picture by me – taken on road trip – it pays to look out the window
Travelling has and always will be the death of me. From an early age I remember the lengthy road trips from Sacramento to Los Angeles during the holidays, and when I moved back to Guam the average travel time was at least 18 hours altogether. It also does me no favors that I cannot sleep on planes. However, what distinguishes my travel experiences from childhood until now is the advent of the smartphone. In my childhood, I was very fortunate if my parents remembered to bring their CD catalog or a deck of cards on a road trip. Whenever they forgot, I knew I was in for a long, excruciatingly boring ride.
In my recent road trip to Salt Lake City, this was not the case. I had endless access to music, TV shows, and social media. My smartphone enabled me to stay busy during the whole trip, whether it was listening to music while driving, watching Regular Show sprawled out in the backseat, or even scrolling through Insta and Reddit after exiting the mountain passes. In the different cities I would pass through, different ads would pop up, usually for casinos in Vegas or for Camera stores in Salt Lake City. As billboards throughout the highway advertised for different businesses, so did the ads on my social media. My acquired privilege and obligation to drive during these long road trips brought the key differences in navigation to my attention as well. For the entire time I drove, it was Google Maps updating me on traffic and where to navigate instead of terrestrial radio reports and physical copies of maps.
Despite all of these newfound abilities and access to content, I still struggled with boredom, impatience, and now more than ever, motion sickness. I have never been the type to sleep through a road trip or flight, so even while I was watching one of my favorite shows or listening to my most played songs of 2019, the experience of the drive just made all of it far more unenjoyable. Still, I did it because time does not pass by quickly enough when I look at the world around me. It was during the times when I’d put my phone down and appreciate the snow capped mountains that the road trip seemed to take forever.
The amount of access to media has undeniably changed my travel experience. From the way I navigate to the way I keep myself entertained, the differences speak for themselves. However, travelling still sucks, and my access to media becomes far more mundane and unenjoyable when I am in an environment that forces me to scroll mindlessly through social media or begrudgingly listen to a song because it’s better than listening to the white noise of tires speeding down a freeway. Technology has managed to capture my dependency on a constant stream of media consumption while simultaneously making the consumption of media far less enjoyable when I feel like I need it most.
Has my access to media really made my travel experience more tolerable, or has it reduced my ability to sit through a drive without a smartphone in front of my face? In any event, I would rather live in a world of smartphones because of tools such as Google Maps that streamline the experience. While technology does make some experiences easier to handle, it exacerbates our feelings of boredom and impatience. I have done media logs in the past, but this assignment has made it clear that I need to work on being more comfortable in my own head rather than on social media.
Alfred Bordallo // ASCJ 200 