How our holidays became packed with the media

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/16/holidays-media-bbc-netflix-google

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Twenty-five years ago, on holiday in Italy, I made a new friend, a City analyst who told me he specialised in telecommunications. I said something like “is telecoms even a thing?”

Of course that seems ridiculous now. At the time, when telephones were functional objects fixed to the kitchen wall or tethered to your desk, news was consumed on paper, music came on CDs and you watched television on a large box in your living room, it wasn’t so naive.

Most people then were unaware of the imminent telecommunications revolution which would change their world. One of the first aspects to be transformed was the annual holiday such as the one we were on. That transformation took time. It wasn’t until 1995 that a cellphone became a common sight on Italian beaches.

Communication across borders was still difficult. You couldn’t fire up your mobile phone on landing in a foreign country and watch it connect to the local provider. Going away meant taking a holiday from your regular media habits. In southern Europe keeping up with the news from home meant travelling to the nearest urban hub and buying a three-day-old UK newspaper. If a celebrity died or your team lost you wouldn’t know until you were at the airport ready to fly home. In the later years of the 20th century there might be an internet cafe if you were in a city but news was still something you had to seek out.

It was the same for entertainment as it was for information. For people who were heavy users of music or books going on holiday entailed staving off the dread possibility of running out of stuff. Would you get tired of listening to the half-dozen C-90s loaded up with your favourite music? What would happen if you got through the reading material and found there was only a sun-bleached spinner rack loaded with Robert Ludlum and German translations of Agatha Christie? Would that friend at home remember to videotape the TV episode that aired before you returned?

In 2015 it is all different. Not only is the travel booked and paid for online, the holiday experience itself is hardly less digital. Broadband and Wi-Fi are now staples in parts of rural France that a few years ago hardly seemed to understand the concept. Hence new books are bought on Kindle without anyone needing to leave the deckchair. The news of Cilla Black’s death pings on to an adjacent sunbather’s phone. On rainy afternoons family members practise hair-braiding techniques learned from vloggers on their tablets. Fire up Netflix in France and you find their American sitcoms are different from the ones at home. You don’t need to miss anything. You can breakfast with John Humphrys via the BBC Radio Player, download favourite magazines, use Spotify or YouTube much as you would at home. All the things we don’t seek out somehow find us via social media. We are kept across everything from Test match scores to the problems at Calais without any effort on our part.

It’s standard to decry this continued connectedness, to say we really should be able to set it all aside once a year. You can do that if you want to. Frankly, I prefer feeling connected. I don’t miss the days when it was hard to stay in touch. Nor does anyone else if truth be told. Even the members of a holiday party who ostentatiously set aside their devices rely on somebody else to know what the weather’s likely to do tomorrow, or consult Google to settle the trivial argument that began over dinner.

Twenty-five years ago my new friend could justifiably have claimed that telecoms were not just a thing; they were the thing; they were about to transform the world. That transformation has turned all the media and entertainment industries into branches of the telecoms industry. It has shrunk the globe in ways nobody predicted. The same technology that makes our holiday more congenial has also organised the journeys of the unfortunates washed up on holiday beaches in Greece and Italy. We can no more wish away one than the other. It’s no use trying to persuade ourselves that we can have a get away from it all holiday nowadays because we know we can take “it” with us. It’s in our pockets. The fact that we know this has turned us into different people. It’s only at holiday time we fully realise just how different.