The travel of academics is achingly prominent on Twitter and Instagram, projecting an alluring collective image of globetrotting intellectualism even if many of the individuals contributing to it would resist this connotation. Users of these platforms are exposed to far more details of where there colleagues are going and what they are doing than was previously the case, leaving encounters with travel photography a mundane occurrence where once familiarity with their travelling would have been restricted to a conversation about it, if that.
Obviously, conversations with collaborators and friends might have be extended far beyond this, but these are surely the exception rather than the rule in our working lives. Even if sharing travel stories has been an established, if tedious, feature of academic sociality for many years, encountering images from these travels is still a relative novelty, particularly outside the context of a conversation and the stories being traded within it. Social media use by academics is contributing to an increasingly vivid sense of how much we as a professional group travel. Under these conditions, it is unsurprising that increasing numbers are coming to the conclusion that we travel too much and wondering what it is that we can do about it.
Mark Carrigan 