The technological mediations of near and distant cultures and environments have long fascinated scholars and the public alike, and it seems like this interest peaks around times of large-scale technological transition, when new modes of transportation and mediation become available.
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What are the affordances of media technologies and the modes of storytelling and experience in digital representation of travel? Using examples from Norwegian travel mediations, this article asks what happens when new media forms and networked digital technologies become part of the armchair travel experience. In recent years, geolocative technologies and networked screens have seemingly extended the range and immersive depth of what we now think of as virtual travel experiences. The media of armchair traveling, however, is in constant change. 2 As such, armchair travel is a deeply humanistic practice, weaving a web of meaning, narratives, and connections across the world, but always centered in the physical location of the armchair traveler. At the same time, armchair travel is about estrangement, as Bernd Stiegler argues: to not just learn about new places, but also to see familiar places in a new light. The genre has tight connections to nature writing, seeking to build understanding of, knowledge about, and attachment to natural and cultural places. Armchair travel is a way of seeing the world with age-old traditions.
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You are armchair traveling when you read a Lonely Planet book about some place you may or may not be planning to actually visit when you watch the Travel Channel on cable TV when you watch penguins in Antarctica on Google Street View. Through the printed word, still photographs, moving pictures, and sound, scenic locations and remote landscapes come alive, conveying some form of filtered and mediated experience of the world. The armchair traveler explores the world from the comforts of home. The traveler perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble. It was, in other words, that machine ensemble that interjected itself between the traveler and the landscape. Yet the railroad was merely an expression of the rail's technological requirements, and the rail itself was a constituent part of the machine ensemble that was the system. The empirical reality that made the landscape seen from the train window appear to be “another world” was the railroad itself, with its excavations, tunnels, etc. These highly popular mediations of railroad or boat travel challenge Schivelbusch's ideas of speed, distance, and experience of landscapes, but also direct our attention towards the role of digital media in making sense of a changing world.
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The article analyzes a series of technologically mediated digital representations of travel and movement through landscapes, in particular the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's “slow travel” series of digitally enhanced TV programs.
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This article brings Schivelbusch's thesis into the digital age as a way of examining the spatiality of digital media and the natural world. Few scholars have analyzed this relationship between technology, media, and the perception of landscape as convincingly as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who famously argued that the landscape perceived by travelers was filtered through the machine ensemble of the railroad system. The technological mediation of near and distant landscapes have long fascinated scholars and the public alike, and it seems like this interest peaks around times of large-scale technological transition, when new modes of both transportation and mediation become available.