I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here.
Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective.
However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you. This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignness of another place, the language, the customs - the sheer strangeness of it to you. How you react to it, or manage it, or negotiate it are lessons worth learning. That's the education.
It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go.
Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public speaks English. Now traveling to another country is how traveling to another city was 60 years ago.
Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter where you go, but you typically have to put in the effort.
The person reading Wikipedia and the person who visited the place are both beaten by the person who read Wikipedia and then visited the place. Reading about a place can point you to unique experiences that you would otherwise have missed.
A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.
Or you visit and then read the Wikipeida article. I mean even better as a double-decker wikipedia sandwich, but good as long as you read it.
I spent my last 3 hours in Hungary reading about the 1957 revolution [1]. The whole city was out celebrating the anniversary with funny-looking flags. I felt like an ass for not knowing about it before, but I learned.
The author is right that you don't magically become cultured by traveling. But you also don't become a Shakespeare expert by reading all his plays. That doesn't mean you should read the Shakespeare Wikipedia article instead.
In a world full of people who read Wikipedia first and, generalizing some, actively look for other people's opinions via online reviews and reading up about the history of a place before visiting, I feel that the more unique experience overall be to show up and actively experience the place on your own outside the opinions of others.
I've traveled a fair amount now, and I think there's value to showing up someplace and letting it show you what you should know and experience, rather than letting the internet intercede between you and the world around you. I would add a fourth category, the person who shows up and finds something cool enough by walking around that they feel compelled to then read Wikipedia about it. For me, it would beat out the other three you posit, but that's a matter of taste I think.
The author completely misses what travel is for.
Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_.
You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.
Many people do not invest that much into researching a location (or museum and it's art), before they visit them. Even afterwards they probably still won't invest much more. They just go there with a bare minimum of knowledge, often even less, and then call themself educated enough. Experience is not education, it has little value on itself for understanding something.
> To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.
Was this written by some AI or LLM because what kind of logic is that? Someone who travels vs. who reads? Is that an even worthy experiment? No..
Interestingly enough, I've been to Turkey twice. I know the taste of the food, the gentleness of the people, their hospitality. I got a haircut both times - I lived their style. I had lunch with some of them. I sat and listened to them talk. I toured their houses and walked their streets.
I know a couple of interesting facts about Turkey, but I know things that I can't describe in a Wikipedia article, too.
10/10 would recommend a trip to Turkey
At risk of offend that genuinely reads like a post by someone who has never left their home country.
Wikipedia and streetview is in no shape or form comparable to experiencing something first hand.
Nor is the assumption that people do one or the other correct. Ideally you first do the online research to plan travel and then go.
I agree.
To be honest, this kind of justification (TFA) is often written by people who don't enjoy travelling. I have a family member like this, they claim they don't need to go abroad (or anywhere outside their city, really) because "everything is there in Google and Wikipedia".
I find it very sad.
I'll give you one example -- Bali, Indonesia.
If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.
Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.
Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.
Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.
I grew up in a tourism economy. I have traveled to half a dozen countries.
I side with the author. Viewing consumer travel for entertainment only makes you more learned if you care to observe and think critically, which most do not do as that detracts from the indulgent entertainment aspect of it and even then it's very limited.
The nit picks of the offended peanut gallery here are very much valid, you won't learn everything from wikipedia and street view either, but they don't invalidate the broader point that galavanting about as a tourist doesn't really teach you squat. It's a luxury. The .03% "education" component doesn't really change that.
I can’t think of a country I’ve visited where my preconceptions gathered from the sources the author mentions haven’t been turned on their head.
I'm born and raised in the midwest of the USA. I've watched UK shows since the 80s when PBS would run Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances, and other UK shows. I've never read a history devoted to London or the UK but I know the basics.
This summer I visited London for the first time and there were so many things I either had no idea about or knew in the abstract but experiencing it first hand was very different.
When I went to London, I went to the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Tate, the Tower of London, ...
You can also say "reading comic books is not education".
Most people who travel just go to unfamiliar restaurants and unfamiliar shops. I imagine that a LOT of HN people do not fall into this trend, but for most people travel seems to be more about a feeling of novelty and adventure than it is really about specifically learning about the locale you're visiting.
I get the author's point, but it's a bit "light". I enjoyed this article which truly helped me to see other perspective: "The Case Against Travel" which cites great philosophers and writers https://archive.is/OCBJf
I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.
It's like saying that just reading about s*x is better than actually doin it.
You may claim, but it is not true.
That would be an interesting point, if it was.
It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.
Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.
Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.
I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.
> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.
Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.
But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.
Total touch grass moment.
There's more to education than just trivia and there's more to travel than just learning about the place you're in.
The only way to learn about the human condition is by meeting other humans.
Meeting someone from a vastly different culture from you and finding similarities is far more education than simply reading about how they are different.
Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of its history can only enrich the book knowledge of a place.
Sounds like this person could use some travel to teach them about empathy and patience for others their books don't seem to be sufficient.
[deleted]
Vaguely reminds me of Mary's Room ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument ). You can learn a lot from going somewhere and experiencing it that you just can't from Wikipedia. Obviously there is a lot you will learn from reading that you won't get from travel too, but that stuff isn't necessarily better.
Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel.
It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.
Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.
I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.
Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...
One of my favorite things about a recent trip to Japan was just watching people go about their daily lives.
We stayed in a home and it was fascinating how differently the homes are designed and function.
There is no substitute for experiencing a place.
Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.
The trivia approach doesn't even work for most people - ask the wikipedia reader and the person who travelled to Turkey about it a year later and see who has actually retained some knowledge.
Indeed perhaps the most valuable lesson from travel is returning with the realization of just how poorly the generalizations and statistics describe the messy reality of a place. Everywhere has every sort of person
It is not even remotely close making a comparison between reading an article on Wikipedia and visiting a country for 10 days.
This is like reading somebody's linkedin vs working with them for a month.
BTW the value gained from travel is dropping with every new country. The single biggest lesson is just noticing everything you assumed is obvious and natural that is actually just accidental and specific to your country. Especially Americans would benefit from it.
New hype unblocked: Tourism is a bad thing
having just returned from a trip to asia and australia, i can confidently say that the basic premise of this article is mistaken. reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country. the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you. is this satire? is this written by a bed bound agoraphobic? dont be silly. education is more than reciting the after effects of chinese rule on a small nation, its more than knowing dates of revolutions and the current form of government. education is context and perspective, macro to micro, the where and why and how. if education is wikipedia then philosophy is dirty limericks and science is air fryers.
All true, but most "travel" is staying a week or so as a tourist in some location, and it is true that what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong). You probably can learn more deep truths about a country and culture from reading on the internet, unless you are really making an effort to properly integrate in some way, likely for a minimum of many months. But, then, this is usually not what is meant by "travel".
> most "travel" is staying a week or so
Most reading is probably crap, too.
> what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong)
Someone can learn the wrong history of a dish while still being educated by it. Broadly speaking, I’m sceptical of new experiences not yielding education outside the irredeemably incurious.
You do realise many of us read ”on the internet” (or preferably study literature, history, art and the language) of places we visit? These two in no way cancel each other out.
I have been on a work trips to places I really did not quite know the culture, history, or the language of, nor did I care enough to learn about them. These trips are always boring, even without the work stuff. Mass-turism is similar and most beautiful artistic achievements are just tedious extension of yet more of Disneyland forever.
I spoke a bit of Japanese when I travelled to Tokyo over 10 years ago, before the current tourist boom. I had known the history and culture for years from reading about it and studying martial arts since I was a child. I was an art student when I went to Rome, Firenze, Venice, Napoli. I could read a comic book in French when I first went to Paris, knowing of course the art historical perspective to it, but wanted to understand the culture, the feel, match it with my reading of the history.
So there’s travel and there’s travel. You can travel to your own back garden and find immense treasures, after a bit or research. Or you can go to other side of the planet and find nothing at all.
Nothing about my post said nor implied the two things were at odds or that there aren't people that do both. In fact, based on everything you are saying, I can't really find anything to disagree with at all.
> So there’s travel and there’s travel.
Indeed. If travel = tourism, then I agree most travel (as tourism) is superficial gives mostly trivial knowledge about a culture. If travel is "living / working abroad" or "an exchange", than, obviously it is not so trivial. And indeed, even a week as a tourist can be rich if you've read deeply on some specific aspect of the country, and that is the focus of your tourism.
I would still guess that over 90% of travel (at least among younger generations) is just shallow tourism, and people most vocal about the benefits of travel are generally just tourists pretending their shallow tourism is something more. This is the sentiment I think animates this kind of blog post / article.
EDIT: And also there is nothing wrong with liking fundamentally superficial and/or simple things. I enjoy trashy fast food and SPAM from time to time despite also happily spending many days and hours carefully preparing gourmet meals. But I don't ever pretend that enjoying SPAM is some elevated fine taste. Those who enjoy shallow tourism just have an annoying tendency to try to pretend that their "travel" somehow makes them better and/or sophisticated in some way, but, it simply does not, in the vast majority of cases.
i think it goes back to a deeper root premise about the human experience. maybe thats where i go a-kilter. it seems common these days for people to travel and then take instagram pictures and make posts about their experience going to michelin starred places. perhaps they are looking at their phones much of the time or documenting their travel for an audience that isnt themself. then, sure, you may as well read articles about it. youre missing the whole point anyway, and youre also missing life at home even if you arent traveling.
Instagram is of course full of those people, and in certain hyped or especially "instagrammable" places these people are common. But by and large these people seem like a tiny minority when traveling.
> reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country.
That's not the premise of the article, it's just an example. The premise is that knowledge depends on the source of information and it's quality, and travelling is usually a rather poor source on it's own.
> the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you.
So what history did you learn from the smells? What did you learn about the problems and philosophy of the people? This reads more like a delussion. Travelling a locations and talking to people is valuable, but this is mainly experience, not education. What you collect is the public picture of a place and their people, not the private parts they only talk about to people they really trust. Unless you live for some decades at a place, you will not be able to learn and understand the things you can gain from a well written article explaing something and it's history. Personal experience is a lousy educator, because its lacking on so many neccesary details.
I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here.
Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective.
However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you. This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignness of another place, the language, the customs - the sheer strangeness of it to you. How you react to it, or manage it, or negotiate it are lessons worth learning. That's the education.
It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go. Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public speaks English. Now traveling to another country is how traveling to another city was 60 years ago.
Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter where you go, but you typically have to put in the effort.
The person reading Wikipedia and the person who visited the place are both beaten by the person who read Wikipedia and then visited the place. Reading about a place can point you to unique experiences that you would otherwise have missed.
A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.
Or you visit and then read the Wikipeida article. I mean even better as a double-decker wikipedia sandwich, but good as long as you read it.
I spent my last 3 hours in Hungary reading about the 1957 revolution [1]. The whole city was out celebrating the anniversary with funny-looking flags. I felt like an ass for not knowing about it before, but I learned.
The author is right that you don't magically become cultured by traveling. But you also don't become a Shakespeare expert by reading all his plays. That doesn't mean you should read the Shakespeare Wikipedia article instead.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956
In a world full of people who read Wikipedia first and, generalizing some, actively look for other people's opinions via online reviews and reading up about the history of a place before visiting, I feel that the more unique experience overall be to show up and actively experience the place on your own outside the opinions of others.
I've traveled a fair amount now, and I think there's value to showing up someplace and letting it show you what you should know and experience, rather than letting the internet intercede between you and the world around you. I would add a fourth category, the person who shows up and finds something cool enough by walking around that they feel compelled to then read Wikipedia about it. For me, it would beat out the other three you posit, but that's a matter of taste I think.
The author completely misses what travel is for. Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_. You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.
Many people do not invest that much into researching a location (or museum and it's art), before they visit them. Even afterwards they probably still won't invest much more. They just go there with a bare minimum of knowledge, often even less, and then call themself educated enough. Experience is not education, it has little value on itself for understanding something.
> To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.
Was this written by some AI or LLM because what kind of logic is that? Someone who travels vs. who reads? Is that an even worthy experiment? No..
Interestingly enough, I've been to Turkey twice. I know the taste of the food, the gentleness of the people, their hospitality. I got a haircut both times - I lived their style. I had lunch with some of them. I sat and listened to them talk. I toured their houses and walked their streets.
I know a couple of interesting facts about Turkey, but I know things that I can't describe in a Wikipedia article, too.
10/10 would recommend a trip to Turkey
At risk of offend that genuinely reads like a post by someone who has never left their home country.
Wikipedia and streetview is in no shape or form comparable to experiencing something first hand.
Nor is the assumption that people do one or the other correct. Ideally you first do the online research to plan travel and then go.
I agree.
To be honest, this kind of justification (TFA) is often written by people who don't enjoy travelling. I have a family member like this, they claim they don't need to go abroad (or anywhere outside their city, really) because "everything is there in Google and Wikipedia".
I find it very sad.
I'll give you one example -- Bali, Indonesia.
If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.
Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.
Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.
Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.
I grew up in a tourism economy. I have traveled to half a dozen countries.
I side with the author. Viewing consumer travel for entertainment only makes you more learned if you care to observe and think critically, which most do not do as that detracts from the indulgent entertainment aspect of it and even then it's very limited.
The nit picks of the offended peanut gallery here are very much valid, you won't learn everything from wikipedia and street view either, but they don't invalidate the broader point that galavanting about as a tourist doesn't really teach you squat. It's a luxury. The .03% "education" component doesn't really change that.
I can’t think of a country I’ve visited where my preconceptions gathered from the sources the author mentions haven’t been turned on their head.
I'm born and raised in the midwest of the USA. I've watched UK shows since the 80s when PBS would run Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances, and other UK shows. I've never read a history devoted to London or the UK but I know the basics. This summer I visited London for the first time and there were so many things I either had no idea about or knew in the abstract but experiencing it first hand was very different.
When I went to London, I went to the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Tate, the Tower of London, ...
You can also say "reading comic books is not education".
Most people who travel just go to unfamiliar restaurants and unfamiliar shops. I imagine that a LOT of HN people do not fall into this trend, but for most people travel seems to be more about a feeling of novelty and adventure than it is really about specifically learning about the locale you're visiting.
I get the author's point, but it's a bit "light". I enjoyed this article which truly helped me to see other perspective: "The Case Against Travel" which cites great philosophers and writers https://archive.is/OCBJf
I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.
It's like saying that just reading about s*x is better than actually doin it.
You may claim, but it is not true.
That would be an interesting point, if it was.
It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.
Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.
Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.
I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.
> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.
Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.
But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.
Total touch grass moment.
There's more to education than just trivia and there's more to travel than just learning about the place you're in.
The only way to learn about the human condition is by meeting other humans.
Meeting someone from a vastly different culture from you and finding similarities is far more education than simply reading about how they are different.
Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of its history can only enrich the book knowledge of a place.
Sounds like this person could use some travel to teach them about empathy and patience for others their books don't seem to be sufficient.
Vaguely reminds me of Mary's Room ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument ). You can learn a lot from going somewhere and experiencing it that you just can't from Wikipedia. Obviously there is a lot you will learn from reading that you won't get from travel too, but that stuff isn't necessarily better.
Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel.
It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.
Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.
I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.
Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...
One of my favorite things about a recent trip to Japan was just watching people go about their daily lives.
We stayed in a home and it was fascinating how differently the homes are designed and function.
There is no substitute for experiencing a place.
Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.
The trivia approach doesn't even work for most people - ask the wikipedia reader and the person who travelled to Turkey about it a year later and see who has actually retained some knowledge.
Indeed perhaps the most valuable lesson from travel is returning with the realization of just how poorly the generalizations and statistics describe the messy reality of a place. Everywhere has every sort of person
It is not even remotely close making a comparison between reading an article on Wikipedia and visiting a country for 10 days.
This is like reading somebody's linkedin vs working with them for a month.
BTW the value gained from travel is dropping with every new country. The single biggest lesson is just noticing everything you assumed is obvious and natural that is actually just accidental and specific to your country. Especially Americans would benefit from it.
New hype unblocked: Tourism is a bad thing
having just returned from a trip to asia and australia, i can confidently say that the basic premise of this article is mistaken. reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country. the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you. is this satire? is this written by a bed bound agoraphobic? dont be silly. education is more than reciting the after effects of chinese rule on a small nation, its more than knowing dates of revolutions and the current form of government. education is context and perspective, macro to micro, the where and why and how. if education is wikipedia then philosophy is dirty limericks and science is air fryers.
All true, but most "travel" is staying a week or so as a tourist in some location, and it is true that what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong). You probably can learn more deep truths about a country and culture from reading on the internet, unless you are really making an effort to properly integrate in some way, likely for a minimum of many months. But, then, this is usually not what is meant by "travel".
> most "travel" is staying a week or so
Most reading is probably crap, too.
> what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong)
Someone can learn the wrong history of a dish while still being educated by it. Broadly speaking, I’m sceptical of new experiences not yielding education outside the irredeemably incurious.
You do realise many of us read ”on the internet” (or preferably study literature, history, art and the language) of places we visit? These two in no way cancel each other out.
I have been on a work trips to places I really did not quite know the culture, history, or the language of, nor did I care enough to learn about them. These trips are always boring, even without the work stuff. Mass-turism is similar and most beautiful artistic achievements are just tedious extension of yet more of Disneyland forever.
I spoke a bit of Japanese when I travelled to Tokyo over 10 years ago, before the current tourist boom. I had known the history and culture for years from reading about it and studying martial arts since I was a child. I was an art student when I went to Rome, Firenze, Venice, Napoli. I could read a comic book in French when I first went to Paris, knowing of course the art historical perspective to it, but wanted to understand the culture, the feel, match it with my reading of the history.
So there’s travel and there’s travel. You can travel to your own back garden and find immense treasures, after a bit or research. Or you can go to other side of the planet and find nothing at all.
Nothing about my post said nor implied the two things were at odds or that there aren't people that do both. In fact, based on everything you are saying, I can't really find anything to disagree with at all.
> So there’s travel and there’s travel.
Indeed. If travel = tourism, then I agree most travel (as tourism) is superficial gives mostly trivial knowledge about a culture. If travel is "living / working abroad" or "an exchange", than, obviously it is not so trivial. And indeed, even a week as a tourist can be rich if you've read deeply on some specific aspect of the country, and that is the focus of your tourism.
I would still guess that over 90% of travel (at least among younger generations) is just shallow tourism, and people most vocal about the benefits of travel are generally just tourists pretending their shallow tourism is something more. This is the sentiment I think animates this kind of blog post / article.
EDIT: And also there is nothing wrong with liking fundamentally superficial and/or simple things. I enjoy trashy fast food and SPAM from time to time despite also happily spending many days and hours carefully preparing gourmet meals. But I don't ever pretend that enjoying SPAM is some elevated fine taste. Those who enjoy shallow tourism just have an annoying tendency to try to pretend that their "travel" somehow makes them better and/or sophisticated in some way, but, it simply does not, in the vast majority of cases.
i think it goes back to a deeper root premise about the human experience. maybe thats where i go a-kilter. it seems common these days for people to travel and then take instagram pictures and make posts about their experience going to michelin starred places. perhaps they are looking at their phones much of the time or documenting their travel for an audience that isnt themself. then, sure, you may as well read articles about it. youre missing the whole point anyway, and youre also missing life at home even if you arent traveling.
Instagram is of course full of those people, and in certain hyped or especially "instagrammable" places these people are common. But by and large these people seem like a tiny minority when traveling.
> reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country.
That's not the premise of the article, it's just an example. The premise is that knowledge depends on the source of information and it's quality, and travelling is usually a rather poor source on it's own.
> the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you.
So what history did you learn from the smells? What did you learn about the problems and philosophy of the people? This reads more like a delussion. Travelling a locations and talking to people is valuable, but this is mainly experience, not education. What you collect is the public picture of a place and their people, not the private parts they only talk about to people they really trust. Unless you live for some decades at a place, you will not be able to learn and understand the things you can gain from a well written article explaing something and it's history. Personal experience is a lousy educator, because its lacking on so many neccesary details.
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