Day 15: My Gadgets And Me

(Her: Joanna)

Things have drastically changed from my first backpacking trip in 2005, my trip to South America in 2008 and this trip in 2012. It hits me when I saw almost everyone in the common area doing their thing with a laptop or a smartphone at Oki Doki Hostel in Warsaw. No one talk to each other! “Back in the days” in 2005, hostels don’t usually have internet for you to use for free or even purchase, let alone Wi-Fi. If you were in the common room, there’s no better thing to do than chatting with people from different places and hang out. Nowadays, whenever people have down time, instead, they pull out their computer or smartphone, which unintentionally send out a signal of “do not talk to me”. I’m equally guilty of doing the same thing during this trip.

On a backpacking trip, if you choose to stay at a hostel, you should take advantage of meeting different people instead of hiding behind your computer or smartphone screen that you can do at home anyways.

The world has changed so much in this short 7 years. Has the advancement of technologies really improve how well we communicate? At work or school (the serious stuff), I think it has but for personal communication, I’m not so sure. I’m sure a lot of folks my age or younger have BBM, What’s App, MSN or SMS their friends or roommates or folks in the same room as them instead of opening our mouth to talk to them.

Just before I left, I got this anxiety of life without a cell phone and DATA (serious anxiety...lol). Thought I would get a break from my gadget leech for 6 months without my iPhone and Blackberry but no! Charlie and I are on the computer or WiFi with our iPod all the time during our down time. We seems to forget how to move on with our life with out gadgets. Sadly, I can't get away from this addiction.

Planning our hiking route at Propad, Slovakia with good old, paper map and Lonely Planet guidebook.