Roads aren’t real anymore. All roads are now metaphors about the road. Most people would rather stay home. In their homes they feed on lots of clichés about the road so that they won’t feel as if they’ve stopped moving. Only the dead stop moving and most people don’t want to be dead. Every couch potato dreams himself or herself on the road, and they are, thanks to TV, which gives them the illusion that they are somewhere else. Everyone lives on TV now, which is everywhere and nowhere. People are in the Amazon, in the Arctic, on the streets of Detroit, in the Southwest, in San Francisco all at once, by remote control. When TV travelers do travel they go to places they’ve seen on TV, straight into the tourist postcards and never see what they haven’t already seen at home. If they stumble on something that’s never been on TV they shoot it with the video camera and then it’s on TV. They go from postcard to postcard by plane so they never touch the road.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century