Shadowcasting tourism knowledge through media: Self-driving sex cars? (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
This article analyses the content of 2,742 news items on tourismification and tourismphobia in Barcelona published in the Spanish press between 2008 and 2020. Based on Foucault's theoretical approach to the study of discourse and applying a content analysis method, the social construction of a tourism model is critically analysed through the examination of tourismification narratives. The dominant discourse on tourismification expressed by the Spanish press is organised into three narrative axes: the use of a local community point of view to highlight mass tourism as a contested social issue; governance as a solution for tourismification within the framework of the debate about the city's tourist identity; and the use of tourism-phobia as a formula for politicisation of the discourse on tourism, to influence public opinion and develop power relations. The recognition of the problems and impacts of tourism in the press discourse proposes a narrative that incorporates a critical reading of tourism in place of the previous growthbased discourse. However, while this discourse advocates for tourism as an invariable, necessary and strategic element of the city, even during episodes of extreme tourism crisis, it fights shy of alternative approaches that call for a "transformative turn" in tourism.
Mediating Touristic Dangerscapes: The Semiotics of State Travel Warnings
2010
Official ‘travel warnings’ are recurrently published by the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in Israeli media, with the aim of informing potential tourists about the dangers of terrorism aimed at Israelis who travel abroad. These travel warnings, which juxtapose menacing warnings with tranquil visual representations of touristic vacationscapes, have recently gained a considerable public attention and have sprouted discussions around local tourism and identities. In this article, we offer a discursive and semiotic analysis of 55 travel warning articles, which appeared between 1998 and 2010 in printed and digital Hebrew press in Israel. We address visual and textual aspects of the articles and ask how they represent and mediate touristic vacationscapes. Following recent developments (‘turns’) in both tourism studies and media studies, we argue that these warnings articles construct multilayered spatial–visual representations of tourist destinations, which amount to a unique genre of tourism imagery in and of itself. Focussing on travel warnings addressing Israeli tourists who travel to the Eastern shores of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, we find that these combined or hybrid images and spaces present a convergence of two contemporary systems of representation, related to tourism and mass media, respectively, and construct a charged and mediated cultural space in Israeli collective imagination.
When Travel Meets Tourism: Tracing Discourse inTony Wheeler's Blog
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2012
This paper examines a guidebook publisher's travel blog in order to shed light on the tensions between discourses of travel and tourism. Tony Wheeler's Blog is written by the founder of Lonely Planet and is hosted on the company's website. I argue that the "blog" title implies that the text has certain intrinsic qualities, some of which are evident while others are not. I also argue that this text is an online travel narrative that draws on the discourses of travel, tourism, and blogging itself. Travel and tourism are often seen as conflicting, and the traveller-tourist dichotomy has found expression in various travel-related narratives. So Tony Wheeler's Blog becomes a site of negotiation between the discourses of travel and tourism and in so doing takes on certain aspects of the blog while omitting or only imitating others.
Travel journalism has been profoundly affected by developments in social media technology and the rise of user generated content. Yet, in comparison with news and political reporting, it has received limited academic attention. Online travel content is vast and is gaining significant readership figures; this chapter examines the modalities typical of this content and considers the ways in which it is changing the nature of traditional, professional travel journalism. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of 'distinction' (1984), this chapter explores how the authority and expertise of the professional travel journalist now competes with the more organic, less economically driven displays of 'symbolic mastery' in travel blogs. A form of multimodal critical discourse analysis was used to study fifty British broadsheet newspaper articles from 2014-2016 and compared with a survey of the top fifty travel blogs of 2016. This chapter finds that traditional travel journalism is characterised by the imparting of knowledge of destinations' "terroir" (what to do, what to see), whereas the user generated content of travel blogs is typified by more personal, experientially driven content. It notes the emergence of 'hybrid' forms of travel content that span the 'amateur' / 'professional' divide and argues that this is suggestive of the power of travel journalism's increasingly active, consumer/producer audience.
Sustainability, 2021
Tourism has always stood out in terms of economic opportunities and personal enjoyment.However, the problem of overtourism has emerged in recent years in urban contexts of cities withdiversified economies. Overtourism has become—to a much greater extent than any other variablechallenging the sustainability of the tourism model—an object of public debate and the media reflectthis debate, which, in the case of Spain, is concentrated in the term “tourismphobia.” This paperaims to analyse the two main opposing narratives reflected in the Spanish media on the emergenceof the problem of tourismphobia and that defined what was happening to influence both publicopinion and public policymakers themselves. The methodological approach used is the narrativepolicy framework (NPF), which considers public policies as a social construct, shaped by particularideologies, values, and worldviews that are structured in narratives. The conclusions point to the factthat even though the “success in danger” narrative was the winner, for the first time the sustainabilityof the country’s tourism model is being broadly questioned and by very diverse actors. It is also clearthat in order to change the trajectory of consolidated tourism policies, it is necessary to build tangiblepublic policy alternatives that can be articulated and implemented by public actors. Based on thefindings of the paper, future lines of research could use the “Narrative Policy Framework” for theanalysis of sustainable tourism policies or for the study of overtourism in different countries froma comparative perspective.
The exploration of the representation of 'others' in travel journalism is widely acknowledged as a well-established line of academic enquiry (Fursich and Kavoori, 2001). It has led to consideration of the ways in which such representations draw on and resonate with older forms of travel writing (Cocking 2009; Fowler, 2007). The intention of this chapter is to further explore potential 'circuits' of representations in contemporary British travel journalism and user generated TripAdvisor reviews on holiday destinations in the Middle East. In so doing, these representational practices are traced from 'orientalist' imaginings in 19 th Century British travel writing to their articulation in early tourism marketing and travel journalism on the Middle East. In travel content drawn from current travel journalism and TripAdvisor it finds that whilst there is widespread use of modes of representation that draw from earlier, 'Arabist' forms of travel writing, also present are more emergent, 'open' forms of representation. In this way it seeks to illustrate the representational trajectories, the spheres of significatory influence that ebb and flow between travel journalism, online reviews and tourism practices.
Framing overtourism: A critical news media analysis
Current Issues in Tourism, 2019
To better comprehend how the news media frames modern overtourism, content analysis was conducted on 202 news articles. Results suggest that root causes of overtourism are largely overlooked and the focus is on reporting tourist numbers and impacts on local. The growth agenda continues to be promoted in the backdrop of overtourism news, while responsibilities to mitigate negative impacts are attributed to cities, communities and tourists. There is a need to explore responsibilities of diverse tourism actors in addressing overtourism, along with discussions on alternatives to the pro-growth paradigm and the industrial work-home-travel model that fuel modern mass tourism.
Beyond the Mass Tourism Stereotype
Journal of Travel Research, 2015
Low-priced tour packages are mass tourism power projection sites where providers attempt to restrict tourist power. This study adopts a hybrid design that incorporates dual analytic autoethnography and blog analysis, sharing not only the authors’ experiences and insights into the negotiation between supplier attempts to disempower tourists and reciprocal efforts of tourists to self-empower in all-inclusive tour packages, but also viewpoints of other tour participants collected during the tours and from the Internet. Tour experiences were negotiated through power exchanges. In this “powerscape,” we were subjected to disempowerment strategies, including domination, intimidation, reliance creation, and trust building, while our self-empowerment ranged from active resistance to nonresistance. Different disempowerment strategies appear to solicit specific reactions. Our exploratory study provides insight into the power dynamics implicit in mass tourism and identifies several contextual f...
Travel journalism is experiencing a continued period of great change and transition. The economic model of print journalism is increasingly unsustainable in the context of freely accessible, and often user generated, online content. It is in this context that this chapter sets out the aims of this book. Specifically, it outlines the ways in which it seeks to explore how this context of transition is changing the representational characteristics and practices of the travel journalism. That is, how travel journalism represents the world and how technological development and the emergence of new ways of monetising content are shaping the representational practices and potential of this form of journalism. It outlines the ways in which each chapter addresses aspects of these issues. This discussion is contextualised by a review of existing studies of travel journalism from the field of journalism studies as well as other cognate areas.
Tourism Social Science Series, 2000
The term ''social media'' generally refers to the multi-point creation and distribution of electronic communication. It is understood in opposition to broadcasting. This chapter explains the history of media studies as a means of comprehending these newer media in the context of tourism. They need to be studied in the light of existing media, even as we seek a new form of truly interdisciplinary work that brings existing approaches together. Taking its agenda from social movements as well as intellectual ones, and its methods from social sciences and humanities, Media Studies 3.0 should focus on gender, race, class, sexuality, sustainability, and pleasure across national lines-an apt setting for those working on tourism.