Is Travel Writing Dead?
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1) There's very little money for writers anymore, except the extremely successful
2) Travel writing golden age was when the world was exotic and hard to visit - but now we're saturated in travel TV, cheap flights, blogging and especially Instagram posts. If you want to see what the world looks like somewhere, you can get a pretty good idea from the internet. VR tourism if it happens will only make this worse.
3) Finally, globalisation has worn down the exoticness of places. Everywhere has a McDonald's. And we're heading into a time when the pendulum of public opinion has swung against the foreign. How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market?
(The author has reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Words of Mercury I need to finish.)
I think you misunderstand Brexit and other similar movements. People are pushing back at the technical homogenisation caused by that full force of globalisation. These movements are, in my opinion, a subconscious fight against the harshness of technical progress.
If countries focus on their local and national communities once more, they can rediscover culture and the uniqueness of their existence - the sort of authentic experience that tourists crave when they travel thousands of miles. In a way, it's a possible solution to point number three.
The world is becoming culturally globalized and less diverse.
There were about 50 languages spoken in France 100 years ago.
In Nice, many people used to speak 'Nicoise'. In Nice, the old street signs are bilingual: French and Nicoise.
In Monaco they used to speak 'Monegasque'.
Breton in Brittany.
But most of it has given way to French.
The same thing all over the world.
The 'Starbucksization' of the world is happening quickly.
I was in Tunisia a couple of years ago, my father was there in the 1970's. In 1970, people wore those long white 'robe-like' shirts, i.e. North African garb. Today - nobody under 40 wears that, it's all jeans and t-shirts (cheap Chinese knock-offs of popular brands), crazy haircuts (copying footballers). You could take a young Tunisian out of Tunis and plop him down in NYC and he would not stand out. 40 years ago, they would have stood right out.
At best I could guess if I am in Europe (Tiger?) or in Asia (Kanji/Hanzi interspersed with the main logos).
I don't think the enemy is "technical progress" per se, though you might be on to something with the "harshness" part.
People are against when political decisions that favor elites and corporations, and the upper middle classes (not in the British sense, in the US one) are being presented as inevitable forces of nature and economy, where they don't have a say.
There's no rule that says we should move jobs to China, or that automation must mean unemployed people with no income and devastated cities (e.g. we could use something like UBI to prevent the latter).
But because they help pad the profits of large businesses (to the long term destruction of the prospects of their own customers, the middle classes, about which corporate leaders don't care about, like they don't care about other long term concerns, like the environment -- they have their golden parachutes anyway), all the negative effects of technical progress and globalization are let loose.
Then people are surprised that bread and circuses which worked for a few decades, seems to be wearing off.
No, it's even more basic. They're pushing back against the erosion of working class jobs caused by globalisation. If a Brit doesn't have a posh background to get into a top school/job, what do they do with their life? How do they support themselves and a family?
The space is so easy to monetize that the search engines have taken to filling everything above the fold with their own ads and content. Try searching "trip to figi" or "hotels in hawaii", for example. Everything above the fold is ads or search-engine controlled content.
Travel writing is for when you want to read and be assisted in understanding what the world is like somewhere. Not when you want to see what it merely looks like.
>And we're heading into a time when the pendulum of public opinion has swung against the foreign. How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market?
At the golden ages of travel writing Britain was not in the EU or EC in the first place. And being against immigration in one's on countries is not the same as being "against the foreign". The British were much more cautious of others in their own province, and much more xenophobic and even racist in the days when travel writing was cherished (and things like "orientalism" etc).
In fact, globalization can be said to make the world a more or less homogeneous place ("come to Britain, enjoy Indian food" or "come to Japan, eat at our McDonalds"), where travel and travel writing in extension, loses its interest.
Travelling to a place also informs you of what that place is like.
And that's mostly for the "affords" part. The superficial way most people actually travel because they don't know any better, is even more constrained than what they could theoretically afford to see while traveling.
I wont even get into how even a local person might be totally out of touch with reality in their own country (e.g. a rich person that's out of touch with what is to be a working class person or minority, etc).
In general, you are right because most people travel as tourists.
Nothing to do with the working class necessarily as much as experiencing authentic culture, which happens to often come via interacting with the local working class.
It was people of 70+ who voted for the Brexit; I doubt that they're more than a tiny part of the market for travel writing.
With all of the hysterics people seem to have forgotten that both Trump and Brexit were won by small majorities, both essentially being won by the age range who consistently vote (I assume because younger people don't have the time, and in the UK at least belief). I don't think that either would have won had 100% of the electorate turned up.
Both parts false.
Moreover, the implication that Brexiters are 'against foreign travel' is also total rubbish.
Brexit was widely supported among younger people: 44% of those 25-44 voted for Brexit. And 25% of very young. That's not a small number.
Senior Citizens are the travel a lot. They are retired and spend long sojourns abroad.
"I doubt that they're more than a tiny part of the market for travel writing."
Actually, they are the primary source for the classical travel writing market.
The 'king' of travel writing is Rick Dee's (see: PBS). His guidebooks sell by the millions all over the world - and overwhelmingly, his readers are near-retired or retired.
I'd suggest that younger people consume more 'new era' travel writing such as blogs etc..
I think you are correct about the 70+ people though, it makes sense that they would be the ones reading "traditional" travel writers while the younger generations read blogs and whatnot.
That there is a 60/40 split in a demographic over some political issue, I don't think has anything to do with anything tangent from that. Wide pluralities of pro-Brexit people are actually pro-Europe. Anti EU != Anti Europe, or anti anything else for that matter.
Once those young people grow up a little bit, experience the world, and see how European politics work, how currencies work, and see the implications of all of that, they might be more pragmatic about it, and possibly pro-Brexit.
When I was younger and lived in Europe, I was 'default pro EU', because I knew little about it. Now that I know a lot more, I'm much, much more skeptical for example.
But most relevant to the article, I don't think it has anything at all to do with 'travel' ... neither does Trump.
Even traveling to Japan, while quite alien in many ways, still gave me somewhat of a theme park feeling because of westernization (one of my favorite countries though).
Is there any way to experience what it is like to be a rare explorer to somewhere largely untouched culturally? Honestly I feel like the closest thing is MMOs sadly enough.
I think it would necessarily have to be somewhere deliberately cut off, and therefore probably dangerous and hard to reach. The deep inland of the Caucasus has plenty of under-touristed places like Nagorno-Karabakh: http://danhamilton.co.uk/blog/?p=180 Then there's the dictatorships like Turkmenistan, and not-quite-war-zones like the FATA of Pakistan.
(A friend of mine was lucky enough to go to the Lebanon between civil was to see the Roman ruins there. There's a lot of underappreciated under-touristed parts of the Middle East that we'll have to hope survive until the shooting stops.)
Nationalism/isolationism folks aren't the everything should be the same crowd.
I find the museum experience in London to generally have the flavour of the spoils of a post-imperial shopping trip. Even the most radical intersectional globalized contemporary art stuff can be, and is, consumed and "recuperated" into commodity consumer culture. That's a given, and Brexit doesn't really change that orientation towards the exotic, foreign or just "new".
Doesn't seem obvious at all, five 1960 dollars is around 40 2017 dollars. 40 dollars per day can be a plenty.
The difference is, of course, mostly in the rates between the dollar and the European currencies, rather than simply an increase in costs locally.
I think this might be true in some countries -- it used to be way cheaper to go to countries in Eastern Europe before they joined the Euro. But I believe that Germany and France would have always been rather expensive since they had rather strong currencies.
As far as the Euro is concerned, USD / Eur is the highest it's been in 10 years [0].
[0] http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=EUR&view=10Y
The point being that if you're wealthy enough to have a roof over your head and food and medical care, which a significant fraction of the American population doesn't have, then trying to nickel and dime it when traveling doesn't make any sense as an over-hyper-optimization.
I'm in good financial shape so most Americans can't replicate this but I went to Ireland a couple years ago for a week, it was all the time I could get off work, I dropped oh at least a couple grand. From memory the plane tickets were like $700, so that's a hundred bucks a day even if all we did was panhandle at $0 per day. If I have to work 51 weeks a year, when am I going to spend the money on that prevents me from dropping $500/day instead having to spend $5?
They're using videos on a social platform instead of text and photographs on a book. It's just a medium change, to allow for quicker consumption and to engage more with the viewers I guess.
What travel as a verb still happens in 2017 is now about western style decadence or social signalling and both are heavily organized. If you want decadence you read the resort reviews about how good the all inclusive drinks are and proximity to nude beaches and dance clubs and such, its all heavily organized and indexed and sorted and CRUD-app-ified. Who wants to read a book about a quirky end user scrolling thru yelp or airbnb? If you want social signalling, perhaps you need that trip to Africa for volun-tour-ism for that ivy league application, you contact people who organize that from top to bottom, social signalling has been pretty well product-ized.
Some of the death of old style travel writing is the death of optimism. Sure my grandpa was one of the few who could go to Scotland for a month with my grandma, it was semi-realistic to afford for joe 6 pack. The days of the middle class ever being able to afford that are long gone along with the optimism; retirement means if you economically and physically survive the medical industrial complex, you get cat food and ramen at best, not a semi-realistic a trip to Scotland. When people are banned from an activity its human nature to claim to stop desiring it until it becomes real; millennials are too poor live in the burbs, they've been totally screwed over; response, we never wanted to live there anyway nah na nah na na. Plus or minus some gaslighting by people with a bridge to sell to suckas. Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally except maybe as a refugee, natural human response, I never wanted to anyway, not gonna read the book extolling the virtues and excitement of travel, etc.
"Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally"
This is total rubbish. People are travelling way, way more than ever before.
I live in Montreal, one of the poorest metro areas in North America and the 'millenials' here travel a LOT. They prioritize it a little more than other things, and it's easily affordable. Travel is cheaper and more accessible than ever.
They are moving to urban job centers because that's where the best chance of employment is with a decent range of employers so you aren't locked into one or two who can abuse you because they know you have no other nearby options.
Millennials would rather have a higher cost of living and lowered job risk these days. Then there are other aspects like, not wanting to drive everywhere because cars are so baby boomers, wanting amenities nearby, etc.
They also have different views about kids and are having them later, so don't need the bigger living space just yet.
If you want to do travel writing, learn a little about credit cards first.
[0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/ [1] https://thepointsguy.com/
Say what? If anything, it's the inverse.
Most travel best sellers are trite. Fermor's writing is with the best of them, and not confined to travel writing at all.
There's a handful of valuable sources left. roadsandkingdoms.com is one good one.
What if we _ideally_ discover all routes that human want to know. What would happen next after we all have been there - the edge of galaxy. Is life going to be such boredom or we would find yet another dimension to explore? I don't know, _that unknown_ actually makes me excited to explore next.
My 3rd world country is just way far behind westerners in this travel stories scene, it is just in hype state and ads content networking shit is going on around. Please lets finish this scene and move on.
The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (The Best American Series) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0618582150/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie...
We read these in a travel writing class I took in college. Each book is a collection of top stories from that year organized by the editor and there are subseries as well.
Edit: Found the official site. Don't be misled by the pricing. Slightly used copies can be picked up for next to nothing. Highly recommended.
https://www.hmhco.com/at-home/featured-shops/popular-series/...
The travel narrative is pretty alive and strong these days