It's almost as if it were a false start, ladies and gentlemen. (Once again I speak in the plural, in the hopes that there are more of you than there may actually be.)
I feel the desperate need to share with you the germination of this project. I spent last winter living in Stockholm, Sweden and experimented with blog technology for the first time then. I wanted to share the humor and confusion and adventure of my abroad experience with friends and family back home. So I did. At Viking Around.
For my final project, I thought I'd take a look at travel blogs. What they are. What they can be. What head are the writers in when they write? Why do they blog?
I can speak to my loneliness. I was living abroad for the first time and while I did have family in Stockholm, I was still away from my circle of friends and family in New York. I needed to connect in some way. By living my life there as if my friends were part of it, as if I were even having these experiences just to share them with them, it made it more bearable. We discussed in our blogging class the point at which you become your blog, or, more specifically, when you live your life just to blog about it. I can't say I did this to write about it, but what about writers who do. And I mean writers, not necessarily bloggers. (No disrespect meant at all.) I refer to authors who embroil themselves in a different life, so they can better understand the novel they are writing. Or journalists who walk in different shoes so they can better report on a different culture. Blogging is by partial definition writing about one's own life. So the blurred lines happen everyday, not just for a specified period of study.
I blogged for companionship. I wasn't even hep to the comment realm at the time. Neither were most of my friends actually! In fact, as we have discussed, the whole medium was still new to people. Here's an example from a comment of how a close friend of mine was handling all of this electronic communication:
I'm sorry that I haven't figured out the skype(spelling?) thing but i'm an ignoramous when it comes to those things. I could have sent you this in e-mail but I wanted to prove to you that I'm actually reading your blog.
The travel blog allows the writer to stay in touch. It allows the reader to accompany him on his travels. It allows for a connection across great distances. It also challenges the reader to keep up with the technology adopted by the writer. It forces the audience to step up, to meet the artist halfway. If the viewer is not proficient in the medium, she will not be able to experience the art.
7 comments:
I have never written a travel blog because I don't have a blog. I have occasionally documented a trip by organizing a series of pictures with captions and/or by writing a journal in MS Word.
Actually, I lied. I do have a "blog" and I recently posted a travel journal on it. (Rather, Tom just posted on it.) I documented our last trip using pictures and MS Word, and Tom uploaded the document contents to our website (www.camarro.com), which you could call our "blog." Click the Grand Cayman link on the What's New page to see.
I've never really written a travel blog. I suppose it would make some sense as I travel for work and friends and family always ask about what I've seen and done.
Work travel is usually boring. The inside of a generic hotel room isn't really text-worthy.
I've had a few interesting trips. My last trip to Germany for instance, I was staying in a tiny town where nobody took credit cards, but they would take a signed business card and bill the company!
There were a total of three eateries in the town. On Monday noghts, one was closed, and a second was having a private function, so we were relegated to the bar attached to the butcher shop.
We met some locals who out of the blue invited us to try "cider" down the street. Thinking it was another bar we joined them, but it turned out to be someones rathskellar where they were making hard cider, wine, and other fermented goodies. The cellar was 400 years old, and the house above it was 600. It was an interesting local touch you won't get on most travels.
So there it is, I guess I've bloged about travel.
Thanks for the full disclosure, Barb. Hysterical. Now all previous posts are suspect.
Tom writes: "Work travel is usually boring. The inside of a generic hotel room isn't really text-worthy."
Good point. I guess before we ask why we write when we travel, we have to define or at least discern why we travel in the first place.
Can we find "bloggables" on a business trip? If you frequently travel for business, does the frequency strip away the fanciful nature of traveling? Is there a way to find new experiences, even if you revisit the same places over and over?
Those questions, upon review, lack cleverness. Of course you can find new experiences each time you travel. The myriad variables differ every time. The question then might be: what, by definition, is bloggable?
No...even though I use computers all the time, I haven't thought about doing a travel blog. Actually, 2 different people who I traveled with this summer had one, and it was a little awkward finding their blogs and reading about our experiences together. I guess I have mixed feelings about it.
Interestingly, both of them had reasons for their blogs. One person was on a "driveabout" - he left everything and traveled the country and did volunteer trips for 6 months or so. The other person was a single mom of 2, and had rasied money for the 3 of them to volunteer - this was a way of sharing their experiences with people who contributed.
Jackie brings up a good point about the subjects of one's blog reading the blog.
I encountered the same dilemma when I was writing from Sweden. I didn't tell any of my Swedish family and friends that I was writing a blog. I wanted to be able to write freely about my experiences without the potential for misunderstanding. I didn't want anyone to feel insulted if I found humor in their society or was just puzzled by the way they did things.
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