As an American who has spent some time in multiple European countries, using Google maps and looking at online pictures is never going to replace the experience of actually travelling to these places and experiencing them with your own eyes and ears. It’s never going to come close to actually sitting down and eating at local restaurants, trying out your language skills with the shop vendors, or chatting with the locals.
Digital images have a way of becoming “meme-ified” in a sense. You get used to seeing iconic imagery of places or things you’ve never actually experienced yourself. The brain lazily shortcuts this to “seen it”. This is the kind of shit Magritte was warning us against with “The Treachery of Images”. Yeah, anyone can look up Google images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But when you’re actually there, breathing the air and seeing the real thing, experiencing every tilted marble step upward to a fantastic panorama of the Italian cityscape and countryside, you will understand everything that an image cannot show you. Anybody can look up a picture of the Sagrada Familia. I can never, ever replace the experience of stepping out of a Spanish taxi and being absolutely gobsmacked by how far I had to crane my head and body just to look at the entire structure from bottom to top.
You will never truly understand what you have not experienced without any intermediate filter.
This kind of comment is Plato’s Cave exemplified.
As an American who has spent some time in multiple European countries, using Google maps and looking at online pictures is never going to replace the experience of actually travelling to these places and experiencing them with your own eyes and ears. It’s never going to come close to actually sitting down and eating at local restaurants, trying out your language skills with the shop vendors, or chatting with the locals.
Digital images have a way of becoming “meme-ified” in a sense. You get used to seeing iconic imagery of places or things you’ve never actually experienced yourself. The brain lazily shortcuts this to “seen it”. This is the kind of shit Magritte was warning us against with “The Treachery of Images”. Yeah, anyone can look up Google images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But when you’re actually there, breathing the air and seeing the real thing, experiencing every tilted marble step upward to a fantastic panorama of the Italian cityscape and countryside, you will understand everything that an image cannot show you. Anybody can look up a picture of the Sagrada Familia. I can never, ever replace the experience of stepping out of a Spanish taxi and being absolutely gobsmacked by how far I had to crane my head and body just to look at the entire structure from bottom to top.
You will never truly understand what you have not experienced without any intermediate filter.