For this week’s blog post I wanted to tell a short personal story about how technology changes some things, but doesn’t actually change much. My parents have always loved travelling, this means I was a very lucky child since my parents took me and my sister on trips all over the world. They considered travelling to be an important aspect of growing up, and of course they just loved it themselves as well. We have been to many places, some very far away and some very close. Even though each trip was unique, one thing always remained the same: my dad being inseparable from his little travel book.
Every country, city, tourist hot-spot, pretty much every everything has its own travel book by now. These books provide information about the place you’re travelling to and often include a little map as well. For as long as I can remember our vacations always included my father running around somewhere holding his little book and reading about every stone we would come across. At times he would try to involve us in his love for the little book, and sometimes we would happily listen to his stories and sometimes it would end up with my mom, my sister and I running the other way or asking ‘can we just go get some food now?’. Not that we didn’t appreciate his efforts, it’s just hard to be interested in anything except food when you’re really hungry.
The inside joke of my dad and his book wasn’t just a family thing, anyone who had traveled with us or my parents knew about it. We have tons of pictures of my dad standing somewhere, always holding his book, like the one below. Besides reading from the book about everything we saw he would also use the maps to guide us around. It wouldn’t be rare for him to send us in the entirely wrong direction. Followed by some mumbled swearing he would find the right directions in the end (even though my mom probably already asked somebody and knew where to go).
Even though my dad and his books were inseparable, time goes by and things change… My dad hasn’t completely said goodbye to his travel books yet, but the past few trips they have been replaced by a travel app! Yes, technology came and took over the job of the costly paper pages and my dad now gets his shots of information via the screen of his phone. This hasn’t changed the situation though. He still loves reading about every little thing, so the tool has changed but the result is still the same. He still misreads maps, is reading everywhere about everything and our family joke is still the same family joke. My dad and his digital travel book. So even though time goes by and the world changes, some things never do.
hey Judith,
very nice story, reminds me on the trips with my mother. I agree that some things will never change, even technology might enhance it. However I think it depends how you use that tool.
For instance, I don`t use the map app often, when I travel through different countries even though I might not reach the destination as fast as I could. The reason is I like to come in touch with local people and that`s why I made some great connections in the past. However, I have noticed that in daily live I use maps very often and ignore basically the surrounding by starring at the map app.
I think its great that your trips have not changed just because of a new technological device.
Hi Judith, I really liked your post and the story you wrote about. I agree, there are things that never change, at least I hope that who we are and what we love will not change with the use of digital media! I do think that digital technology does not change what we like to do, but it inevitably changes the expereince of it, and this can be both positive and negative, depending on our use of the medium. I guess that if we love doing something and we have the opportunity to enhance the experience of it through the use of technologies, this is a good thing. The problem is when the use of digital media limit our experience of the world. Luckily, this is not the case of your dad!