When the Internet Stops Inspiring Travel

“The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

 

Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière / In Search of Lost Time

 

Accidental Discoveries

 

We discovered it by accident.

 

One evening, almost absent-mindedly, we searched for a place we had written about years earlier. It was not anywhere famous, not one of those places that fill travel magazines or dominate social media feeds. It was a quieter stretch of trail, the kind of place that had stayed with us because we had walked there, spent a night there, and enjoyed a good meal there.   We remembered the weather, the light, the birds, and the landscape. It was one of those moments that is impossible to summarize but which we enjoyed time and again on the Trans Canada Trail.

 

Then something odd appeared in the search results.

 

Our photograph.

 

But it was not on our website.

 

It was not even on a site we recognized.

 

Curious, we clicked. Then we found another. And another. And another.

 

By the time we finished searching hours later, our photographs and fragments of our stories had appeared on more than thirty-five different websites. Some had taken the images directly. Others had lifted phrases, route descriptions, daily details, and even our experiences. Many presented the material as if the journey had happened to no one in particular, as if the places, the birds, the mistakes, and the experiences had simply appeared online, ownerless and ready to be repackaged. A few presented it as their own journey and their own achievement. 

 

That was the moment we began to realize something about the internet had changed.

 

For years, we shared our travels online with a simple hope: that our stories and photographs might encourage someone else to step outside and experience the world for themselves. We wrote about the virtue of taking long hikes, wandering through forests, and exploring small towns across Canada.  We wrote about difficult days, unexpected acts of kindness and those moments on a journey that suddenly become more meaningful than we could ever have expected. Often in these moments it some odd detail or encounter or mistake that somehow became the thing we most remembered.  Sometimes it is the oddest and smallest details that still stand out even years later.

 

Amid it all, the goal was never to provide perfect answers. It was to capture something of the feeling of being out there - to tell a story that might encourage someone else to go see the world for themselves.

 

For a long time, that felt like what the internet was for – to educate, to inform, and to inspire.

 

When we began our #Hike4Birds across Canada on the Trans Canada Trail, we were not trying to create a definitive guide. We were walking, photographing, birding, and writing our way across a country that could not possibly be reduced to a single line on a map or understood in a simple way. 

 

Newfoundland began at Cape Spear and moved through coastal footpaths, the T’Railway, puffins, whales, icebergs, caribou, and the wonder of taking those first steps westward. Prince Edward Island offered a very different feel on the Confederation Trail, red beaches, lighthouses, shelters, Charlottetown, and island hospitality. Saskatchewan, which so many people casually imagine as flat, surprised us with ferries, sand dunes, the Qu’Appelle Valley, the Trails of 1885, Snow Geese, and landscapes that were anything but simple.

 

Every province complicated our expectations. Every section reminded us that a journey is not the same as an itinerary or simply understood. We tried to show these complexities – the good and the bad, the wonderful and the challenging.  We shared it all and our photographs online to inspire.

 

The World Matters Beyond the Search Result

 

But lately, I have begun to realize that the philosophy of the internet is changing.

 

Increasingly, online writing is being shaped not for human curiosity but for algorithms, artificial intelligence, search engines, and attention spans that are ever more fleeting. Articles are structured to answer questions quickly and efficiently. Bullet points. FAQs. Short paragraphs. Repeated headings. Clean answers. Simple takeaways. Everything is designed to be scanned, summarized, extracted, and fed back into another system.

 

I understand why this is happening. People want fast answers, and technology is evolving to deliver them. There is nothing wrong with wanting to know where a trail begins, whether a route is safe, how long a section might take, or what kind of terrain to expect. Practical information matters. On a long-distance journey, it can matter very much.

 

But something important is getting lost in the process.

 

If only because life, the world, and travel often cannot be presented or understood as a set of simplified answers.

 

The experiences that stay with us are usually the ones we did not expect. The trail we almost did not take. The wrong turn that led to somewhere beautiful. The person who stopped to ask whether we needed help. The storm we watched rolling across the prairies. The tiny town that offered more kindness than any famous destination. The day that looked ordinary in the morning and became unforgettable by evening.

 

Those moments do not fit neatly into lists or search queries. They are not always useful in the way the internet now defines usefulness. They do not always answer “what is the best,” “how do I,” “can you,” or “should I.” They cannot be reduced to FAQs and listicals.  Often, they do something more important. They ask us to pay attention – because if we don’t, we miss out on the opportunity to see so much more of the world.

Across the Trans Canada Trail, that was the lesson we kept learning. The trail was never one thing. It was a coastal footpath, a rail trail, the shoulder of a road, a city pathway, a prairie concession, a forest track, a ferry crossing, a mountain route, a highway edge, a waterway, a detour, and sometimes a gap that had to be solved with patience and humility. Ontario alone became a vast, almost bewildering patchwork of pathways, roadways, waterways, urban trails, Canadian Shield, Great Lakes shoreline, northern roads, the Sudbury Camino, the Casque Isles Trail, and Sleeping Giant Provincial Park.

 

No quick answer could explain that.  No summary could make it simple without making it false.

 

What happens when Stories become Substitutes for Experience

 

At the same time, another change is happening behind the scenes. Stories, photographs, and personal experiences shared online are now being absorbed into enormous systems of reuse. Some of this happens through artificial intelligence. Some of it happens through scraping. Some of it happens through websites that exist largely to gather other people’s work, rearrange it, and publish it again in a more generic form – all generalized, all simplified.

 

The result is that travel content is increasingly detached from the people who actually lived it, and stories as related by AI and Google Search results are becoming substitutes for lived experience.

Photos appear on websites we have never heard of. Stories are summarized and repackaged across dozens of platforms. Experiences that once belonged to a specific place and moment are flattened into generic answers to generic questions. Sometimes our own photographs appear on websites that seem to claim them as their own. Sometimes our stories are retold without context, as if they happened to someone else entirely. Sometimes a complicated journey becomes a tidy guide. Sometimes years of walking are compressed into a few confident paragraphs by someone, or something, that was never there.

 

It creates a strange feeling: watching real experiences slowly dissolve into anonymous content or being claimed as another’s journey.  This is not really about credit alone, although credit matters. It is not only about ownership, although authorship matters too. The internet has always been a place where ideas circulate, evolve, and inspire other ideas. We have never objected to people being inspired by our work. In fact, that was the point. We wanted people to see a trail, a bird, a landscape, or a quiet stretch of Canada and think: maybe I could go there too, maybe if they can do that, I can go further.

 

What feels different now is that the stories themselves are becoming substitutes for the experiences they were meant to inspire.

 

Instead of reading a story and feeling the urge to explore, the system increasingly encourages something else: stay where you are, ask another question, scroll a little further, let the summary stand in for the world.

 

In some ways, it makes sense. If technology can provide a quick answer to any question about any destination, why bother going there yourself? Why get muddy? Why be uncertain? Why stand in the rain beside a confusing trail junction? Why misjudge the distance between towns? Why learn, slowly and sometimes uncomfortably, that the world is more complicated than the plan?

 

But travel was never about simple answers.

 

Role of Travel, Importance of Lived Experiences

 

Travel is about uncertainty. It is about the moment when the map stops being helpful, and curiosity has to take over. It is about stepping into a place you have never been and discovering that reality is always more complex than any description. It is about challenging your assumptions, discovering new perspectives and going on to ask better questions.

 

The internet can tell you that Manitoba contains prairie, boreal forest, extreme heat, rail trails, and the Crow Wing route. But it cannot tell you what it felt like to walk out of Whiteshell Park, into the flat opening of the prairie, under a hard sun, with little water and a horizon that seemed to keep moving away from you. It can list trails and towns and provide fixed distances, but it cannot reproduce the accumulation of feeling that came from walking from South Whiteshell to Pinawa, to Winnipeg, along the Crow Wing Trail, and turn north following beside the Rossburn Subdivision Trail, and the Crocus Trail as the landscape gradually changed beneath our feet.

 

It can tell you British Columbia has mountains, trestles, tunnels, the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, the Fraser River, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and the western terminus at Clover Point. But it cannot stand with you in the cold  and see fresh snow on the peaks, or understand that the landscape has changed overnight. It cannot know the mixture of relief and exhaustion that comes from reaching the Pacific after years of walking west.

 

It can tell you Alberta stretches from the Iron Horse Rail Trail and ranch country to Edmonton, Calgary, the Rocky Mountain Legacy Trail, the High Rockies Trail, and Elk Pass. But it cannot feel the shift from open prairie to foothills to mountains in the mind. It cannot understand how a route that looks clear on a map can become a series of decisions about weather, traffic, fatigue, danger, and whether continuing on is worth the risk.

 

That is what worries me about this new version of the internet. Not that it gives people information. Information is useful. Not that it summarizes. Summaries have their place. But that it can make the world feel already known and simplify everything down so much that it has no meaning and no relationship to the real world.

 

And a world that feels already known is a world people may stop entering with curiosity.

A trail becomes content. A town becomes a listicle. A bird becomes a stock image. A lifetime memory becomes an FAQ for AI to read. A journey becomes something consumed rather than something lived.

 

The Complexity and Beauty of the World

 

Yet the world remains exactly as it has always been: beautiful, unpredictable, and far too complex to fit into a list of bullet points.

 

The best parts of travel are often inefficient. They take time. They require attention. They refuse to be optimized. You cannot summarize your way into the feeling of walking into a new province. You cannot Google your way into the kindness of strangers. You cannot search-result your way into the humility that comes from being wrong about a place or knowing you have pushed too far. You cannot generate the particular silence of an empty road in the Arctic at night, the smell of wet forest after rain, the sound of Snow Geese filling the sky, or the feeling of finally reaching an ocean you have been walking toward for years.

 

No algorithm can replicate that.  No summary can capture the feeling of standing somewhere for the first time or seeing something unexpected. 

 

Stories matter because they are not only containers for information. They are invitations. They ask us to slow down long enough to imagine the world as something alive, layered, and unfinished. At their best, they do not close curiosity down. They open it.

 

That is why all of this matters beyond our own photographs, our own blogs, or our own frustration. If travel writing becomes only a source of extracted answers, then we lose the very thing that made it worth reading in the first place. We lose the hesitation, the contradiction, the weather, the confusion, the tenderness, the long approach, the partial understanding, and the sense that the world is always larger than what we know how to say about it.

 

The internet will continue to change. Of course it will. Search engines will change. Artificial intelligence will change and evolve. The ways people find, read, and reuse stories and information will likewise adapt and change.

 

The real question is whether storytelling will still have a place within a world increasingly shaped by digital content.

 

Perhaps the task now is not to write for the machine, but to keep writing past it. To keep telling stories slowly enough that they resist being flattened. To keep placing names, weather, birds, roads, mistakes, kindness, and uncertainty back into the frame. To remember that the purpose of sharing a journey is not to replace the journey for someone else, but to remind them that the world is still there, waiting beyond the screen.

 

Because stories do something that algorithms cannot.  They remind us that the world is not something to be summarized.  It is something to be entered, something to be experienced, something to be lived in.

 

See you on the trail.