ABSTRACT
The rooms in the Sumaryo Guest House where I was staying opened onto a sunny central courtyard blooming with hibiscus bushes and furnished with low-slung lawn chairs. Small clusters of three or four travellers, mostly young Western backpackers, would sit in the lawn chairs late into the night engaging in that casual banter and story swapping that tends to characterize backpacker socializing. Mark made an odd exception to this social choreography. I noticed that he had pulled one of those lawn chairs up against a wall and was sitting there alone, hunched over a black portable computer. Wires spilled out of the side of his computer and snaked up the wall where he had rigged a power converter to plug his computer into an outlet. When I asked him what he was doing, he slowly peeled his gaze away from the screen to look at me and then patiently explained that he was keeping a digital travel journal and writing articles about travelling around the world with a computer. These articles were intended as a kind of ‘how-to’ guide for other travellers who might want to bring their computers along, but were worried about security or weight or voltage. He gestured to one of the wires, which led to a phone jack, and explained that he was occasionally able to connect his modem to the phone line in the guest house to transmit his travel journal to friends back home. ‘All my friends get is a postcard’, I joked. But, I quickly figured out that his friends were not like my friends. They were tech-savvy computer nerds who spent most of their time in a university lab and knew how to make computers on opposite sides of the world talk to one another. He clearly wanted to get back to the task at hand, so I wandered off, fascinated and confused by this guy in a guest house in Indonesia communicating, somehow, with his friends on another continent.
