Once the domain of business travelers, mobile information and communication technologies such as laptop computers, wireless cards, MP3 players, GPS devices and mobile phones are now becoming as commonplace in leisure travelers’ luggage as cameras and sunscreen. What does this mean for the ways travelers connect to – or disconnect from – people and places while they are traveling? What kinds of mobile connections become possible in the digital age? And in what ways are we becoming more disconnected? In this research project, I examine how travelers incorporate digital technologies into their leisure travel practices to make and maintain social relations and relations to place while on the move.

This research analyzes the social implications of the growing trend of ‘interactive travel’, or what some travelers refer to as ‘flashpacking’, which refers to the practice of integrating mobile technologies and social media into one’s journey and staying electronically connected while traveling -- and it is clearly on the rise. Studies by the Travel Industry of America found that in 2005, 86% of leisure travelers brought a mobile phone on vacation, up from 46% in 1999. A 2006 poll sponsored by Intel found that 38% of American leisure travelers brought their laptop on holiday and that 53% planned to do so in the future. In 2009, the hospitality networking site CouchSurfing.org grew to over 1.2 million members while travel blog hosting sites like Bootsnall.com and Travelblog.org currently host thousands of blog posts published by travelers on the road. Websites, podcasts, digitized audio and video tours and other online applications designed by and for these connected travelers have proliferated online over the past decade.

The project explores the intersection between travel and technology in three 'field sites': 1) the development of mobile, mediated urban walking tours in Boston and Cambridge; 2) Couchsurfing, an online hospitality networking site; and 3) round-the-world travel blogs. Taking a mobile ethnographic approach to these three case studies, this project aims to uncover the way travelers use these technologies in the course of their travels, how these technologies are reshaping the spatial and social dimensions of travel, and what this trend might reveal about shifting patterns of social life in general. Taking travel and tourism as exemplars of broader social change and shifting patterns of social life, the project interrogates the relationship between new technologies, new socialities and new ways of producing knowledge in the information age. How do we connect in an increasingly mobile world?