ABSTRACT
I spent the day just walking around London and sitting on the top of buses, A to Z in hand, spotting street names and watching and listening; people, places, everything. I’d lived in London for seven months now, supply teaching, but always taking the tube. For the first time I started to see how London’s different and rich geographical features, sights and people were connected and related to each other. I could see how I might come to know this city as I know my own city, Birmingham; not by taking the tube. This experience has stayed with me some time and become a metaphor for my ambivalence towards the role of technology in our quest to know and understand more about the world around us. Like the tube, technologies can take us to places faster; places we may not have reached before. But can it also mask our knowledge and understanding, depriving us of the richness and variety of experience to be had from the journey?
