Today’s the day. I’ve got a final right before lunch, and as soon as I’m done there I hop in the car and head up to Birmingham to catch a plan to Boston.
I’ll have my phone and my computer with me, which means I’ll be able to maintain net access from pretty much anywhere. So email and phone are still both great ways to get in touch with me (except for those odd periods in flight where they make you turn your phone off).
I’m pretty sure I’ll end up writing something fairly significant, possibly even a paper for presentation, on the way that mobile communications technology and internet communities have impacted travel. Here’s a brief summary: It used to be that traveling resulted in either a temporary break with, or a fundamental shift it, the way people interacted with their social circle. You either went from primarily face-to-face contact to the telephone (if they were important enough for you to call), or you just didn’t have any contact with them for the duration of the trip.
Now that cell phones are all over the place, two things come into play: we are suddenly accustomed to calling people all the time. Instead of phone calls being relatively rare (since both people have to be at home), they are now common. I can call you no matter where the two of us might be, and so I do, and this results in an increase in the amount of socialization that takes place by phone. Further, since nation-wide calling is pretty much standard, this isn’t interrupted by travel. The phone-related aspects of our socialization are unimpeded by most forms of travel.
On top of that, more and more people are constructing social networks online. These experience very little interruption during travel since you’re not even fundamentally shifting the way they work. While I might be losing a common channel of socialization (face-to-face) from my local social network when I travel, I’m not doing that at all for my online social network. I’ll still have access to the net, so I’ll still have access to every single aspect of my online social network. Nothing is lost.
Both of these combine to make travel significantly less disruptive to social networks than it once was. And I find that to be really interesting.
Thomas
Have a safe flight!
And at the same time, travel is not a shared experience with the people you happen to be traveling with. When your social networks are portable, there’s no incentive to form social bonds with chance-met travel companions. (For example, I’ve just been rereading The Count of Monte Cristo where there’s a bit about how people traveling abroad met and related to each other at the time.)
You might want to check out “Life in the Real-Time City,” by Anthony Townsend (I think) if you haven’t already read the piece. It was written a few years ago but it was a really prescient look at how mobility changes our social experience; I imagine you’ll find it a useful reference.
When your social networks are portable, there’s no incentive to form social bonds with chance-met travel companions.
::nods::
That’s one of the reasons that I would never travel with a portable phone or computer. For me, an important part of travel – if not the most important part – is isolation, the separation from the stuff and substance of everyday life. The nature of the relationships one forms with chance-met travel companions is one of the more important side-effects of that self-imposed isolation, for me.
Then, that’s just my approach to Travel with a capital-T. If I were visiting friends and going to a con, as Thomas is doing, then I might well keep in touch: that’s a different sort of travel, to my mind, than Travel-with-a-capital-T.