Paper short abstract:

This paper moves from analysing travellers' practices of swiping and tapping on screens, flipping through travel guides and unfolding maps, towards how these material/virtual interfaces re-constitute the travel experience, and how travellers thereby enact multiple notions of being in touch en route.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I take the popular travel booklet Point It - Traveller's language kit, Picture dictionary (Graf, 2013) as a starting point for exploring questions of touch, connection, distance and sociality in mobility research. This little booklet makes it possible for travellers to communicate with others by pointing at images and thereby it opens up a space for non-verbal, visual, and bodily forms of interaction between 'locals' and 'tourists'. The gestures performed in this opened up space of communication between travellers and the people they encounter along the way find their echoes in the 'show-and-tell conversations' that I have had as part of the travel media ethnography conducted for the Next Generation Paper research project by The University of Surrey and The Open University. In this paper, I move from analysing travellers' practices of swiping and tapping on screens, flipping through travel guides, and unfolding maps, towards how these material/virtual interfaces re-constitute the travel experience, and how it brings into focus how the 'actuality of touch extends into the metaphor of being in touch' (Leslie, 2016, p. 195). Following on, I argue that research participants deployed different strategies in their use of technology in order to 'disconnect' during their holidays. By oscillating between 'switching off' and 'tuning in' travelers enacted different notions of touch, and negotiated their availability (Wajcman, 2016) in different ways. By looking closer at touch, this paper attempts to contribute to debates on travel, technology, and sociality.