The Guidebook Experiment: Discovering Exploration in a Hyper-Connected World

by David Bockino

Overview

Our modern day, multimedia, information-obsessed culture has fundamentally altered much of what we do day-to-day. The way we shop and pay bills. The way we communicate. The way we research, study, and learn.

In the realm of travel we have more tools than ever telling us where to go, how to get there, what it will look like, what to do, and why we should go in the first place. This proliferation of constantly updated data has changed the way we go about our journeys. But how?

By tracing the evolution of the guidebook from pilgrim manuals and Baedeker’s books to Yelp reviews and Google Maps, David Bockino explores the effects this information growth has had on the state of travel and adventure. Inspired by some of the world’s greatest explorers, he sets out guidebook-less to a destination he knows little about, launching an experiment to determine just how the guidebook and its digital descendants have transformed the nature of travel.

The Guidebook Experiment is a call-to-action to conduct our own guidebook experiments, to disconnect from the ceaseless barrage of information in modern life and explore an unknown neighborhood or unfamiliar country and discover the joy of travel on our own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609520922
Publisher:	Travelers' Tales Guides, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/22/2015
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.13(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Bockino is a faculty member in the School of Communications at Elon Universityin Elon, NC. He was born and raised in New York and currently lives in Durham, NC with his wife and son.

Read an Excerpt

Day 6 — Georgetown, Guyana: It’s karaoke night at the Sleep-In International, an irritating (and unavoidable) epilogue to the events of the past few hours. After my visit to the police station, I had used one of the hotel’s calling cards to call my wife. I said I had been defeated – I had no money, no credit cards, no idea where to go for help — and was ready to abandon the experiment. But she convinced me to stay, to march on through this methodological hiccup, and so here I am, in my hotel room, penniless, listening to the grating melodies of 1980s American pop ballads.

* * *

The purpose of my trip to the Guianas, a journey I had ceremoniously designated the “guidebook experiment,” had been to determine how the recent proliferation of guidebook-related material – how the explosion of travel blogs and restaurant reviews and backpacking message boards and digital mapping applications on top of the already vast library of print-related guides to nearly every city, region, and country on the planet — had changed the way we see the world. That was how I ended up trapped one night in a hotel in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, with a black eye and barely a dollar to my name, listening to middle-aged men serenade their female companions with the unmistakable passion of forlorn American rock ’n’ roll musicians. My presence in that hotel at that very moment seemed to embody, in all its pathetic glory, the results of my experiment.

But I must back up; no proper experiment begins with its findings. Most, instead, begin with an introduction – an explanation of the experiment’s purpose, a justification of its design, and a description of its participants. And so before I explain how I endured and eventually escaped my karaoke purgatory, I must first explain how I ended up there in the first place. That particular story begins not in Guyana but in Montana, on the trail of two of the most famous guidebook-less travelers of all time. It was there that the guidebook experiment was launched.

Table of Contents

PART 1: THE GUIDEBOOK EVOLUTION

CHAPTER 1: THE GUIDEBOOK EVOLUTION

CHAPTER 2: EXPLORING NEW YORK CITY

CHAPTER 3: THE HISTORY OF THE PROFESSIONAL GUIDEBOOK

CHAPTER 4: THE HISTORY OF THE AMATEUR GUIDEBOOK

CHAPTER 5: GUIDEBOOK BACKLASH

PART 2: THE GUIDEBOOK EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 6: WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

CHAPTER 7: MOVING ON

CHAPTER 8: THE ART OF NEGOTIATION

CHAPTER 9: HOSTILITY AND HOSPITALITY

CHAPTER 10: TETHERED INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER 11: DESCRIBING THE INDESCRIBABLE

PART 3: THE GUIDEBOOK EFFECT

CHAPTER 12: THE RESULTS

NOTES AND SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editorial Reviews

"Bockino empowers the reader to go skinny dipping in the unknown—I dare you to read it and stay put."
—Peter Wortsman, author of Ghost Dance in Berlin and Cold Earth Wanderers

From the Publisher