Facebook; The New Message in a Bottle

Sitting on a desert island after being shipwrecked on a round the world voyage you scribble a message onto a small scrap of paper and stuff it in your last empty bottle of rum. With a long over arm action you hurl the bottle and its contents as far as you can into the surf with the hope that maybe someday someone will read the message and wonder a little about the person who wrote it.

Being a castaway leaves little scope for correspondence, modern travellers however have a huge number of ways to stay in touch although writing a letter on actual paper and posting it is the least likely option in today’s electronic age.

Communication mediums such as Facebook has made travelling much easier

I was rooting through a box of photographs and papers recently and came across a bunch of old letters from the seventies and eighties with stamps from all over the world, instantly the memories came flooding back of long forgotten trips, faces and loves of a previous life. I read and reread love letters from a girlfriend in Canada, now married with kids, about how much she missed me and when was I going to save up the money for a ticket. There were postcards from Africa, an old British leather bound passport adorned with colourful stamps. I found a list of addresses written down on the back of beer mats, this jogged my memory of train trip to Nice with some Swedish girls who drank and sang all night leaving me exhausted in the morning sun with promises of a reunion in some other city that I never made it to. There were photographs of young faces, mine included, strangers to me but fast friends to my image in the pictures, I ached with the thoughts of missed opportunities and lost connections wanting desperately to reach out and see where our lives have led us.

The airmail paper and envelopes were impossibly thin, a necessity to avoid expensive stamps; the writing on my new found treasures varied from elegant to manic, the prose playful to pleading. It was a window to my youth, a period of innocence and naivety with the effort and time spent on their creation a testament to the friendships made. We waited patiently for letters to traverse thousands of miles to our doors, our trust deep in the mailmen who carried the valuable cargo.

We have to back up our lives online, plugged into the matrix our past is inextricably linked with the present

Snapping out of the reverie I try to focus, the memories fading ghostlike into the distance and I am once again staring at my computer screen with the flashing icon “You have a new message from Facebook”. I was watching a news program a day or so ago when yet another pillar of our society, this time a Catholic Archbishop, was vilifying social networking and the evils of texting thus proving a total lack of understanding of the new media and the immense benefits to the communities they serve. I pined for the age of letters but in my heart I knew the electronic revolution carried such huge advantages and was here to stay.

The Facebook phenomenon has moved from a small tightly knit university group to a worldwide network of friends and businesses; the often publicised privacy issues notwithstanding, Facebook has become a de facto tool of travellers everywhere. A must have account that says as much about who we are as who we want to be; it is a communication tool of the zeitgeist and a link to our past and future. Although touted as a twenty something craze it is age indifferent and cuts across social boundaries with ease.

Travellers meet up in a youth hostel in Rome and swap details in seconds, mutual friends are found and pictures are uploaded, changing your status can be rewarding as comments flood in from connections all over the world. I hesitate to call all of them friends in the true sense and I think that this is where commentators miss the point. We often meet people on a casual basis that we may never see again as out of sight and out of mind is quite often a truism. However with a social networking tool such as Facebook, a change in status or notification of intended trip may trigger those acquaintances to get in touch and firmer friendships may be made. It is often easier to take on a new city with the knowledge that you already know someone there, you have a picture and past history, a common thread of shared experiences.

For the modern world traveller an assured means of communicating with friends and family is essential, segregating the ever expanding list into groups makes it manageable. The immediacy of email is at once congruent with the way we live and an indispensable travel tool, which is not to say that we should be casual about this. How will the traveller of today look back on the past and reread emails and look at photographs, how will we access those memories in the future? We have to back up our lives online, plugged into the matrix our past is inextricably linked with the present.

Although I am an adherent to the electronic medium I fervently hope, like that message in a bottle, that we will always find pleasure in the occasional real letter, hand written, delivered through the mailbox and eagerly awaited.

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