Please note: Heather Cochran will not be presenting her paper at the conference.
Ah, globalization. The world village. Even with all this rain, we keep hearing that the earth is shrinking. Figuratively at least. Borders are smoothing out, opening up. Even Bhutan doesn't seem so far away anymore.
Much of this "global community" sensibility has been brought to us via the Internet. It is hard to pick up a newspaper these days without finding a reference to this vast array of digital networks--be it an article on technology, an op-ed on new FCC regulations, or at the very least a URL, those ubiquitous www.businessname.coms that are popping up everywhere.
The hype is not without merit. The Web has brought the world closer together. People on opposite sides of the globe can communicate with one another through pictures, sound, and video, even if they don't share a spoken language. Students can write reports with material previously unavailable in the local library. Distances shrink: Russia, Chile, and India are all delivered to your desktop computer with a click of the mouse.
You can see where I am going with this. The Web is perfectly suited to transfer information about distant lands and strange cultures--as well as information about getting there, and articles by those who have been before. And it is happening.
Getting information about a little known destination is as easy as completing an online form and waiting for a search engine to deliver the goods. Usenet groups allow people to ask for and offer advice about travel. Online diaries and journals of trips past and present are categorized by location or type of travel.
The growth of online travel magazines has been explosive. Some, like Salon's Wanderlust (http://www.salonmagazine.com/wanderlust/) and Mungo Park (http://www.mungopark.com/) are well-funded, slick enterprises. Others, such as Web Surfer Travel Journal (http://edge.edge.net/~dphillip/) and Cyber-Adventures (http://www.cyber-adventures.com/) depend on smaller budgets and passion of a single editor.
Those of us who work online are watching carefully how the four-year-old Web is evolving, but what is clear is that this new medium will affect the greater publishing industry, and by affecting publishing, it will affect writing--the subjects covered, styles used, and audiences courted.
A number of differences between print and online travel writing are already evident. For one, online content must fight much harder for attention. With links bounding off in all directions, readers can leave in a click, never to return.
Online readers won't scroll through a tome the size of even a small paperback. Perhaps because of this, travel writing pieces on the Web tend to be shorter, with a greater focus on zing, on exciting exploits and quirky characters, rather than on the leisurely building of context and atmosphere. Sites such as Salon publish new stories each day in an attempt to keep people returning--a rather frenetic pace for both readers and writers to keep up with.
Articles focusing on personal observation are popular, in contrast to the classic, footnoted and carefully researched tales. This Oprahfication of travel writing--the telling of personal narratives without much supporting research--is not an entirely new phenomenon but seems especially obvious online.
Because anyone can publish a Web page, and each Web page is just as easy to reach as the next--my Web site and Microsoft's command the same amount of this "cyberspace"--many people are publishing who would not have had a similar opportunity in print. Online you can tell your tales as loudly as Jan Morris or Peter Mayle.
This is both the strength and the weakness of the Web, for in truth, much of the information now online could use an edit. Travel writing, stemming as it often does from diaries and journals of everyday travelers, suffers similarly. The details recorded are often of great interest to the writer and of significantly less to the reader. The lack of external, objective editors and professional writers makes for a swath of less than keen observations of the "the pasta was good. The hotel was loud" variety. Typos abound.
But neither is the reader's investment so great. These days, you can get a month of Internet connectivity for the cost of a new hardcover. A site that does not deliver--or delivers the mundane and misspelled--is soon left behind.
The Web has and will continue to spawn a slew of new travel writers--some great, some not, but all given the same opportunity to be heard and the chance to be discovered. How this affects what we read in print in the years to come is still to be seen.
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