7 April

I hardly ever see some friends on FB. Until they go on holiday. Then suddenly there’s a burst of posting. Which to me is a window into what travel culture is really about. It’s not about experiencing the world or ‘seeing the sights’. The greatest fallacy of all travel is that ‘being there’ brings you closer to the reality of the place. If you go there, you’re changing the reality of what it is you went there to see. When we travel we travel inside our own social networks, the places we want to see are defined by what others do (or don’t) want to see, we share our humblebrags as evidence to others of where we are, etc. Jerry Seinfeld’s observation that the real reason we went to the moon is so that astronauts could say to people at home, ‘so, did you see me up there?’ It’s also a gift to burglars, who scan posts like that to see who’s not home.