The bottles of apricot schnapps are pretty, but they wouldn't have trumped the palaces, the white horses, the blue Danube, the monuments of Vienna, as subjects for a photograph in 1972. You didn't waste film, and you brought back the picturesque European stuff. Now, by what would surely seem like magic to the 1972 version of me, my camera takes unlimited numbers of clear photographs, and anything famous has thousands of searchable images on the web. I find myself photographing anything that interests me, as a kind of record of my interest, and emphasising ephemera: posters, graffiti, things in cars, juxtapositions. Casual photography has become, quite recently, a new activity.
Similar, quite recent, changes have changed most of the constraints of travel in 1972:
*I can talk to my friends and family for free, anytime they're awake. In 1972, I never called home. It was too expensive and too intimidating. I got cold just thinking of the electrons passing through that long cable.
*Anything I know the name of, I can find, or find out about. If it's a place, I can get there. If it's a name, I can find the Wikipedia article. If it's an idiom, somebody's done a discussion of it.
*The Vienna subway is finished and integrated with busses, streetcars and trains. No place within a city of a million people is very far away, and the fares are cheap enough that one just doesn't worry about them. The mapping technology is so good that, even without a constantly working smartphone, I can get where-ever I want to go.
*With a Kindle, I can bring all the books I need, without adding more than the weight of electrons.
*Local media - television and radio - are available streaming for free, in some version. That means that I can learn to understand the spoken language faster and that I can keep up with the minutiae of life in the city for years after I return home.
*I can work from any place I am living. I don't need an office or a desk or an assistant.
All of this was unthinkable in 1972. I could say something now about how this is a sort of mixed blessing, and it probably is, since most blessings are mixed, but I can't think seriously of a downside to these developments, for my preferred kind of travel. Rick Steves, in his excellent advice to travellers, is concerned to help them get into casual, comfortable relationships with local people and to show them the country beyond the stereotypes. What the new developments mean, for me, is that, on an extended visit, I can go beyond that admirable ideal, can understand enough of where I am to have serious conversations and engage in persistent inquiries -- following up on the hints that are around me about what might be going on. This just wasn't possible before.
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