nhom_toi

I TRIED traveling with a laptop through Southeast Asia. The plan was to edit videos from bungalows and blog from beaches.

That lasted two weeks until hundreds of tiny red ants invaded the machine, secreting their nasty juices all over the circuitry.

This compelled me to question whether I should just stick to taking notes in my journal and all-day binge sessions at cramped internet cafes.
Thoughts?

Does traveling with a computer help or hinder the overall journey?

Do travel writers even have a choice these days?

Try explaining to a Thai electronics repairman that ants munched your motherboard.
He will just stare at you, trust me.

Community Connection

What electronics do you take with you on your journey? Have you had a positive or negative experience traveling with your laptop?

Matadorian Beija-Flor with street kids in Brazil. There are all different kinds of travel.

FOR ME the relevant question is never why but when, followed closely by where.

You think about why you do something, maybe write that reason down, but then when you look at it a year later–or maybe 5 years later-at some point you’re going to change the way you feel about it. There was the “why” you did it then and the “why” you’d do it (or not do it) now.

Your answer to the question why is like a little bookmark of the way you thought and felt about something at a specific moment in your life. And in some ways this seems more important than the actual answer itself.

This is my thinking anyway after spending a while collecting various Matadorians’ answers to the question “Why do you travel?” Some of the answers seem ‘wise’ or ‘earnest’ but mainly they just make me stoked on the people who said them.

Beija-Flor

As the world is my home, I need to feel at home.

Mike Lynch

To keep away from home.

SweeneySays

Because I feel most at home when I am in motion.

Matt Scott

There just too much great stuff to see

Beer and Beans

To see the way light falls in other parts of the world.

Jess Vulcan

Because I don’t like owning silverware.

Nancy Harder

Because I truly believe that travel is art. We have the ability to create masterpieces with our experiences.

Sarah Menkedick

To avoid falling into patterns and only seeing the obvious things from an ingrained personal perspective.

A Literal Girl

To try to understand how we experience place.

Julie Schwietert

To know myself better and to know the world better.

Candice Walsh

To learn, to explore, to meet new people, to find what the hell I’m looking for.

Neha

To look for all those stories waiting to be found.

LeighShulman

It keeps me from taking things for granted.

Gregory Hubbs

To learn from other human beings and experience the world in new ways.

Lola Akinmade

To be a cultural ambassador as well as soak up the wisdom of other cultures.

Hal Amen

I’m not sure…but I can’t stop!

Community Connection

Why do you travel? Please share your answer with us in the comments below.

Internet map by The OPTE project

AFTER READING the following post by Marie, I started wondering how to visually represent what she was talking about.

Then I found (duh) there actually are people mapping the internet via IP address as well as other metrics which, to be honest, I don’t really want to even try to understand.

Marie wrote:

When I start reading a blog or a Tweet by someone I don’t know and then click on one of their contacts’ blogs or something else on their page, it seems I inevitably end up on the page of someone I know from Flickr, Twitter, my own blog readers, Matador, etc. How is that? Are we all getting our contacts from each others pages or is it just that the people you are friends with just have the same taste as you? I’d really like to see a drawing of the map I take when on the net and how it matches up with the map of others. Do they have that yet? I’m sure I’d be going round in circles and eventually passing through the circles of others.

–from Social Networking: How would it work in real life?

Marie goes on to describe a scenario wherein the virtual friending or unfriending of social media contacts plays out in the real world. You simply meet someone and instantly, effortlessly accept or reject them.

But what I loved more than anything about this post was the notion of just going around in circles, bumping into others, and the inherent tendency to form tribes (something Seth Godin would surely approve).

What speaks to me, what interests me about social media, microblogging, ambient awareness, location ‘independence’, accelerated culture (Does that term still apply? Does twitter make us ‘post-accelerated’ culture?) basically the entire amorphous realm of computer mediated communication, is that there really is no map, no precedent. Like Marie, I could use a drawing.

Community Connection

From the very beginning of Matador we’ve been stoked on the voices and exchange of ideas coming out of our community site. To make sure more of these ideas, photos, and blogs reach more people, we’ve begun pulling the best of the community blogs up into the Network sites. To participate, please join the Matador Community!