Raison d'être

"The unhappiest people I know these days are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves."
- Pico Iyer, The Global Soul

"All America is Disneyland."
- Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

During my week-plus hiatus from blogging, I've been mulling a few ideas I think might be interesting, but whenever I sit down and start typing, all that comes out are little blips about UPN's Veronica Mars, Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, and LucasArts' Star Wars Battlefront. I notice with some surprise that four out of my last five blog entries have been about movies.

Don't I have anything real to write about?

I have a few beers with my sister, the Anthropologist, who reminds me that, originally, this blog was going to be a form of travel writing. ("And travel writing is a form of ethnography," she says significantly—or maybe just drunkenly...)

I'm quick to point out—I'm a "travel" writer who doesn't like leaving his apartment. I don't take vacations. My favorite mode of travel is to relocate every two or three years.

* * *

Yesterday, I had this conversation with myself: "I need to go out. I need to go out. I need to go out." "I have nowhere to go."

What's so great about out? I have an impression that, no matter how much I get done at home, my day will be incomplete—will feel insufficient—if I don't leave the confines of my apartment. So I invent destinations for myself: I go to a café and order a coffee that I could just as well have made at home. I pay my $3, sit uncomfortably in a stiff wooden chair, feel some annoyance at the too-loud conversations around me, and go home. "There," I think. "Now I've had a full day."

I don't think this is particularly neurotic; I think it's a result of a false distinction we make between "real" experiences and virtual ones.

* * *

It seems only natural to assume there's a hierarchy that puts a trip to the stone beaches of Nice or the Buddhist temples of Cambodia on a higher tier than my forays to Veronica Mars' hometown of Neptune, to the "far, far away" planet of Coruscant.

If I believe this hierarchy in theory, I turn it upside down in practice, because, given the choice between actually traveling, and virtually traveling, I've mostly picked the latter. Add up what I've spent on movies, DVDs, and video games, and I could doubtless have seen those Cambodian temples by now, if I'd really wanted. And if this blog was meant to be a kind of travel writing, then I have to conclude, it's that kind: the virtual kind.

Not exactly a new idea: Rough Guide has been publishing travel books about the Internet for ten years now. Back then, this was a shocking idea—shocking and a propos—because it introduced the radical idea that the Internet was a distinct location, one where you could tour, visit, collect souvenirs.

Lately, I find the idea shocking—and incorrect—because it assumes that the Internet is a distinct location, when in fact, the Internet and its extended family of media-driven experiences are everywhere. The Rough Guide assumes that my experience of virtual things is a small set, distinct from my "real" experiences—when in fact, it is becoming a larger and more significant part of those real experiences. I'm hard-pressed to name an experience I could have which isn't mediated, packaged, marketed, purchased, and consumed. Rather than ask, "What is virtual," I'm left wondering, "What isn't?"

All America is Disneyland.

What's an Urban Sherpa to do? What's left, but these little "rough guides" to movies, videogames and television? The occasional restaurant review? This really is the stuff of life in the city...

* * *

The recently-released Xbox 360 boasts such genuinely impressive graphics that reviewers are describing the games as "photo-realistic." The True Crime series of games are set in Los Angeles and New York, on maps that have been built to mimic the real cities, down to the signage on the front of each convenience store. Google Earth offers its users "a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop: view exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more."

You see where I'm going with this, right?

* * *

Travel writing, and even traveling, have many of the same problematics as ethnography: they are based entirely on the biases and expectations of the traveler. They are representations, only. And because they claim to be something more (more "real"), they are in fact less—less honest. As Baudrillard said, the map has replaced the destination, and the destination has ceased to exist...