You may be wondering why anyone would feel the need to tote a bunch of distracting gadgets on vacation to the Most Magical Place on Earth.
Well, for starters, it’s the Most Magical Place on Earth. Have you ever tried to put up with constant enchantment and happiness for an entire week? It’s exhausting. It’s annoying. It makes you itchy to attack some smiling green pigs with a slingshot and a digital flock of “Angry Birds.”
But let me back up. A few weeks ago, we went on a long-planned family trip to Walt Disney World. Despite the heat and the work involved in wrangling princess-obsessed 3- and 5-year-olds across four separate Disney parks, we had a great time. I don’t think that this great time was wrecked by a decision I made before the trip: not to unplug completely from the online world while on vacation.
I brought a laptop, two tablets, a smart phone and multiple digital cameras. I kept up with online news, Tweeted, posted a handful of the best photos to Instagram to share with online friends, and even answered emails that weren’t directly work-related.
You may be ready to call the authorities on me for neglecting my wife and kids during designated family time. But I feel that interacting via these digital tools has become so integrated into our lives (OK, maybe my life in particular) that it would have been more work and stress for me not to stay plugged in. And there were specific reasons for me to keep connected.
First off, during our trip we were in the process of selling a house. Though we tried to minimize that obligation during our trip as much as possible, we still needed to make a few timely decisions and stay in contact with our realtor. I was the family liaison on that front.
Another factor in staying plugged in was that my vacation fell on a week when tech company Apple was due to make some big product announcements. Also that week, video game titans including Microsoft and Sony were making presentations at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo. I wasn’t obligated by work to follow those events on my time off, but my curiosity and interest led me to glance at the headlines and, when I felt I had something to say about those news items, I shared my comments via social media.
Also, I found staying plugged into the outside world in such a hermetic, man-made environment as Disney World to be a way of staying sane. At a Disney resort, you begin to feel like nothing exists outside of that Orlando bubble of fun and all-inclusiveness. After a while, you can’t see anything past the Disney meals and Disney live shows and, of course, all the Disney merchandise.
As we stood in long lines for rides with other families, all of us sighing and sweating, I’d pull out my phone in an idle moment to see what was happening far away from the mermaid Ariel’s Fantasyland Grotto. On one of our last days at Disney, we were on the fence about whether we should go to Animal Kingdom, a park that seems to divide visitors into “Loved it!” and “Hated it!” camps. Based on some of the feedback we got after I put the question out to my online friends, we ended up going and having a wonderful time. In this instance, the wisdom of the online crowd proved useful.
The official Disney World app helped us navigate the parks. On a day when we were all tired, hot and hungry, the app geolocated us, pointing us to the nearest quick-service restaurant where we refueled and rallied.
I tried to keep most of my online use to idle moments (kids napping, long lines, late at night when everyone else was sleeping). My wife might disagree on how distracted I was: She blamed my phone for us missing a Monorail stop on our way to one of the parks.
But the remarkable thing I noticed was that unlike nearly every other place in the world, people weren’t constantly pointing their smart phones at every live performance and Instagramming every meal. People, especially kids, were distracting themselves with digital screens much less than practically anywhere else. It seemed out of place to stick a device between your face and the Mad Tea Party ride, the kids’ first glimpse of Cinderella or a big song and dance number from the “Festival of the Lion King” show.
Real life for once trumped the alluring, ever-present attraction of the online and virtual. As the trip went on, I fell in line, taking my phone out less and shooting fewer photos, choosing instead to build memories instead of a digital photo roll. How strange it was seeing people actually live life and experience it in the moment instead of recording it for later.
That turned out to be pretty magical after all.
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