Going Abroad by Rob Gordon

Author:Rob Gordon [Gordon, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317258759
Google: ymbvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T02:50:24+00:00

Chapter Seven

Traveling Light (and a Rant about Electronic Technology)

He who would travel happily must travel light.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Most travelers take too much luggage, literally and figuratively. This chapter deals with the essentials. In planning on going abroad, it is tempting to get the very best gear, not only for safety but also convenience, pleasure, and, sometimes, blatant consumerism. One of my pet peeves about hiking and kayaking is meeting up with folks who seem obsessed with discussing their gear! The problem is more than a self-image shaped by consumer materialism; too many hightech gadgets fail while abroad, especially when they are needed. Such gadgets also serve to insulate the traveler and create a barrier to the immediate social surroundings. As economists would say, one has to distinguish between needs and wants. I hope to make the case for minimalism so that all the senses can be exposed to the environment. Travelers are now increasingly defined not by what they carry but by what they leave at home, knowing that the destination environment will provide.

Stuck in my mind is an image of a hiker I encountered early one summer in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. It wasn’t only the top-of-the-line clothing he wore that piqued my interest. It was the accessories he appeared to carry: cell phone; digital still and video cameras; weather radio; state-of-the-art Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, which not only gave information about where he was but also reported elevation and temperature; and, most important of all, an iPod that played constant motivational music. He could have been in an electronic cocoon; my companion remarked, “If he were in Africa or the Himalayas he would probably have been mugged and his electronics redistributed.” Many years ago the anthropologist Melville Herskovits introduced the notion of “cultural focus” to point to the central obsessions in a culture. So, for example, in parts of Africa it would be cattle, in Papua New Guinea it would be pigs, and for Americans it would undoubtedly be consumer electronics.

As Zygmunt Bauman anticipated in the 1980s, rich and uprooted elites jet around the world in search of fun and opportunity while the poor and uprooted workers move in search of a living. Wireless communication is changing the way the elite work, live, and relate to places. This new technology provides exciting possibilities not only for research but also for communication. Mobile phones are now ubiquitous. The International Telecommunications Union claims that more than half the world’s population, over 3.3 billion, now subscribe to a mobile-phone service. The one drawback of the mobile phone, difficulties in connecting up to the Internet, is rapidly being resolved by new developments. Text messaging is now more popular than making ordinary phone calls in the United States, and most cell phones also have the ability to visually and aurally record events. There are other developments that could be important for going abroad as well. Particularly relevant to travelers will be the option of location-based services for cell phones. With

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