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.
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.
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
You can try and explain the tradeoffs being made, but it seems mere words and video can't paint the picture. They have to experience it for themselves before they can truly understand, and consequently make sensible a judgement about whether they might like the lifestyle, or not.
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.
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.
If they don't like to travel I put them in the same category as people who don't like fancy coffee, playing sports, wine, video games, or science. I like a lot of those things but not everyone needs to [although I really wish more people understood science]. All these things cost resources and so far resources aren't infinite.
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.
Sure, Premier League branded football shirts turn up in the unlikeliest of places and it turns out that actually people don't wear what the internet says is their national dress all that much - that's one of the first things you learn when you travel - but there's plenty that's different, even if you can only communicate with the English speakers.
even for very central cities. LA is very different from Paris which is very different from Tokyo.
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..
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
With this mindset, seeing a photo on the internet and seeing the real thing with your eyes, after a walk to the location, is "the same". You've seen the thing, you can mark it in your checklist. Google, Wikipedia, and the real physical experience are all the same, you've "gained" the same. Reading about a sports match in Wikipedia is the same as having experienced it live, petting a dog is the same as looking at a photo of a dog, etc.
The author protests this is not what they mean, but ultimately, it seems that's exactly what they mean.
I couldn't disagree more with this mindset.
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 technically perfectly 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.
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.
They only need to take away the internet, because the opportunity to travel never existed in the first place. And it's not as if, upon returning from your cultural experiences out west, your banking app isn't searched at the border for treacherous transactions. Physical travel is just dramatically easier to precisely control and dramatically more expensive to access, compared to digital media where you have to use a heavy-handed approach to blocking.
This post is, at it's core, "my town is being wrecked by tourism". That's perhaps a reasonable feeling for the author to have, but I don't really agree with any of the broader claims they're trying to make.
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.
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'm sure that if you just do zero research about a place and just take a package tour you won't come away with any greater knowledge than they would by reading a Wikipedia article or watching a YouTube video.
But if you learn some things in advance, and then go to a place, and suddenly you have the experience of "Ooh, there's that thing I learned about!", followed by watching how locals interact with it, there has to be some deeper level of understanding that is reached there.
And i think the cause and effect is all backward for Guatemala: the CIA wanted to overthrow the country, so they invited sympathetic journalists on a staged journey. That's a very, very far cry from the experience of a typical tourist, and i think i could make a pretty compelling case that journalists who've never been to {Iraq, Venezuela, Guatemala, Palestine, et. al.} are far MORE likely to write completely out of line imperialist propaganda than the ones who have.
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 and finding similarities is far more education than simply eading about how they are different.
Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of 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.
You can also say "reading comic books is not education".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
While the Vatican has a lot more loot and bling to look at, I'd say looking at the pictures on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_the_Sistine_Chapel_... is the superior experience.
The same goes for the Mona Lisa, which is the least interesting painting in the Louvre. Either see it in a crowded room full of tourists, behind a glass case, or see every last brushstroke at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa (7k x 11k pixels in uniform lighting)
Personally I liked seeing the brickwork of St. Peter's dome more, but each to their own.
(yes, I know this wasn't the point)
The original post laments having to interact with these people (in Cambridge, MA - oh no, Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, maybe as a "local" you should walk off the beaten path a bit).
Looking up webcams and Wiki pages as a substitute for going places is a bad conclusion - it's even more of a fake world. The author thinks we can somehow "really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country". Really beautiful? Come on, that's ridiculous. I get that this is Hacker News but that's a terminally online viewpoint that's warped as can be.
It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.
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...
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.
The bigger problem here that many people are building opinions lacking education, and this often can lead to harmful descicions, especially in how the world is developing today.
My point: I’m not sure “travel” as I understand it (educational, beautiful, soaking up of local culture, taking time to stand and understand as much as possible) is the same as the “travel” that others understand it.
