Journal 5

Humans are more mobile now than any point in our history. Modern technology has allowed for travel to become available to all people, no longer only the wealthy elite. Similarly, the spread of information has become extremely mobile through the World Wide Web. Both of these factors have greatly affected travel writing and how we interpret travel. Mobility has made writing more personalized and self-actualizing. Traveling has transformed over the centuries from a way to gain knowledge and worldliness and produce discussion, to a more observant and silent task that involved taking in the experiences to cultivate the self. Traveling became a solitary state of introspection and isolation which encouraged people to find themselves. This is still a widely held belief, but contradictory to their ideals about travel, people remain connected through the internet. Before, travelers found themselves cut off from everyone when they set off but now, entire discourses are created just for people to find out how to remain connected while traveling. People are mobile and now so are all of their social interactions. Mobility has led to connectivity and collaboration which have constructed vast knowledge of the world. From this knowledge people read and write about what they want to know, exchange ideas, share pictures, and in a sense create the world they want to see through discourse.