Before the Phones Told Us Where to Go
“Before the phones told us where to go” - a line from John K. Samson’s “Oldest Oak at Brookside” (Winter Wheat, 2016) is a line I often ponder while roaming countless city blocks attempting to stop time in rectangular fashion. As the line repeats in my head while I snap the shutter release, I also ponder the following questions: Is life better now that we are constantly connected and no longer have to Magellan our way around the world? What role, if any, does photography play in navigation? I attempt to answer these questions and more in this short-ish essay.
So what exactly was life like before following the blue dot on Google Maps? Well, maybe it was not that much different. Perhaps the better question is what was navigation like before the internet? Or before maps even? Just how did the Polynesians discover the Hawaiian islands anyway? Luck? The stars? A bit of both? I do not have the resources to answer those questions at the moment, so will stick to a brief story of the Hostel Treasure Map, a term coined in the Fall of 2009 while backpacking around Japan and Korea.
I was in Kyoto in the autumn of 2009, solo traveling with a North Face slingshot backpack that fit everything including a mini-laptop (barely; bursting at the seams, but it worked). I had a hostel booked, was wide-eyed, and thrilled to be back in Japan after a five day mini-adventure in Korea. On the bullet train from Hiroshima, I glanced at my printed out directions and they read something along the lines of:
“Take the north exit from JR Kyoto Station and hop on the No. 12 bus. Ride that bus for roughly 20 minutes in a counter-clockwise direction. After about 20 minutes, get off the bus and walk north for 10 minutes. The hostel will be on your left.”
Huh!? All the best finding that hostel. I ended up not following those directions as I arrived at Kyoto station later than expected. The hostel’s website stated that you could not check in past 8pm, which at the time made absolutely no sense. I did not have access to the internet on the fly to confirm such potential rumours. Thus, I hopped in a taxi and with my completely elementary Japanese somehow communicated to the driver to take me to said hostel. Point being: somehow I survived and relied on other navigation/survival skills to traverse around the globe before the phones told us where to go. And perhaps it was all a little more adventurous.
In pre-smartphone era Japan, I would take photographs of key intersections on my deck-of-card-sized point-and-shoot so I could retrace my steps back to the hostel. This often worked quite well and also gave me some decent photographs to sift through at the end of the travels. But, not now! What are we doing now to navigate unchartered territory? Of course, you know the answer. Our phones are telling us where to go, which is all well and fine, incredibly convenient, and comforting, especially in places where we may not speak the language. Additionally, I have been able to get to many places with minimal effort because of this 5g-connected rectangle in my pocket. So much now that I rarely think twice before leaving the house of how to get to where I am going. A safety blanket for the ages.
So is life better now that we are constantly connected? A brief saunter around Shinsaibashi and Amemura in Osaka recently had me thinking perhaps not always. I could not help but notice many tourists with a phone in hand, likely following the blue dot from destination to destination. And this is nothing new, but it got me thinking that it may be kind of fun to leave the house again someday without the connectivity and just simply go with the flow.
