Tim Leffel's Cheapest Destinations

Social Media vs. Electronic Leash

Does staying connected while traveling mean a self-inflicted leash law?

I am currently in the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, on a cushy writing assignment. I won’t be tweeting about my room or dinner there, or sending photos from my cell phone, or updating a Facebook page with a shot of me in front of an arch you’ve seen a hundred times already. Most of my Internet time at night will just be spent checking for emergency messages before heading to the bar to talk with real flesh and blood people or taking a reflective walk on the beach.

I do have a twitter account, so go follow me if you are so inclined. But don’t expect many updates. I mainly joined it to keep someone else from getting my name. Every time I log onto there I get the kind of dissonant feeling I do when two radios are playing at once or my relatives are all talking at the same time during a family gathering. As a writer, the platform is akin to a painter working on a postage-stamp-sized piece of cardboard or a concert violinist trying to play Bach on a toy store violin with three strings. Lots of noise, not much music. A marketer’s dream, I’ll admit, so it has corporations salivating. But I’m not the ceaseless flogging type and I don’t really care what anyone is doing at this particular hour except maybe my wife or daughter. So I’d like it even better if you subscribe to the blog.

The media loves twitter though because they love a good trend story and if 5% of the population is using something, that’s enough to make it worth talking to death—especially when that 5% is the chattiest and most vocal part of the population. Right now I’m looking at queries from a media matching service that has posted these interview requests in one day: twittering in church, twittering on vacation, twitter in meetings, “Are you addicted to twitter?” and my favorite, “Twitter ruining your marriage?” Substitute drugs, sex, or alcohol and we’ve seen this movie before. Next up will be The Guy Kawasaki Twitter Rehab Clinic.

I don’t have a Facebook account at all, so I guess like Chris Guillebeau I have mastered the art of non-conformity. I already have contact information for every high school and college friend I really care about. If the rest are too lazy to do a Google search (where my phone number and e-mail address are easily found) to look me up, then I don’t want to be their fake friend anyway.

If you’re a business associate that wants to find me, I’m on LinkedIn. That doesn’t require any of my time for upkeep and it’s all people that I truly know already, so I like it. Nobody pokes me, writes on my wall, or posts old drunk party pictures that should be kept private. Biz life and family life stay separate.

For me personally the most relevant question for social media is, “What am I going to give up in order to make time for this?” Unless you’re exchanging social media networks time for TV time (a net gain in most cases), why put even more demands on your rare enough leisure hours? Why create a situation where you have to keep feeding a virtual pet to keep it alive?

As ProBlogger Darren Rowse said on a recent post about time spent on all these web 2.0 sites, “It’s easy to get to the end of the day and wonder what it was that we really achieved.” Then the problem is, the “end of the day” never comes until you go to sleep. For a lot of type-A people, the leash is always connected.

My real worry though is the number of travelers who are increasingly the amount of time spent interfacing with their electronic devices instead of experiencing the what and the who around them. Rolf Potts already took the heat from the fanatics when he suggested that all the electronic tethering gets in your way if you really want to be a perceptive traveler, so I won’t belabor his points.

But as someone who travels both ways regularly, plugged and unplugged, I know for sure you have a richer travel experience when you let disconnect for a few days or more. Travelers by nature must give up something in order to spend that time with the electronic leash. They often give up quiet wandering, aimless walking, reading a good book in a quiet hammock, observing the daily street life scene from a cafe. They stop stumbling into random neighborhoods to find a restaurant unknown by anyone who is twittering, and connecting face-to-face with locals on their non-electronic level.

It has become almost a cliché to see three or four people sitting at a table together in Buenos Aires or Prague with food or drinks or coffee in front of them, all thumbing away on their Blackberry or iPhone and not saying a word to each other. Or you’ll see people pulling out their phone to send inane tweets from a place that should be treated with reverence and awe. “At the top of Temple of the Sun. Awesome view. How cool!” Gee, the world is such a better place since you shared that.

I’ll leave this with a quote from someone much smarter than me, the new CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz. “Once in a while, just put down that new gadget and schedule some human time. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

[I don't know who to credit for the hilarious illustration above as it is all over the web with no source listed, but I originally found it on this religious blog post, Breaking free of our gadgets for lent.]

Related posts:

1. I’m Changing My Tune on Traveling with Laptops
2. Public Leisure and Valuing Free Time
3. More Reasons to Drop it All and Move Abroad