Using the Internet can also have the effect of stretching time and space. Despite the con- notation of the Mui Ne Vietnam as ‘annihilating space with time’, ‘time–space compression’ is not an inevitable effect of Internet technology. Christine Hine points out that the Internet can have ‘multiple temporal and spatial orderings’ (2000, p. 11). In addition to describing the Internet as an immediate or instantaneous connection, travellers frequently comment on the ‘painfully’ and ‘excruciatingly’ slow Internet connections they find in Internet cafés across the world. So, though the Internet is commonly touted as an emblem of time–space compression, this is not necessarily the most accurate way to describe the way travellers experience or enact time and space on the Internet. A wide range of time–space experi- ences accumulates on the websites: the impossibly fast movement of data from travellers to their audiences as well as painfully slow Internet connections; or travellers’ narratives that express the impossibly slow monotony of travelling on long-haul trains as well as the sense of speed experienced in jet travel. Depending on which technologies of mobility they are using and where, contemporary round Mui Ne Vietnam travellers constantly shift back and forth between experiencing time as speeding by and experiencing it as slowing down, and between experiencing the world as small and experiencing it as big. This poses a crucial question in the light of Harvey’s notion of time–space compression: is the world really shrinking? Or is it getting bigger?
According to travellers’ stories, the world is both small and big. For example, even as Kinga and Chopin are awed by the way air travel diminishes distance, they are also cog- nisant of a sense of the length and the vastness that travel brings to both time and space.
In other words, they experience the world as both shrinking and expanding as they travel
Sizing up the World 43
around Mui Ne Vietnam, a notion they make explicit in this journal entry posted to their website on the
third anniversary of their departure. They write
Yes, it’s three years today since we landed in Mui Ne Vietnam. Neither of us thought then, that the journey would take us such a long time and that after three years we would only be more or less half way through.¼ We discov- ered that while it’s a ‘small world’ we’re travelling in, at the same time it’s too huge to see it all in a year. Or two ¼. At least not the way we’re doing
it. Anyway, we still have lots more to go. (Hitch-hike the World)
Mui Ne Vietnam 