Armchair traveler
27/01/13 05:18
There are several things in my life that remind me that I live in a time of rapid change. I have loved books for all of my life and I have collected them and now have a small room in our home that I call my library. I have floor to ceiling shelves on the walls and an oak library table and a comfortable chair for reading. I enjoy my room, but as I sit in it I know that it is a place of the past. My children and grandchildren will never have similar rooms. They have no need to collecting paper books. They have electronic book readers and access to all of the literature they need without filling their homes with heavy and expensive books.
Along the top of my shelves is a row of boxes filled with copies of the National Geographic Magazine. I have been a member of the society since 1978. My parents were members and my grandparents before them. I come from a long line of people who have loved travel and maps and stories about far away places.
Today is the anniversary of the founding of the National Geographic Society. It was January 27, 1888 that the National Geographic Society was founded in Washington, D.C. The 33 original members were geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. They all shared the love of travel. Not long after they founded the society they started a magazine. The magazine began as a technical journal with short articles about the details of map making and distant travels. The circulation was very small. But things were about to change. In 1899, the society hired Gilbert Grosvenor to edit its magazine. He quickly changed the format from technical articles to articles of more general interest. But the thing he did that revolutionized the journal was to add the then new technology of photographs. Circulation shot up from 1,000 issues per month to over 2 million in a short period of time.
The magazine was the first to print photographs of many distant locations including the North and South Poles. It was the first to print natural color photographs. It was a pioneer in supporting photojournalists and developing new photographic technologies. Proceeds from the sales of the magazine were invested in grants to explorers. Robert Peary used funds from National Geographic to journey to the North Pole. Richard Byrd flew over the South Pole funded, in part, with money from the society. Jacques Costeau was supported by the National Geographic as was Jane Goodall.
But the technology is changing. And one has to admit that printed magazines are now rapidly becoming things of the past. There is a National Geographic application for tablet computers and the new retina displays make the pictures more brilliant and realistic than can ever be done with print technology. The Society has remained on the cutting edge of technology, expanding into film, television and now the world of the Internet and social media. You can now own every issue of the National Geographic magazine ever printed on a boxed set of DVD media. Even those will quickly become obsolete. Even smaller storage devices will enable one to have access to the archives. You can already browse through the magazines online if you have a high speed Internet connection.
The National Geographic Society no longer is and exclusive source of travel photography. There are lots of other ways for armchair explorers to investigate distant places. When we are planning a trip these days, I spend some time looking at YouTube videos. Although there is a lot of junk on YouTube, there are also some very accurate video clips of places that I would like to visit. I sometimes just enter the name of a place that I dream of visiting into the YouTube search engine and after watching a few cute cat videos find myself looking at the place that I would like to visit.
Cell phones have made everyone photographers and videographers. We carry devices capable of capturing high-resolution video with us wherever we go. Increasingly, our digital lives are becoming more cluttered than our real lives. We used to have a box of photographs that needed to be sorted and put into albums. Now we have tens of thousands of digital images that wait for some indexing and organizing. Even that process is now facilitated by the metadata that is automatically included when we take a digital picture. We can sort our pictures by date or by location without having to do anything. The face recognition software on my computer is getting more and more accurate and I find that using it is becoming nearly as accurate as the names my grandmother used to write on the back of her photographs. Her memory wasn’t always accurate and sometimes she just wrote the wrong names on the photographs. She left behind a legacy of photographs and no small amount of confusion along with them.
It isn’t all bad living at the intersection of the past and the future. I have a large computer monitor on a shelf on my library table. I have a wireless router in my home that gives me access to the Internet in my study. I even have a small television with Apple TV for browsing the Internet and watching YouTube. And the oak telephone operator’s workstation that I salvaged when our small town telephone company was taken over by AT&T now serves as a printer stand where I can make prints of digital photographs when I want them.
I know I have to figure out what to do with my old National Geographic Magazines. Libraries all have them. Schools are inundated with them. No one else really wants them. Perhaps they can be recycled as sources of pictures for school projects or collages. I hate to see them cut up, but that is probably the best use of them. I’d give them away if I knew someone who wanted them. It isn’t a legacy that my children want to inherit. They can access the magazines in other ways.
But for now I am comfortable in my study and, when I have a few moments, I enjoy reaching up and taking out an old magazine and reading about a distant place.
Happy Birthday, National Geographic! Thanks for all of the armchair travels.
Along the top of my shelves is a row of boxes filled with copies of the National Geographic Magazine. I have been a member of the society since 1978. My parents were members and my grandparents before them. I come from a long line of people who have loved travel and maps and stories about far away places.
Today is the anniversary of the founding of the National Geographic Society. It was January 27, 1888 that the National Geographic Society was founded in Washington, D.C. The 33 original members were geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. They all shared the love of travel. Not long after they founded the society they started a magazine. The magazine began as a technical journal with short articles about the details of map making and distant travels. The circulation was very small. But things were about to change. In 1899, the society hired Gilbert Grosvenor to edit its magazine. He quickly changed the format from technical articles to articles of more general interest. But the thing he did that revolutionized the journal was to add the then new technology of photographs. Circulation shot up from 1,000 issues per month to over 2 million in a short period of time.
But the technology is changing. And one has to admit that printed magazines are now rapidly becoming things of the past. There is a National Geographic application for tablet computers and the new retina displays make the pictures more brilliant and realistic than can ever be done with print technology. The Society has remained on the cutting edge of technology, expanding into film, television and now the world of the Internet and social media. You can now own every issue of the National Geographic magazine ever printed on a boxed set of DVD media. Even those will quickly become obsolete. Even smaller storage devices will enable one to have access to the archives. You can already browse through the magazines online if you have a high speed Internet connection.
Cell phones have made everyone photographers and videographers. We carry devices capable of capturing high-resolution video with us wherever we go. Increasingly, our digital lives are becoming more cluttered than our real lives. We used to have a box of photographs that needed to be sorted and put into albums. Now we have tens of thousands of digital images that wait for some indexing and organizing. Even that process is now facilitated by the metadata that is automatically included when we take a digital picture. We can sort our pictures by date or by location without having to do anything. The face recognition software on my computer is getting more and more accurate and I find that using it is becoming nearly as accurate as the names my grandmother used to write on the back of her photographs. Her memory wasn’t always accurate and sometimes she just wrote the wrong names on the photographs. She left behind a legacy of photographs and no small amount of confusion along with them.
It isn’t all bad living at the intersection of the past and the future. I have a large computer monitor on a shelf on my library table. I have a wireless router in my home that gives me access to the Internet in my study. I even have a small television with Apple TV for browsing the Internet and watching YouTube. And the oak telephone operator’s workstation that I salvaged when our small town telephone company was taken over by AT&T now serves as a printer stand where I can make prints of digital photographs when I want them.
But for now I am comfortable in my study and, when I have a few moments, I enjoy reaching up and taking out an old magazine and reading about a distant place.
Happy Birthday, National Geographic! Thanks for all of the armchair travels.