Last year I went to Sri Lanka for a short visit. It was the first time I had been travelling by myself since I went to Laos in 2008.
When I was much younger, I went backpacking in India and I used to hitchhike quite a lot around Europe. I would go off, and be out of contact until I got back, a few weeks or months later – apart from the odd postcard or letter.
These days, social and mobile media have changed things a lot, and it’s much less common to be separated from your family and friends – even when you are on another continent.
I did a lecture about this last year, in a class about social media literacies. Part of the point of the class was to experience different presentation platforms (as a way of thinking about affordances and modalities), and I prepared a presentation using a timeline format, on line.do.
Click below to have a look.
This lecture was much influenced by The Social Affordances of Flashpacking: Exploring the Mobility Nexus of Travel and Communication (Germann Molz & Paris 2013)
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