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

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

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

Author Bio

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