Can Travel Blogs Survive?

It really seems like the travel blog is dying these days. I hope it survives. All mediums have their pro-s and con-s. The advantages of a text-and-photo blog are considerable. The blog is of course being replaced by You Tube videos which really don't have great advantages.

So why are these videos so popular? Isn't it because it reminds people of watching the boob tube? There is remarkably little content in most travel videos. They are really just 'chewing gum for the eyes," as the old saying goes.

Inevitably they migrate towards the "adventurer" cooking in their van or just outside it. Is there something fascinating about boiling water in a pan in a van that deserves 20,347 views and 357 comments? This makes a bit of sense if the adventurer is a pretty and personable young woman, wearing skimpy clothing, while swishing her tail at the stove. But really!

Mountains don't move. Neither do forests or lakes. So what is the point of taking 'moving pictures' of stationary objects? I heard the commentary track once of an old Fred Astaire movie explain his transition from the Broadway stage to Hollywood movies. He was reported to say something like, "Either I am going to move, or the camera is." It turned out that he did the moving, and the camera stayed still.

Travel video-makers use the opposite trick: the camera does all the moving. The camera rests on the dashboard of a moving car or is attached to the helmet of a mountain bike. The result is a moving image on a screen. But it really seems like a cheat.

Speaking of movies, the other night I rewatched a movie I hadn't seen in a long time: "Rain Man." It was quite a reminder of how satisfying a "road trip" movie can be. There have been many good ones over the years.

What is so satisfying about road trip movies? Perhaps a road trip is a 'vehicle' and metaphor for the arc of personal development that the character goes through in the movie. They could go through an arc back at their own home, job, or lawn. But life has a tendency to become swallowed up in trivial busy-ness and routines that put a person to sleep on one level.

On the road, the character runs into non-routines. Surprises. These encounters present the challenges that cause the character to go through the arc of development that makes for an interesting story.

If travel blogs are to survive, maybe they need to be reborn. They need to give up their picayune prose about "how to" details as well as their over-emphasis on scenery postcards. They could use the Hollywood road-trip movie as their model. They could write about a personal arc that makes for an interesting story, or maybe write about how the surprises of unplanned travel bumped them into looking at the human condition in a fresh way.