With our smart phones rendered dumb, we made do with a cheap rented mobile that did nothing except—get this—make phone calls. No SMS, no MMS, no GPS, no Web browser, no Google Maps, no currency converter, no translator app, no camera, no Scrabble. This might have felt vaguely liberating if we were, say, camping in Vermont. But we were in Tokyo, a city as bewildering as it is vast. Take away any connection to the information cloud, and we might as well have been on a raft in the Sea of Japan.
The more ways we devise to connect, inform, or amuse ourselves—the more tricks our gadgets learn—the more aggravated we become when they don’t work. Which is often. The digital world may be growing up fast, but at the moment it’s going through an ornery adolescence, that awkward beta-phase when expectations outpace capacity and the default setting is frustration.
Then again, this makes our wonky tech tools the perfect analogue to travel itself, which is inherently buggy. Even on the best trips, equipment breaks down, wheels fall off suitcases, passports are left in the safe. Things go wrong all the time, such that a savvy traveler comes to expect it. How strange it will be when our phones, our laptops, and our vacations all run as smoothly as we’d like them to.
Some things already work too well. For a few months last year I got addicted to Google Street View. I’d be on there right now if I could trust myself to stop. At the peak of my habit I was Street-Viewing around the clock, everywhere I went, from London to San Francisco: previewing my every move, scanning each fish-eyed storefront for clues, providing for all possible detours (“Look, there’s a bench outside that café. I’ll sit there”). Delirious fun, but after all that Street-Viewing, the real thing—the actual bench—was curiously disappointing.
Like anyone, I initially get a kick out of seeing exactly what color my hotel bedspread is going to be (thanks for the pics, RoomSleuth461!). But I kind of prefer not knowing. Part of the thrill of travel is in the mystery it entails, the buzz that comes from trying to imagine what this strange new place will even look like. The gap between our expectations and harsh reality is diminishing, but so, too, I can’t help but think, is our excitement.
It’s true that information-age tools enable us to have easier, safer, more reliable vacations. But sometimes we have better vacations in spite of them. The danger is in using these conveniences simply because we can. Especially when we travel—which, after all, is supposed to entail stepping outside of ourselves and our little mobile cubicles. Take a look around you right now and count the number of people on the phone; I’ll bet they outnumber those who aren’t. The more we connect with the world above and beyond us, the harder it is to be present wherever we actually are.
I keep thinking back to that lobby in Barcelona. A surreal scene, and not just for the LL Cool J cameo. 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 travelers: tweeting, IM’ing, video chatting, sharing slide shows, and virtually bonding with people in other rooms, some halfway around the globe.
In the real world, meanwhile, nobody seemed to notice anyone else, aside from LL Cool J. Though I overheard their entire conversation, I never even said hello to the couple from Chicago. In another era we might have exchanged addresses, or at least sightseeing tips. Instead, we kept our distance, like everyone else, clustered around the virtual hearth of the lobby Wi-Fi—together and apart, in our own huge worlds.
Peter Jon Lindberg is T+L’s editor-at-large. Follow him on Twitter: @peterjlindberg
