Postcard from Bishkek

Twitter is officially five years old.  The first tweet was sent out on 21st March, 2006.  The idea apparently grew out of SMS (Short message service) codes that people were sending each other on their mobile phones, and it is sometimes described as the internet SMS.

Subscribers are able to send short messages, no more than 140 characters long, which are relayed via the Twitter servers in the US to other users who “follow” the subscriber wherever they may be around the world.  The character limit is sometimes a hurdle to be overcome and so people develop codes and abbreviations to use in their messages.  Some overcome this limit by splitting what they want to say into five or six short sentences which are transmitted in quick succession.

At first, many people thought the content as “mundane musings on ordinary events” but it moved on a long way from its benign origins.  It’s become a real example of “Pandora’s box”.  Today, with more than 200 million users sharing something like 140 million tweets a day, it seems to have become a real force which people around the world are using for a variety of purposes: to keep friends and relatives informed about what one is doing, to garner support for a cause, to market goods or services, to pass comment on events, whilst all the maintaining a personal connection.

If the press reports are to be believed, political activists in various countries have apparently used it, and other examples of social media, to organize protests and even revolutions.

Amongst the people that I “follow” are a number of travel writers, and they have started an experiment, #ttot – Travel Talk on Twitter.  Each week they decide on a theme and then pose a series of questions on that theme inviting others to submit answers and hold an on-line conversation in real time.  Actually, in many ways it is more like “brainstorming” as the comments flood in, without comment but providing food for thought.

Today, for example, the theme was “non-tourist travel”.  How, I wondered to myself when it was announced, are we supposed to understand that topic?  I thought that we were probably in for the old semantic debate about the difference between a “tourist” and a “traveler”.  I was afraid that we would get a lot of comments which derided the concept of “tourist” whilst expounding the virtues of being a “traveler”.

I was right.  There were certainly questions and answers which “looked down” on the tourist, for example: Q.: What defines Non-tourist travel?, A.: Definitely not hopping on a tourist bus or taking a guided tour! or Q.: Describe your most shameless (or embarrassing) touristy moment, A.: stayed in a package hotel for complete 7 days in Egypt! (First & last time!)

Many of the comments espoused the virtues of mingling with the locals, being treated like one of them, being treated as one of them.  Being asked for directions, for example, and being able to answer.

Now, I know that I run a tour company, so I must be biased, but there are several aspects of this discussion that I found worrying or disturbing.  It wasn’t just the arrogance of some of the comments, (but by no means all of them, indeed there was a lot of valuable food for thought contained in many of the over 500 offerings, even in those that I found made me feel uncomfortable).

One of the first things that I noticed, (maybe because, as I said, I was expecting it if not actually looking for it), was the belittling of the “tourist experience”.

I agree that many people, if not most, would benefit and gain much more from their trip if they had the opportunity to “get off the beaten track” and “mingle with the locals” but there are “horses for courses”.  Not everyone wants to be, has the inclination to be, or the possibility to be a “traveler” and not everyone wants to be taken for a “local”.

It seemed to me that many people overlooked, forgot or simply ignored the fact that we are all tourists, even those people who prefer to be called “travelers”, when they travel away from home.  The standard legal definition of a tourist, for example, has nothing to do with being on an organized tour, either in their home country or abroad.  Rather, it is someone who spends time, (at least one night), away from home.

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For anyone who is interested, TTOT takes place every Tuesday at 9:30am and 9:30pm GMT.

Tags: Expat, internet, Social_Media, Tourism