Who, in these virus-constrained times, is not fed up with virtual life? Flat video sessions with homebound colleagues and distanced loved ones fatigue us.
We sink with empathy and regret at newspaper stories by students grappling with a semester gone remote. I find the internet’s suggestion that we watch zoo webcams or scroll through scanned museum exhibits a bit … hopeful.
So I too look forward to the return of handshakes, hugs, and tangible interaction, of real life.
But, a few years ago, I discovered great merit in the opposite. At the time, I was regularly isolating in front of my laptop and — please withhold judgment — clicking across the continental U.S. inside the Street View interface of Google Maps. All the way across. Street level.
It was a virtual road trip. I clicked and clicked (and clicked and clicked) from the foot of a Maine lighthouse, through the towns, farmland, and mountains of middle America, to a beach near Ozette, Washington. I never once resorted to the cruising altitude of Google Maps. It took a couple of years, and there was some personal context: I was living in Rwanda, in Africa, and looking for a touch of home beyond the rabid political news dominating my internet connection.
I blogged about what I saw in Street View, and I took screenshots of gutted Main Streets in central Ohio and of wintry sweeps of forest in Idaho. Wikipedia served as my Fodor’s, my Lonely Planet. In southwestern South Dakota I noticed outdoor basketball hoops everywhere I clicked and spun — Street View had revealed to me the cultural phenomenon of “rezball,” a high-tempo style of basketball that I learned is popular among Native Americans from Wounded Knee to Arizona.
I described my stunt as an “experiment” built around a single question: What can we discover about — and in — America when we use our digital tools in the “long form?” The answer, as proved by rezball and crushing images of rural and industrial decay, was a lot.
Moreover, as early as upstate New York, I found myself blogging about the experience of virtual travel. Plenty of artists leverage Street View images for social commentary or fine art — Jon Rafman’s “9 Eyes” project and “The Agoraphobic Traveler” by Jacqui Kenny come to mind — but I noticed something extra in my unbroken movement across Street View America: I controlled the internet; it did not control me.
If today we are deflated by our confinement to digital spaces, many of us are also worried. We are worried about safeguarding our personal information from big tech, about Zoom-bombing hackers, about online retailers destroying our Valley’s own Main Streets. We worry about algorithms controlling the media we are fed, and about fake and false news, not to mention the brick-and-mortar pleasures we have already conceded to tech: email, ebooks, intelligence that is artificial, reality that is augmented. Cars will self-drive and, of course, Google Maps already navigates.
But that is not what happened on my road trip, as virtual and pixelated as it was. My desk in Rwanda looked out over the country’s green hills, and as I sat engrossed in Street View, I realized that I was witnessing America on my own terms, not through the polarized screaming and instantaneous cycles of mainstream and social media.
Part of that freedom came from choosing my route and choosing my blog post topics, but more of it derived from an unrestricted license to sit and stare. As an East Coaster — a fairly privileged one comfortable with metropolises, college towns and international airports — my eyes were opened to parts of America unknown to me. Or known only via my preferred media sources.
In these places, I circled blocks and stood in front of yards full of battered cars. I paced Main Streets where hair salons and gun shops stood sandwiched between thrift shops and family restaurants. I thumbed through Wikipedia (or finger-scrolled) to hear of an empty, disempowered factory town’s heyday.
I did these things free of the self-consciousness that I — and suspect other travelers — feel when confronting the unfamiliar. I was a stranger everywhere I went in Street View America, but I never felt any consequential pressure to leave, to judge, or defend against judgement.
Nor — and this is important — did NPR, Fox News, Facebook friends, or Google search algorithms tell me what to think. I simply clicked, gazed, clicked, gazed, and blogged about what my eye saw, personal biases revealed and all.
That application of the human to the high-tech — not the tech to the human — is, I think, rare. Google might digitize our streets and landscapes, and its bots might investigate our movements, but pulling off the Great American Road Trip in Street View showed me it is possible to not just use our digital in the “long form,” but actually reclaim the human endeavors that big tech strives to claim from us — and, at the same time, to discover something about yourself, not the internet about you.
I will not argue virtual travel is better than the real thing — though, for fun, my blog occasionally staked that claim — but as we slog through our virtual existence today, I wonder if there are similar opportunities to turn the tables on our digital tools. What better time than now, when we are stuck online and six feet from where we would rather be, to discover such an opportunity? It is the opportunity to manipulate, not be manipulated.
Matthew Muspratt lives in Northampton. He blogged about his Street View project at mmuspratt.com/across-the-usa.