As with most students, from March onwards, many elements that make up our daily calendar are put to one side as our workload increases. Then, once June comes, we begin to open the curtains, read the news and see friends and family. In my living room, a pile of Newsweeks dating from February has accumulated on my desk.
After reading the first couple of issues, I came across an article by Paul Theroux, “Dispatch from a Shrinking Planet”, in which the writer talks about the increasing importance of travel in today’s society. Theroux argues that the use of packages like Google Earth, while useful, creates an illusion of knowledge. With that in mind, the act of travelling becomes essential in creating experiences that are authentic.
The purpose of travelling, for many, is about taking yourself out of your comfort zone and developing new levels of knowledge about another place. It provides you the opportunity to experience the elements that make a place: its sound; its smell; its materiality; its people; and the surrounding culture. This is where Theroux’s idea of an illusion is based. None of those elements will ever be understood if you are not there to encounter them, and any knowledge gained via Google Earth is an illusion.
Nevertheless, one cannot get away from the idea that Theroux is trying to sell books. I say this because if what we find on Google Earth is providing an illusion of understanding, then we will have to read about it through sources like books or websites. The latter could be seen as Theroux’s competitor, since the internet allows the stories that, which would have would have marvelled Theroux’s audiences in previous decades, to be spread by social media and even by local people.
For example the following excerpt would not be so unusual:
“Later that year in Central Africa, flying low into Nyasaland, toward the aerodrome, as it was called, I could see small villages of mud huts with thatched roofs, and no vehicles on the dusty red roads except bicycles. In the Lower River district, women went naked from the waist up, because of the heat. Crossing Afghanistan in the early 1970s I saw men with bolt-action Lee-Enfield rifles that had been obsolete for decades, and some carried muskets inlaid, like their dagger handles, with mother of pearl.” THEROUX, P (2011). DISPATCH FROM A SHRINKING PLANET. NEWSWEEK. NEW YORK
The more that these descriptions of foreign cultures and societies become the norm, the less stark Theroux’s descriptions are. What is underlying in the article is the diminishing nature of ‘the gatekeeper’, a term I first came across during an episode of the BBC’s Culture Show. Paul Morley described the gatekeeper as a person or group with knowledge of what is good or bad and filters it accordingly. The discussion during the episode focused on the role of the gatekeeper in music, that its diminishing role in an interconnected world had lead to a devaluation of the art form and a flood of sub-standard musicians. It is hard to escape the fact that Theroux could see the expanding role of online, free media as a restraint on his ability to make money from publication.
Within his article, Theroux does cover an unnerving truth about this new age of interconnectedness – which is that it is increasingly difficult to escape.
“The world has been made more restless, more volatile, more impatient through the internet, and it has robbed people of contemplative solitude and introduced a new solitude, a sort of loneliness induced by a buzz of information.” THEROUX, P (2011). DISPATCH FROM A SHRINKING PLANT. NEWSWEEK. NEW YORK
The notion of escaping is inextricably linked with travel – you can be travelling away from somewhere as opposed to travelling to a destination. Now that our reaches have expanded it is becoming hard to find spaces that remain unaffected, but it is also difficult to take ourselves away from the ceaseless deliverance of information and gossip.
The larger issue raised surrounds the nature of space and place. As Paul Goldberger stated in 1996,:
“In an age where technology allows us to be anywhere, then what does it mean to be somewhere? What is the nature of place when you can be anywhere all the time? When you can walk through virtual space on a computer, what does real space mean?”
Goldberger could be seen as relating to a fear that when we are moving into a world of virtual reality, the importance of real place, and travel for that matter, are being challenged like never before. The idea of what constitutes real space is even up for question when some are interfacing in a virtual world more than the real world. Yet within the search for what it means to be in real space in the 21st century, two competing arguments, put forth by Doreen Massey, exist in relation to the validity of the argument itself.
Where Goldberger asks the question of what real space means in this world of evolving dimensions (physical and metaphysical), Theroux could be seen to provide an answer to what the value of experiencing real and unchartered space is. What Massey provides is a context to the topic.
“Many of those who write about time-space compression emphasize the insecurity and unsettling impact of its effects, the feeling of vulnerability which it can produce. Some therefore go on from this to argue that, in the middle of all this flux, people desperately need a bit of peace and quiet - and that a strong sense of place, or locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the ’real’ meanings of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ’sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide - in this form and on this interpretation - stability and a source of unproblematical identity. In that guise, however, place and the spatially local are then rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary. They are interpreted as an evasion; as a retreat from the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of ’real life’, which is what we must seize if we are to change things for the better. On this reading, place and locality are foci for a form of romanticized escapism from the real business of the world. While ’time’ is equated with movement and progress, ’space’/’place’ is equated with stasis and reaction.” MASSEY (1994) SPACE, PLACE AND GENDER. MINNEAPOLIS : UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRES
Massey states that those who search for the real meaning of place, are seeking a rootedness, something that they can hold onto, as real, in an uncertain world. On the other side, those who criticise that stance see it as opposing the gradual and inevitable evolution of society. Those who are indulging in this rootedness are attempting to escape the realities of life.
It could be argued that Theroux’s article spoke of someone who seeks a rootedness, yet he is not wrong for seeking to do so. Neither is there anything wrong in seeking to push a technological agenda, making our global society more connected through social media and networking.
Theroux’s main point, of real life exploration, is one to hold onto in a world in which our sense are becoming involved in new and unknown dimensions.
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