Ophelia Field
Seeking Refuge
In 1903, the German essayist Georg Simmel wrote in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ about the loneliness of city people ‘swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism’, and growing more anxious and calculating because of technology (in Simmel’s day, the ‘diffusion of pocket watches’). Questions of Travel has an essayistic subplot that is as much to do with technology as with travel – cataloguing the subtle notches made in our mental lives between the 1980s and early 2000s: the suspense of the email inbox, the first photos taken on mobiles, the new ‘lightness’ of web-surfing. Ravi, one of two protagonists, bookmarks poignantly abandoned websites and ends up asking himself, ‘what if you preferred to scroll down a continuous story’ rather than lead a life that jumps through a series of hyperlinks?
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