Pology.com editor works to put the 'human touch' back in travel mags

Bastardize "anthropology," take it traveling and put it on the Internet. You’re left with Pology.com. Yet this travel website is anything but a bastardization of its namesake.

Pology.com creator and site editor Neil Schwartz said that anthropology, or “cultural exploration” as he wrote on the site, separates his monthly travel magazine from other travel websites.

Schwartz’s “rampant idealism” led him to create Pology.com out of his desire to put a human touch back into the travel magazine. This approach to travel provides more meaningful information than the usual travel guide, Schwartz said.

Other travel magazines "lack visceral connection to the reader," said Schwartz. Free from lists of places to “stay, eat, and shop,” Schwartz said a visitor to the site will find travel logs from contributors who make each destination more viable by making it personal. These "impassioned vignettes" are missing from commercialized travel magazines and are designed to inspire people to leave their homes and experience the world, Schwartz said.

Offering "multiple, conflicting accounts of the world" is the appeal of Pology.com, Schwartz said. Pology embraces cultural immersion and exploration as a method of understanding the complexities and multiple truths of the world. Additionally, Pology encourages individuals’ personal interaction with the rest of the world and reminds readers of the need for cultural acceptance, Schwartz said.

In each issue Schwartz balances locations from each continent with a conscious effort to represent locales from both developed and developing nations, he said.

With this global perspective guiding the content of each issue, Pology is a work in progress, Schwartz said. Expanded content and more dynamic aspects will be introduced to the magazine in the upcoming months with the possibility of taking the magazine to print in the next year, he added.