Institute For The Future

Greetings from England

I'm in England for the next week, speaking at a conference at Oxford on the uses of science and technology studies in the business world, and doing some interviews for a project we're now doing for the British government on the future of science and technology.

Actually, I'm on the train from London to Cambridge, enjoying a lovely ride through the East Anglia countryside. I've never been here when things are in bloom; when I was a graduate student, I came over here to do archival research, and always came in the off-season-- i.e., the dead of winter. England in December has its charm-- if nothing else, all the Christmas Dickensiana is amusing-- but I always felt like I was one day away from a case of tuberculosis.

I expect I'll be blogging the conference-- or at least some high-level summary of it, if not the graphic details-- and delivering other notes from the field.

I think the experience of travel has been changed by the Internet and wireless as nothing else has. Or perhaps it's just that the wonder of the technology is clearest when you're thousands of miles away, you log onto iChat, and two of your coworkers and your children are immediately pinging you-- and none of them consider it particularly remarkable that they're in California and I'm 5000 miles away. Ten years ago, I had infrequent, incredibly quick phone conversations with my parents, pouring pound coins into those wonderfully bulky pay phones. I stopped by the American Express office in Cambridge every day to see if I got any letters. And the global retail brand was still more a concept than a reality: McDonalds was in Picadilly Square, but there wasn't a Blockbuster up the street in one direction, and a Sephora in the other.

Indeed, the whole texture of travel has changed: I'm finding that so long as I can get online, I don't really feel like I'm away. Of course I know I'm in a different country, having spent 10 relatively uncomfortable hours in an airplane; but I don't feel cut off if there's a connection available at the end of the day. (It's on these grounds that I'll no longer voluntarily stay in a place that doesn't have Internet access.)

Travel used to involve a deep sense of separation from home, the knowledge that a letter could take a week to get home and a phone call was a luxury. Now, at least in the places I go, that's no longer so.