Crossing the Channel

Tourists by the million have crossed from Britain to France over more than three centuries. Their destinations might have been the towns of the French coast, more distant places in Europe, or even further to the continents beyond the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. During the twentieth century air transport delivered a faster alternative, and in its closing years the Channel Tunnel gave rail links to the continental system.

Those travellers might have been seeking relaxation on sunny beaches, quiet countryside, city life, social adventure or any of a dozen other opportunities. For each and every one, something had attracted them to go abroad: stories heard from friends and acquaintances, or what they learnt in school. Or perhaps the reports of other travellers in newspapers and television. There may have been someone in a foreign country with whom they corresponded or talked on the telephone. In recent years the internet or the web might have played its part in bringing tempting tales of the enjoyment to be found far away.

All these sources of information added to the jigsaw of knowledge held by the recipient. Some of it, lively and fresh in the memory, would soon fade. Other snippets in letters and photos, leaflets, newspaper clippings, written notes, books, videos – even some souvenir presented by another traveller – would last longer, teasing reminders of an idea, an image, of another place desired, awaiting visitation.

These sources can be divided into four groups. The first are those brought by personal contact with people. The starters here are our parents, family members, friends and acquaintances, the people at home. As the youngest of children these are the sources of all our world knowledge. But we learn to crawl and then to walk, opening up new sets of opportunities for discovery for the first time as we explore our surroundings, opening doors onto the outside world and beginning to make our own way into places where before we could only go with parents. This is the second group of information sources – the different forms of movement and means of travel. Walking is one, riding in a car or on a bike, are others. Buses, trains, ships and planes perhaps come later. Personal contacts are increased through the distinctive contribution of travel.

Each mode of movement has its own characteristics and peculiarities. For example, when we walk we have an all-round vision of the world, full of sounds and smells, things to touch and even to taste. A car on the other hand is restricted, cut off from all but vision and some sounds, some smells, and it goes where the driver chooses. As passengers we don’t make the choice. Such a source of frustration to an exploring child! This feature, with someone else deciding where to go, and controlling therefore what we encounter, is a form of selection which elsewhere, in the media, is called editing, and it is found everywhere in travel and therefore in tourism too.

Very young children are exposed to the media of postal services, telephone and internet. Sometimes they are what is termed one-to-one, as with the telephone or individual postal messages like a birthday card; sometimes one-to-many as with a mass mailing leaflet or web page. These latter forms lead in to the mass media of newspapers, books, television, radio, audio and video recordings. Less common now are public speeches, once a staple means of political persuasion but now turned over to the broadcast media or set in films or plays. All of these media represent indirect ways of accessing world knowledge. They rely entirely on the opinions and actions of other people in supplying information – the mediators of knowledge. It is interesting that our growing child has been in this situation before: relying on parents and others is also a matter of relying on someone else’s views and timing.

The fourth group of discovery processes are those within education – here meaning formal education, organised and structured, as opposed to the ‘informal’ which is that which we do ourselves when we move to find out things for ourselves. Of course it needs to be said straight away that all education relies on activities ranging from the more didactic – being told by someone else – to the heuristic – learning by our own efforts. Over time there has been a shift from the didactic towards the heuristic, for good educational reasons, the growth of discovery media available, the increasing interactivity of communication and the sheer numbers of people taking part. Heuristics is about finding out, the student’s learning processes rather than the teacher’s telling processes. In this discussion ‘education’ refers to those structured and organised activities run by professional tutors, trainers and mentors. It means education as it is organised in schools, colleges, universities and adult education classes, and will be referred to as ‘formal’ education.

Four groups of activity have been described in the order in which they are encountered by the child growing into an adult. Formal education is entered only after the other three are well established as influences, somewhere around the age of five. Formal education is usually seen as completed after some ten to twenty years. However, for those who can do so, and who want to take advantage of them, formal systems of education are available life long.

Each of the four groups employs and builds on the previous groups’ activities. So travel extends the face-to-face nature of primary contacts with family members and others by adding the outcomes of mobility, the exploration of new places and people. The media extends the range again with indirect or ‘virtual’ access to more destinations and sources beyond the normal reach. They also stimulate efforts to reach at least some of those places. Finally, education uses face-to-face contact, travel and communications media to reach its objectives.

The suggestion to be made is therefore that travel, and tourism, should be seen in a different way than the one it usually seems to occupy in public discussion. It is not just as a means of making money or of having a good time. It is most definitely more than that – it is a primary means of discovering the world and its peoples, of understanding it and how we deal with it.

Travel and tourism offer what the other forms of discovery do not – the ability to see things for ourselves. How that happens and whether the results are good or bad depends on how they are organised, by whom and with what aims and objectives they have.

Done well it is a contribution to the quality of life. Such enrichment comes from information flowing through the four broad channels of personal contact at home, personal contacts gathered as a result of travelling; the media, and education. The schematic below illustrates this. Information obtained through these sources is interpreted by individuals in the light of their existing, accumulated experience, and it is then stored. Human memory is one form of storage, rich and dynamic but easy to decay. The artificial media such as paper, photos and electronic recordings last longer, though they are less dynamic and lack the multiple facets of memories.

The discussion concludes in "3D Media", accessed from the list at the left.