Mike Spencer Bown on the dark side of travel and technology

“It used to be that you would hardly ever see anyone you met ever again. With the advent of email, the half-life of a friendship was about a year. Keeping up with mail tended to fall off at that rate, but with Facebook it lasts forever. There is a dark side, however. Over the last several years I’ve often found entire hostel common rooms, with perhaps 40 backpackers, all absorbed in smartphones and tablets, barely aware of each other’s presence.”
–Mike Spencer Bown, What I’ve Learned: The World’s Most Traveled Man, Esquire, 10/25/13