Internet Tour Guides

“Digital field trips” are coming to a browser near you

Sep 16, 2024

“Born too late to explore earth. Born too early to explore the galaxy. Born just in time to explore the internet.” – Julian Lehr

DO YOU EVER have that feeling you're not getting the most out of the internet? It's estimated at the time of writing this that there are two billion websites just a few keystrokes away. And when I looked at my browsing history over the last month, I visited about 200 sites. I feel like I practically live on my laptop! But I'm obviously still missing an incalculable amount of stuff. It's like I'm going to the world's biggest barbecue and only eating salad. And what's more, in the time it's taken you to read up to this point, another hundred ~~sausages~~ websites have been added to the mix 🤯

If you're like me—curious, restless and routinely plagued by the prospect of wasting potential with a capital P—then this feeling of barely scratching the surface of the web is like the feeling you get when you’re told you’re only using a fraction of your brain power. Or when you hear about overworked and underpaid holidaymakers struggling to save up their hard-earned cash and boarding 15-hour flights halfway across the world only to spend their whole time by the pool of some homogeneous hotel chain, eating buffet food they could have found on their local high street.

But it's not all bad. I also feel a tremendous sense of anticipation and excitement just imagining what treasures lie beyond the keyboard waiting to be discovered. Ideas. Connections. Jobs. Friends.

And I'm incredibly grateful too—grateful for the richness, the diversity and the inexhaustible possibility afforded by the internet in just the same way as I'm grateful for the big blue earth itself, for being able to travel in its cities and small towns, forests and caves, coastlines, hidden alleys and wide open plains.

Two things come to mind at this point. The first is the avid traveller and writer Tim Ferris saying that YouTube is like “being in the Library of Alexandria with a blindfold on.” And the second is my artist friend George responding to my question, “What advice would you give your children” with “I’d tell them to open all the boxes.” These two statements—one an astute observation about why the web is so beguiling; the other a provocation to engage with it, to try to map the unmappable and chart a course through the unchartable—these two statements play on loops in my mind whenever I think about what's out there on the internet.

What if I told you there were internet tour guides? How would you picture their roles working? Would you think of them as being members of a particular web-oriented community like, for example, engineers or administrators, designers or typographers or bloggers? What would you imagine their tours would consist of?

Which historical ideas and events would you hope they’d cover? Are there particular digital structures or points of interest that you'd like them to help you marvel at? And what about their routes and means through the digital landscape itself, any vehicles they use or shortcuts or long ways round?

When I imagine an internet tour guide, what I'm really excited about (apart from discovering new websites and tools) is how they move around and interface with the web itself. How do their particular tastes and thinking patterns manifest online? What are the ways in which, purposefully and serendipitously, the online world morphs itself to fit their view of reality, their needs and their expectations?

It's in this sense that I see internet tour guides running interesting tours not by virtue of their tour guide skills per se, but by virtue of their own specific projects and tasks—and by giving us a spectator’s seat alongside them as they plunge into the internet's limitless depths.

The way I see it, there could be two broad types of tour that you could choose to go on:

Subject-based tours. Say, computer programming or home cooking, local politics or parenting, music or hospitality, entrepreneurship or volunteering. The guide would blend tour guide skills (more on those in a sec) with experience in a specific field. Their tour schedule may include domain history, key figures and events, details of how the internet has impacted progress, key players and projects in the space, and predictions for how the web will shape the domain in the future.
Project-based tours. Here the tour guide would share experience developing a specific web-enabled project, artwork, business or event. Participants could expect to learn about how the internet helped or hindered the creation of the idea, its design and development, its network of people involved and their communication and collaboration, and the project's lasting online legacy.

In either case, the guide would explain and demonstrate things within the context of the internet world, emphasising the knowledge, principles, culture, points of interest, people, languages, strategies, tools, trends, mobility and logistics of life online. A good tour guide would incorporate storytelling, oratory, fluency in multiple languages, and they’d win our attention with their gestures, modulating voice, jokes and authoritative presence.

It would be largely a passive learning experience for participants, with opportunities to ask questions, of course, but it wouldn't be like a workshop or a cohort-based class (this is a tour, not a city council meeting!). As such, the mood would be calm and informal, people could eat their dinners and drink a glass of wine no problem. There’d be toilet breaks and photo ops. And mournful sucking of gums at any latecomers holding up the group.

Experienced tour guides would even allow for deviations and detours, finding ways to turn them into further opportunities for reflection and Q&A.

Everybody uses the internet differently and for different reasons. And there's no telling what a teacher could learn from a school kid, or a scientist from an artist, or a politician from a plumber, or a police officer from a criminal—or vice versa!

What type of tour would you like to go on? Would you like to kick back and watch a student complete a homework assignment? How about seeing a chef design a new menu from scratch? Ever wondered what an astronaut gets up to behind their computer? Or a lawyer? A drop shipper? An occupational psychologist or a games designer? Which digital neighbourhoods and nerdfests do you want to get acquainted with? What people and projects have always held an air of mystery for you?

If you're reading this and you like the sound of internet field trips, get in touch, let's chat. I say “let's chat” in many of my posts and I actually do mean it. People have reached out and I have built stuff with people. And I think there is something to internet tours.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that in ten years’ time, every Tom, Dick or Harry on the web will have created, or participated in, an internet tour.

People will be doing tours instead of scrolling socials, watching TV or reading blog posts 😉

Parents and employers will encourage their kids and their workers to spend more downtime on tours because they'll be constructive and expansive.

There’ll be websites (yes, more websites) connecting tour lovers with tour givers.

And more people than ever before will become more internet native, more internet savvy. Digital field trips will help people to mobilise the resources needed to create a vibrant life of their choosing, both online and off. That’s my prediction anyway.

So, who’s up for getting started?

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