This generation of writers arrived when the world really was beginning to unfold and people were able to travel with greater ease than ever before. It has been said that producing literature is a luxury often reserved for those with wealth and leisure. Certainly the 18th and 19th centuries, with their great technological leaps forward in human transportation, supplied fertile ground for literary men and women to explore.

As a result, it became common for the biggest names in fiction to take a detour through the travel genre every so often. All one had to do was pick up a book, and whole new worlds suddenly were accessible. If you didn’t have the money, the latest Twain would have been the next best thing.

So where’s the travel literature today?

Although still a tad pricey, it’s quite simple now to get to just about any corner of the globe — just hop on a plane. Opportunities abound for anyone, not just writers, to visit new places and new cultures.

And that’s exactly the problem, of course.

In today’s hyperconnected world, there are few frontiers remaining. Bloggers are the new travel writers, Facebook photo albums probably have more than half of the mapped world on camera and while literature still examines the influence of geographical identity, it has become less of a genre and more an accepted aspect of human experience.

Contemporary immigrant writers hold fast to their heritage, not like their historical counterparts — the adventuring travelers who always were seeking something unseen. We’re so multicultural that we get confused and lose track of our identity.

It’s not just that the literary attitude toward travel has changed. It’s that other avenues have opened up and rendered travel writing less relevant.

One needs only to turn to Woody Allen’s recent filmography. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then movies such as “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and “Midnight in Paris” outweigh any modern books that might aspire to mimic Henry James’ “A Little Tour in France,” for example.

And the Internet — our computers have become windows through which we can visit virtually anywhere we like in an instant. Why read about someone else’s experiences when you could retrace their route yourself on Google Earth?

However, we must acknowledge our limits. The opportunities of digital reality might lay out the globe in high-definition video and images, but this sense of connectedness can be misleading. There’s a difference between zooming in on the ruins of an ancient Scottish castle by satellite and actually standing before it yourself.

Why, besides the obvious? It’s because the Internet tends to act as a shortcut, skipping all the smell-the-roses steps like the flight into London, the train ride through the English countryside, the bite of the sun in a cold snap and the sense of history that rises out of the stones.

I know this because, for the first time, I have left the North American continent and actually traveled to a place that, until now, had existed for me only as pixels on a screen and an idea in my imagination. I am taking part in a study abroad internship at the University of Cambridge in England, and last weekend, I visited a friend at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where we walked to the ruins of a castle that has been standing for centuries.

What it comes down to is this: travel writing, which began as early as the second century with Pausanias’ “Description of Greece,” has evolved to include a diversity of media such as film, television and the Internet, all of which have brought us closer than ever to the world around us, but which inevitably leave us with our noses pressed against an impassable, if remarkably transparent, glass window.

There’s good news here though. Along with all our advances in bringing other places to ourselves digitally, we also have made it simple to take ourselves to other places. MSU’s study abroad programs are some of the best and most expansive in the nation.

The Internet can take us a long way, certainly. But now that I’ve finally done it, I know — what anyone who has done any traveling already knows — that you can only really experience a place by going there.

This summer, I will be writing from Cambridge and my travels in Europe, hopefully drawing inspiration from James, Twain and the rest of the greats. Because there’s no competing with Google for sheer documentation, but as far as telling a story and making sense of the world, writing remains an indispensable tool.

Craig Pearson is a guest columnist at The State News and a biochemistry junior. Reach him at pears53@msu.edu.