As a new semester begins, freshman are slowly settling into their new surroundings for the next four years, upperclassmen are melancholically eager to finish and over 300,000 American students will be studying abroad this year. As I look back to my time abroad last fall, I recall one of the most important lessons I learned in my travels: the importance of putting the phone down.
I am a student who is constantly surrounded by social media and electronic devices of all shapes and functions because of my status as a millennial and my major, media studies. Nevertheless, one of the qualities that I cherish most is the ability to live life without having to capture, instagram, and snapchat every movement I make throughout the world. Yes, I am guilty of snapchatting array of olives at a market or instagramming an apple tart by the sea, but we live in a world where social media companies have become verbs.
The fast paced world of today has produced a generation that has adapted to the quickness in which society moves but has become oblivious to what is going on outside their doorstep. By picking up the phone, whether we are on our college campuses or traveling through Berlin or Beijing, we disconnect from reality, from human interactions, from the raw moments happening right in front of us.
As a generation I believe we have forgotten what it is like to take in the sights around us; to actually enjoy the landscape. The beauty of travel is that we can return to our homes and describe in detail our experiences and our journeys, because though pictures may speak a thousand words; our John Muir-captioned Instagram post cannot sum up the towns, villages, rivers, and roads we have traveled.
Specifically, I recall a night in Spain where I had only managed to take ten photographs in the five days I was there and a friend questioned me as to why I hadn’t taken more photos. I reassured him that I was in awe of all the different and new architecture and alleyways I navigated thru and that I was being selfish. Selfish to keep all the colors and texture of Spain to myself and by not taking my iPhone out I fell in love even more with cobblestone streets and technicolored churches of every corner. I clarified that though I am a student of media, I do not let media defy me. My willingness to let my phone go while abroad may have bothered my mother and boyfriend but it allowed me to amplify my visual journey abroad.
So to those students studying abroad this semester or next semester or next year and even to those wandering campuses on their phones. I give you three rules to follow from my experience:
1. Limit the Selfies
In your photographs I want to see where you were, so that I could one day arrive there, show me what you saw, so I can attempt to understand what you experienced. I am familiar with your face, but I am not familiar with where you are.
2. The Company You Kept
My grandmother has a saying, “show me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are.” Show me the faces of those you travelled with so I can piece together the countless stories you will tell upon your arrival, which presumably will be filled with foreign characters.
3. Attempt to Capture Change
Try to capture a moment where the world has changed while you’ve been abroad. If it is not the world, maybe you could be the subject. I encourage students in their travels to encapsulate a memory in their journey where they can look back and remember the present, what passed and what was yet to come.
I urge you, when you travel, put the phone down.
