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Vacation exhibitionism comes to the
Internet If you check out Grandpa Chuck's Web site, as I just did, you'll find an hour-by-hour account of the proprietor's latest adventure, a four-day trip to Grand Rapids, Mich., with his grandson, Jon. It covers all of the highlights: the zoo, the airport, the Holiday Inn pool, the Gerald R. Ford museum. Scarcely a moment is left to the reader's imagination. Doesn't sound very interesting? Well, no, it isn't. What's interesting is how many people do this -- return from vacation and post every little detail on the Internet, for all the world to examine. There's no telling how many of these vacation Web sites are out there, but they have to number in the hundreds of thousands. Do a little browsing and you'll see. Vacation Web site exhibitionism is becoming a serious American hobby. Grandpa Chuck's is about the most wholesome example of the genre I've been able to find. It's literate and actually rather charming. It's just dull. These Web sites run the gamut from the saccharine to the outright obscene, with the vast majority, as you might expect, falling somewhere in a middle range of self-centered banality: ''In all my myriad travels, I have noticed that there is one thing that I end up seeing no matter where I go. Waterfalls.'' ''The shock of falling and the jolt of hitting the ice caused me to lose a lot of my bladder control.'' ''What do you do when you're at a crossroads in your life and the answer isn't as clear as it seems it should be? We're entertaining the thought of going on another chic vacation, which we did earlier this year, in February. I've been checking the flights, and it seems that Philadelphia is cheap.'' Not all of the specimens are quite so personal. Many just seem determined to pass along advice to other tourists: ''If you want to know more about the sea turtles on Zakinthos, click here.'' ''Although Stonehenge is a big attraction, it is a long way to go for something that can be photographed in one shot.'' ''By visiting my Web page, I hope that I perked your interest in this crazy country, Mexico.'' Actually, Mexico appears to be a frequent subject of these Web sites. There must be 500 sites devoted to reporting the minutiae of visits to Cancun alone. ''The night I got drunk in Cancun'' may be the single most frequently written phrase in the whole vacation Web site lexicon. For some reason, the gene that causes people to go to Mexico and make fools of themselves also gives them a compulsion to write about it, no matter how embarrassing the details might be. But why do they like to do this? Why don't they just record everything in a diary or scrapbook? There's no need to put it on the Internet. Except that the more you think about it, the more you realize that millions of people always have suffered from a mildly pathological need to inflict their vacation trivia on innocent bystanders. There's no other way to explain all of those hour-long slide shows of the previous summer's Grand Canyon trip that so many of us have been stuck watching, featuring impromptu narration that starts and ends with the car in the driveway and includes every motel and breakfast buffet in between. The people who show those slides know they are boring. They just can't help themselves. They are vacation exhibitionists. Now technology has given them a better outlet for their compulsion. They can cram all of the details onto a Web site instead of putting their dinner guests to sleep. They don't know who's seeing the stuff, but they know somebody is -- in fact, a much larger audience than they could victimize in their living rooms in an entire lifetime. And there's something else. On the Internet, they can be anonymous if they want to. They can feel free to include details that would never make it into a living room slide show. You'd be amazed at how many of these vacation reports alternate between mundane tourist trivia and graphic sexual detail this newspaper couldn't publish. A fair number of them appear to be the work of conventional, middle-class, married couples who just can't resist telling the world everything they saw at the museum and everything they did in bed that night. They are not only vacation exhibitionists -- they are exhibitionists in the old-fashioned, carnal sense. But the neighbors never have to know. All in all, I don't suppose this is a cultural phenomenon we need to be too concerned about. The people who suffer from a particular compulsion have a new mechanism for dealing with it, and the rest of us don't have to watch if we don't want to. No one really loses. And the truth is, I enjoyed looking at most of these, from the innocence of Grandpa Chuck to ''Five Wild Nights in Cancun.'' I just wish the level of literacy was a little higher. One thing you can't help noticing is that, as with many other aspects of late 20th century culture, technological sophistication is running several laps ahead of spelling, punctuation and grammar: ''We cruised closer to the steel mill. Iron ore are piled high here. Freighters brings the iron and coal to the steel mill.'' Not too good. But better than having to watch it on slides. Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor
of Governing magazine and a member of USA TODAY's
board of contributors. ©COPYRIGHT 1997 USA Today, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. |
