants). Questions of who moves and who does not, how movement is chosen, enforced or blocked, and the uneven conditions of movement are thus central to contemporary life (Sheller and Urry 2006). Based on sheer numbers, tourism mobilities are certainly implicated in these questions. The travel and tourism industry alone is worth more than US$7 trillion per year and is arguably the largest industry in the world (Elliott and Urry 2010: ix). Tourism accounts for close to one billion international arrivals annually, a number predicted to rise to 1.6 billion by the year 2020. Tourism is also implicated in the power-geometry of this mobile world (Massey 1993). As theorists have carefully pointed out, the mobility of some is often predicated on the immobility of others, and the fairly comfortable conditions of movement enjoyed by most of the travellers in this study rely heavily on privileges afforded by factors such as race, social class, gender, ethnicity and national citizenship.

If mobility itself is not exactly new, its particular salience within modern society certainly seems to be. The speed and scale of physical and virtual mobilities, the diversity and complexity of mobility systems, the ubiquity of movement in our everyday lives, and the new forms of communication, consumption, citizenship, space, selfhood and sociality that emerge through these mobilities are remarkable. What is also new, or so it seems, is the significance scholars now attribute to mobility. From ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), ‘flows’ (Castells 1996), and ‘acceleration’ (Rosa and Scheuerman 2008) to ‘turbulence’ (Cresswell 2010), ‘stillness’ (Bissell and Fuller 2010) and ‘moorings’ (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006), a rich conceptual lexicon has emerged to describe the way contemporary social life is fundamentally organized around various mobilities and immobilities. These concepts signal a ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences that aims to make sense of social networks that are increasingly stretched across space, social relations that are ever more reliant on mediated communication, and social inequalities that are entrenched in access to or exclusion from physical and virtual mobilities.

In their analysis of the mobile lives that many people now lead, Elliott and Urry (2010: 5) observe that ‘the emergence of complex global mobility systems involves the creation of new forms of mobile social life, new kinds of daily experience, and new forms of social interaction’. Central to the mobile lifeworlds they describe are the information and communication technologies people use to order, arrange and mediate life on the move. Especially for middle-class citizens living in wealthy societies, ‘modern’ lifestyles are only made liveable by virtue of the various mobility systems that whir ceaselessly in the background. One of the most striking aspects of this mobile, mediated and networked world is the extent to which physical movement and communication technologies intersect in new articulations of self and sociability. As networks of colleagues, friends and families extend and move across geographical space, social life now involves multiple forms of co-presence established through physical travel, online interactions and mobile communications (Larsen, Urry and Axhausen 2006). We see this in concentrated form in interactive travel, where travellers experiment with technology to engage in new mobile lifestyles, establish new ties to space and place, and navigate new modes of co-presence with friends and family members while on the road and far away. Physical travel and mediated communication are the ‘social glue’ (Vertovec 2004) that holds these dispersed and mobile social networks together. This hybrid sociality is impossible apart from the technologies of travel and communication that enable it, and yet, as we will see, it is not reducible to these technologies.

Connecting

As I explore the contours, qualities and textures of togetherness in this mobile world, I return again and again to the concept of connection. I argue that connectivity, and especially the dialectic between connecting and disconnecting, lies at the heart of mobile sociality. In many ways, interactive travel conflates social, spatial and digital connectivity, and the title of this book is meant to capture precisely these overlaps. The phrase from which the book’s title derives – ‘travel connections’ – conjures up many images: passengers rushing through airport terminals or train stations to catch the next leg of their itinerary; subway maps and airline routes built around hubs and spokes; and cartographies of the Internet or cellular networks depicting the wired and wireless routes that data travel along as they move between transmitters, servers and computers. These kinds of travel connections are predicated on complex mobility systems composed of interconnected infrastructures, services and modes of transportation and communication. But, ‘travel connections’ also connotes the social, intimate and interpersonal relations that emerge in the midst of all this mobility.

In public discourse about mobile technologies and social media, the term ‘connect’ often gets used in such unselfconscious ways that we rarely ask how we get from the digital to the social. Facebook, for example, claims to ‘help you connect and share with the people in your life’. Nokia’s motto is, ‘Connecting people’. Cisco, a multinational telecommunications company, brands itself as ‘the human network’ and claims to be ‘bringing people together’. The conceptual leap from electronic connectivity to human and social connections in these corporate taglines appears to be seamless. We are led to understand ‘connection’ as a fairly straightforward way of referring to social ties, especially ones that are technologically mediated. Connecting to the Internet and connecting to a faraway friend are barely discernible activities.

The fact that ‘connection’ refers today as easily to social relationships as it does to travelling or to Internet access attests not only to the term’s polyvalence, but also to new forms of sociability that revolve less around physically proximate communal relationships and more around geographically-dispersed, mediated and mobile social networks. Bauman (2003) notes that people now refer to their social experiences in terms of connections; connecting and being connected rather than...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: tourism, technology and togetherness in a mobile world
• 2 Fieldwork on the move: mobile virtual ethnography
• 3 Landscape: connecting to place, connected places
• 4 Gaze: mobilizing and mediating the tourist gaze
• 5 Hospitality: the mobile conviviality of CouchSurfing
• 6 Authenticity: representation, commodification and re-enchantment
• 7 Escape: unplugging from modernity
• 8 Conclusion: performing mobile sociality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index