What if 'On the Road' had been written today?

KEROUAC TODAY: With modern technology in the realm of commuting and travel, what would Jack Kerouac's On the Road look like if it had been written today? Ari Schulman explores the question. "While On the Road’s reputation rather outstrips the literary merits of the book itself, the mythology surrounding it taps into our deeper aspirations for the possibility, freedom, and adventure granted by travel, and deserves to be taken seriously in understanding what we seem to want out of travel today. The mythology of the road has come to be wrapped up in our desire to imagine ourselves as part of stories like Kerouac’s, to experience them for ourselves, and so to partially emulate them in our own journeys. How, then, would the new technology of location affect an On the Road today? Can we imagine its characters, and by extension ourselves, escaping into the Western night, navigating by GPS and choosing where to go with Yelp, supplied with surrounding-relevant multimedia by GeoTour, encountering city streets with their iPhones held up and overlaying the view, and still having the same adventure? Something about this image is absurd."