Technology
Everyone can share experience with GPS navigators.
It's something I find happening more and more often. In the 25 years I've been a travel writer, the information revolution has changed everything. Once, we visited travel agents, bought paper maps, consulted destination guides. Now, all of those needs can be taken care of by a few flicks of a finger across a phone's touch screen. Because information is so cheap, we don't need to pay much attention to it. We can browse around the world the way we browse around the web.
Pilots have a word for the state of presence in the world around you; they call it situational awareness.
"Keep your eyes out of the cockpit,"
my flight instructor always used to tell me. Meaning: Look at the world around you. Don't get fixated on what your instruments are telling you. Understand the context of what you're seeing. Situational awareness means understanding where things are in relation to one another. It means knowing what's going on, and what you can do when your plans start to unravel.
In travel, as in so many other areas of life, information technology is a two-edged sword. It both empowers and cripples. It convinces us that we don't need to worry about background, about context, about details. It seduces us into overlooking the difference between knowing and understanding, between information and knowledge.
Jeff Wise
Psychology Today
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