Gazing at the Box:

Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization (Internetity)


In this paper I suggest that modernity yields one interpretation of touristic experience, postmodernity may construct another, and Thurot and Thurots’ interpretation of advertising discourse produces yet another. Tourism,[1] now, in the context of the growth of the Internet and information technology[2] ("internetity") supersedes and incorporates these previous analyses and produces other interpretations of tourism with characteristics which I shall identify.

In general, I shall argue that touristic experience in the context of globalization[3] and the Internet[4] has changed in specific ways: by increasing the role of representation, i.e. simulacrum (also see Pinker, pp. 77-78) in shaping the touristic experience; by both extending and lessening the ideological distinctions (micro-milieu, macro-milieu) articulated in Thurot and Thurot’s tourism analysis; and by extending the touristic experience through information and advertising.

I shall also argue that virtual tourism by surfing the web for museums, monuments, and other heritage sites, such as for UNESCO World Heritage sites or the online Louvre, is a new form of tourism, different from mobile tourism.

In addition, I want to suggest that these new Internet-related touristic developments all contribute to the way one might model the vicarious experience of tourism, both digital and ‘mobile.’

In conclusion, I want to suggest that globalization and the Internet create new conditions of social existence where the societal dynamic of integration (due to globalization and digital technologies) vs. cultural identity contributes to reshaping the touristic experience. For tourism, which is now global in scope, the Internet amplifies, facilitates, and extends the tourist’s opportunities, knowledge-base and experience.

As both digital and mobile tourism increase in the context of globalization, the potential for cultural integration also increases, reshaping cultural identities. Internet touristic discourse, in potentially superseding and incorporating modernity, post-modernism, and advertising touristic discourse, shapes a new hyper-touristic experience.

 

The Internet and information technology, it can be argued, offers the reader an opportunity to understand the touristic experience theoretically in the context of the globalization that emerges from a MacCannell, Urry, Thurot and Thurot, and Parrinello tradition of touristic interpretation.

In the “The Tourist,” MacCannell uses tourism as a heuristic to interpret modernity. For MacCannell, touristic experience is a search for 'authentic' experience (a problematic term) in a world where people, as a condition of modernity, are alienated; tourism is a form of liminal, heightened experience, of seeking an experience of authenticity outside the structure of mundane, ordinary, alienated work life.

Post-modern tourism interpretation suggests that the touristic experience is really knowingly played as a game which is an elaborately constructed representation, whereby the tourist collaborates with the people who stage touristic sites in an ‘inauthentic’ touristic pastiche, and where “no single, authentic tourist experience”[5] is possible. The tourist, in other words, expects staged authenticity, but also expects a different level of ‘true authenticity’ to exist.

Thurot and Thurot take the analysis of tourism a step further than MacCannell and Urry by arguing that advertising discourse significantly shapes how the tourist comes to desire both what s/he is about to see as well as the experience itself. A micro-milieu of urban intellectuals who create and manipulate representations of touristic sites shape desire and choice in the consumer, or macro-milieu. Tourism may be a search for authenticity as well as a game, but more significantly, it’s shaped by image-makers; tourism is a product of an industry.

“The role of advertising therefore consists of transmitting intact to the periphery . . . a model in the form of messages to which the mass media contribute the necessary force, while the larger social milieu verifies that the messages and the goods follow the expected norm.”[6]

Thurot and Thurot argue that MacCannell “told his readers about a society which had virtually disappeared.”[7] Thurot and Thurot might argue that tourism doesn’t reflect the alienation of modernity, but rather reflects people who are trying to follow a particular lifestyle, important to their own culture.[8]

MacCannell, Urry, and Thurot and Thurot embody a tradition of interpreting tourism in the contexts of modernity, post-modernity and advertising / industry discourse. This tradition attempts to explain tourism first as a search for authenticity in response to alienation, a condition of modernity, then as a game in which the tourist knowingly and willingly participates, and then as a shaping of desire and experience by an elite group of advertisers / early tourists (micro-milieu). By delineating key aspects of this tradition of touristic experience analysis, I want to provide a basis from which to examine some possible ways tourism has developed in relation to the Internet, and in the context of the Internet and globalization.

Giulia Liebman Parrinello adds to this contextualizing tradition of tourism interpretation by analyzing it within the context of information technology. Parrinello’s goal is to ‘relocate’ the tourist through a deeper reading of cognitive and bodily aspects of technologies, revealing how these aspects are all connected. She seeks a more global and evolutionary perspective, an up-to-date framework for the mobile touristic experience. She 1) examines cues from the so-called new sciences to see which theories or hypotheses have already been implemented or could serve as benchmarks for tourism studies; 2) analyzes the concept of mobility; 3) revisits technologies in their relationship with the tourist, and 4) concludes with “an enlarged and enriched understanding of the tourist’s embodiment, in the sense of knowledge and technologies.”[9]

In terms of epistemology, Parrinello surveys various contemporary models of cognition, emotion, experience, and brain science -- from symbolic models, Piaget’s genetic epistemology, radical reconstructivism, Artificial Intelligence to connectionist models -- to assess which might be most suitable for empirical and experimental touristic studies. She suggests that knowledge and observations from any of these fields would affect touristic theories concerning “environmental perception, tourist image, destination image, motivation, and decision making.”[10]  Due to the incomplete nature of current mind / brain paradigms, it is difficult to fully understand the touristic experience because mind/brain models are still inadequate. But such contributions do push present theories of touristic experience toward scientific approaches.

Parrinello argues that mobility is the crux of touristic activity, that without it, tourism wouldn’t exist. “In a nutshell, without the tourist’s mobile experience there would be no tourism.”[11] She suggests too that web surfing

in the network as a new form of psychic wandering, can be considered a partly new form of nomadism, because the time and space co-ordinates in the cyberspace are not settled and movement is fluid, shapeless (Maffesoli 1997, P. Levy 1995). Appropriately applied to the phenomenon of drifter tourism by Cohen (1973), nomadism is certainly a suggestive (impressive) cue, but it does not give a productive interpretation for the study of the tourist mobility.[12]

She suggests however that web surfing doesn’t yield a productive interpretation for studying tourist mobility. She cites the concept of tourism as a circular process as a fruitful way to deepen scientific analysis. Referring to Frigden (1984) she suggests that the circular process of tourism involves a number of stages: Pre-trip, Anticipation / Motivation, Travel to the destination, On Site behavior, Return travel, and Recollection. She highlights the significance of the accumulation of experience phase that is at risk for cognitive overload.  Sensory motor action / learning processes become part of circular movement stemming from experience gained in anticipation: i.e. anticipation’s experience resolves into sensory motor cognition and then presumably to experience again. For Parrinello, then, touristic mobility might be viewed “as a special case of sensory-motor learning process.”[13] She concludes, therefore, that virtual tourism is precluded because it lacks mobility.

These traditions each contextualize tourism in terms of significant humanistic, interpretive conditions. By framing tourism as expressions of Modernity, Post-Modernity, advertising / industry discourse, and technology, MacCannell, Urry, Thurot and Thurot, and Parrinello attempt to show that tourism, the largest industry in the world, is shaped in response to large-scale social conditions . I want to suggest that not only do these conditions continue to influence tourism, especially today’s new technologies which Parrinello identifies, but that the Internet and globalization are significant forces reshaping the entire touristic experience. In addition, I want to later argue that virtual tourism develops out of Internet technologies, contrary to Parrinello’s assertion that sensory-motor learning is an integral part of tourism.

 

The Box

To understand the significance of the Internet in shaping experience, especially touristic experience, I want to review some significant interpretations of key mass mediums.

In the mid 1960s, the prescient, difficult-to-understand, Toronto-based media theorist and philosopher Marshal McLuhan suggested that the advent of television represented a qualitative change in the way society shares information and communicates with its citizens. TV diffused faster than any other medium in history and transmits information in a fundamentally different way where what the viewer takes away is not every image displayed -- there are too many -- by an overall impression. McLuhan's well-known dictum that  “ The Medium is the Message” emphasized the dominance of TV as a conveyor of information to a mass audience and not the individual TV messages themselves. In suggesting that "We are going to live in a global village" he presciently suggested that all of society would experience a sense of the ‘whole’ through the electronic medium of TV and later through other technological mediums.

In assessing why TV should have such a major impact, one of McLuhan's researchers suggested 3 reasons: i) TV was a powerful sensorial simulation of reality; ii) TV produced stories allowing the viewer to relate in easy ways to an old human story telling tradition; and iii) TV is a medium that requires the least amount of personal effort, the path of least resistance. TV offered a passive system that disconnects individuals from the rest. The massive use of TV required a very little amount of psychological effort.   

Television helped to define what mass communication is: information from one source to many receivers. While radio was also significant as a form of one-to-many mass communication, it was also connected with other activities such as commuting and working, and not solely for passive reception.[14] McLuhan’s arguments help shape an understanding of the significance of the Internet as a mode of mass communication.

In the 1980s, the 'new media' transformed classic media. Cable, digital TV, satellite TV, VCR, TV/VCR, video on demand became the dominant modes of mass communication. These were mainly financed around the world both through advertising and government control. Over the past two decades a major regulatory transformation occurred around the world; the US was the exception. For example, in 1980, Europe had only 6 private networks; by 2000, there were 150. There was an explosion of privatized and specialized channels.[15]

The impacts on the audience were many. The unified wall of mass media embodied in ‘classic media’ exploded. Specific audiences became targeted at specific times. Specialized channels became the norm – i.e. movies, shopping, violence, sports – albeit driven by images of what were possibly not well researched publics. The business model changed from advertising to subscribe and pay per view models. The transition from ‘classic media’ to “new media” has been dramatic. For example, in 1976, network TV had 95% of TV’s audience. By the year 2000, network TV had only 50% of TV’s audience, while much of the rest of media’s audience was in the hand’s of the ‘new media.’[16]

Numerous Internet related projects are coming to supersede ‘new media.’ The current project of Internet TV, for example, is an unsuccessful attempt. Partly a technological problem, 100s of billions of dollars were lost trying to develop it. What really happened was that people, as usual, adapted technologies for their own purposes, using the technologies separately: using Internet for active purposes and TV, separately, for entertainment.[17]

The tourist can now use the Internet for numerous purposes all of which contribute to shaping the touristic experiences in all its phases. Not only do people now web surf as a form of tourism, the role of the Internet itself as medium and marker changes the nature of tourism. Not only do web sites act as markers (of sites to visit – visiting marked sites is one definition of tourism) for tourists and not only does content play a significant role in the touristic experience, but vis a vis McLuhan, the Internet itself in combination with content profoundly changes touristic discourse; the Medium is the Message. As McLuhan said in the mid 1960s:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.[18] 

McLuhan’s work presages Parrinello’s work. In her paper “New Sciences and High Technology in Tourism Research and Praxis; Mobility and the New Sciences; The Technological Body and the Subject,” Parrinello examines the relationship between mind / brain paradigms and touristic experience to assess which kind of paradigms might be most suitable for empirical and experimental touristic studies. In a globalized world, global tourism, interacting with, shaping and shaped by the Internet, shapes a new discourse which “extends our central nervous system itself in a global embrace”[19] and creates new opportunities for empirical and experimental studies in relation to the box.

 

Globalization, the Internet, and Tourism

Historically speaking, tourism involved traveling (mobility); the Internet changes this key element considerably, both lessening the need to travel and offering more information about more sites, possibly thus creating more desire to travel. ‘Classic media’ and ‘new media’ both contributed to a globalizing world by shaping what people see and know. Manuel Castells argues that fundamentally “We live in media space” – that there is no life outside of TV. He suggests that that is what feeds our minds; jokingly, he says there are 10 people in the world who don’t watch TV and 5 of them live in Berkeley.[20] The Internet extends, amplifies, deepens and enhances this and whatever we do in society.[21] The Internet enables global online interaction for the Tourist at all phases of the touristic experience.

Globalization which can be defined, for the sake of argument, “as the increasingly rapid and dramatic movement of goods, capital, information and people across ever more permeable geographical, cultural and political boundaries”[22]shapes both the scale and quality of touristic experience in a time of global tourism. The scale and scope of flows of people, due to global processes, information technologies and the extension of transportation systems extends in more directions, too. Global tourism gives tourists access to an ever-expanding number of touristic destinations, more frequent travel opportunities and in more varieties of ways, than modern or postmodern tourism. More physical sites are consequently developed in more distant places as are virtual sites. The Internet and its advertising potential contribute to shaping these touristic desires through information, e-commerce, etc. Qualitatively, the touristic experience is extended, shaped by more advertising, more possible destinations offering the possibility to carefully select from a panoply of choices.

Through the media, the Internet and shared experiences, touristic transnational experiences are enhanced and extended, potentially contributing to a homogenization of cultures as people share information; the world becomes more integrated relative to national boundaries. Cultural identity, by contrast, which is shaped by community and core values, and which shapes people’s well being, potentially fundamentally changes in response to globalizing forces and the Internet[23]; tourism acts as an agent of some of these changes affecting both the tourist and local communities. This dynamic shapes new aspects of world interaction and supersedes and departs from Modernity, Post-Modernity and advertising / industry touristic discourse.

 

Increasing Role of Representation in Shaping Touristic Experience

The Internet is a medium of hyper-linked representations significantly shaping the discourse of tourism by offering both producers and consumers more information and approaches to sell tours, heritage, sites, monuments, as well as more touristic choices and possibilities. As the world tourism organization suggests 

If a destination is not on the Web then it may well be ignored by the millions of people who now have access to the Internet and who expect that every destination will have a comprehensive presence on the Web. The web is the new destination marketing battleground and if you are not there fighting then you cannot expect to win the battle for tourist dollars.[24]

The Internet also lessens the distinction between producer and consumer by allowing ‘consumer tourists’ to produce, for example, web content to mark touristic sites, thereby becoming producers. The web also similarly offers ‘producers’ opportunities as consumers. The touristic experience in the context of the Internet becomes a heuristic not of modernity (MacCannell), not post-modernity (Urry), not advertising discourse (Thurot and Thurot) but is enhanced and amplified by it.

The Internet exponentially increases touristic site representations through text and images. The Internet, a searchable, hyper-linked assemblage of IP (internet protocol) addresses capable of displaying information and images shapes the tourist’s experience. Within this worldwide network, an infinite possible number and combination of web pages are accessible. Unlike other media, the Internet as a technology allows for communication, not on a one-to-one basis (like the telephone), or a one-to-many basis (e.g. the TV and radio), but on a many-to-many (scalable) basis. In addition, any one can post almost anything to the Internet at a relatively low cost, allowing individual tourists, small businesses, and others to become producers of representations as text and images.

The Internet which is a series of addressing protocols by which data, such as text, images, video and sound translated into binary ones and zeros, can pass through a worldwide network, dramatically increases the role of representation in shaping touristic experience relative to ‘new media’ and ‘classic media.’ Information becomes interactive; choice between a vast number of web sites and addresses exists. Internet technology is characterized by its reproducibility of images; more specific kinds of targeted advertising become possible.

The tourist can utilize the Internet at every step of the touristic experience, from the phases Parrinello outlines - Pre-trip, Anticipation / Motivation, Travel to the Destination, On-Site behavior, Return Travel, and Recollection – through, for example,

  • booking, communication with future destinations, etc., via email relating to pre-trip;
  • to visiting online sites and getting ideas relating to anticipation / motivation;
  • to Internet cafes and stations, global positioning technologies, digital cameras and video, etc. relating to travel to the destination, on-site behavior and return travel;
  • and to creating a web site and revisiting places one has visited online, etc. during recollection.

Linking of other technologies, such as phone, data bases, data management all become possible through the Internet. Time-space compression allows the tourist at all phases of the trip to link or communicate with web sites, people, representations, not physically proximal. Representations hyperlink with representations.

The French sociologist Baudrillard argues that the proliferation of communications through the media creates a montage structuring a unique linguistic reality. He argues that culture is now dominated by simulations where “objects and discourses have no firm origin, no referent, no ground or foundation. In this sense, what Walter Benjamin wrote about “the age of mechanical reproduction,” Baudrillard applies to all reaches of everyday life.”[25] In Baudrillard’s argument “in a commodity, the relation of word, image, meaning and referent is broken and restructured not to the referent of use value or utility, but to desire.”[26] Baudrillard suggests that this “hyperreality” is a new linguistic condition making materialist reductionism and rationalist referentiality impotent.[27] In respect to tourism, both mobile and digital, the experience of the traveler fundamentally changes due to the Internet. In this analysis, tourism as a commodity becomes shaped by simulacrum; tourism on the Internet becomes part of hyperlinked reality.

 

Extension of the ideological distinctions (micro-milieu, macro-milieu)

articulated in Thurot and Thurot’s tourism analysis

The ideological distinctions (micro-milieux, macro-milieux) articulated in Thurot and Thurot’s advertising discourse tourism analysis, become both extended and lessened. Advertising discourse in conjunction with Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” analysis suggests that a micro-milieu shapes the touristic experience in many more ways than previously and in qualitatively different ways, but because the Internet is an open medium, infinite numbers of people can create web content, thus potentially lessening the micro-milieu / macro-milieu distinctions.

While the Internet does exponentially expand the possibilities for touristic site representation and production, with relatively few boundaries to production, the Digital Divide presently does shape who has access to Internet touristic information. The Digital Divide may parallel a Touristic Divide, where only certain groups have access to digital or touristic resources.

One could argue, however, with many notable exceptions, that just as living standards around the world by and large have slowly but steadily improved over the last two centuries, the Internet offers the possibility to continue this development, first by providing the possibility for democratization[28] of not only finance, information and technology, by giving people access to banks, universities, libraries, and communities through online Internet connections and thus more touristic information, and second through the possibility of online touristic surfing. When people around the world see through TV and other communication mediums how more prosperous people live, they can begin to exert pressure on their political leaders for similar standards. This may only expand a micro/macro milieu split, but it also has the potential to reverse this trend. The potential for tourism increases as a consequence of these trends.

 

Internet serves as possible virtual tourism by surfing the web

for museums, monuments, and other memorable sites

Louvre and UNESCO World Heritage sites as examples

While the Internet provides touristic information and advertising to shape the touristic experience, it also offers the possibility for virtual tourism. In the specifically touristic sense of visiting marked sites, it is now possible to visit the Paris-based Web museum, which contains an extensive collection of over 10 million documents including world famous paintings from French impressionists to early masters,[29] to take a virtual tour of 65 selected galleries in the Louvre[30] using Apple’s Quicktime technology, where, using a mouse, one can drag the video image and view a room or space 360 degrees around, zooming in and out to look at paintings and sculpture. A virtual tourist can also presently take about 10 virtual tours of UNESCO’s world heritage sites[31] situated in many places around the world, also using Quicktime and other video technologies. These remarkable technologies reshape the definition of touristic experience as requiring mobility. Tourism to heritage sites and museums, all classic ‘mobile’ sites, can now be accomplished virtually.

World Heritage web sites allow for virtual access from anywhere around the world. The concept of World Heritage changes meaning consequently to target those who have computers. World Heritage Sites (the phrase is an oxymoron because heritage is specific to a cultural history) which were shaped by unique cultural identities over thousands of years now become accessible to the world via the Internet.

While web surfing as virtual touristic experience hardly compares to actually being there, the video technologies are now available for the online tourist to begin to move through virtual worlds. Contrary to Parrinello, I want to argue that mobility isn’t a prerequisite to tourism and that a sensory-motor oriented analysis of tourism eliminates a new form of tourism, one which fits MacCannell’s definition as following offsite markers to onsite markers, but now involving following hyperlinks to hyperlinks. Indeed, only the lack of mobility distinguishes mobile tourism from digital tourism. Otherwise the experiences are potentially very similar, one can potentially visit more touristic sites on the Internet than mobilely, because the tourist need not spend time traveling. However, due to current dearth of content on the World Wide Web, the online tourist can’t experience as much as while traveling but this will change. The virtual touristic experiences in the mind/brain may have similar attributes to sensory-motor ones and virtual tourism shares much in common with mobile.

In addition, the Internet creates a new form of reference where to have a terrestrial presence requires a cyber presence.

If a destination is not on the Web then it may well be ignored by the millions of people who now have access to the Internet and who expect that every destination will have a comprehensive presence on the Web.[32]

The Internet comes to represent the index, or yellow pages (U.S. telephone index to businesses) to what is on the ground; it is by definition a 'mass' medium.

Also similarly to mobile tourism, virtual tourism allows the web surfer to enter a liminal space relative to work, as outlined by MacCannell, lessening the clearly defined stationary/mobile distinction inherent in MacCannell’s interpretation. It’s now possible to practice virtual tourism, lessening the need for a mobile tourist experience, where both experiences can be modeled similarly.

I also want to claim that tourism on the Internet suggests a new definition of tourism distinct from that which might be claimed for the travel novel, TV travel documentaries, the U.S. travel and geography magazine Nationial Geographic, visiting a library, etc. (which tourism as defined by mobility excluded) because, for example, in the above Louvre instance, it involves virtually doing what the mobile tourist does in the Louvre - viewing paintings 360 degrees around in a hall, getting closer and farther, etc. In relation to tourism in general, with the help of a search engine, one uses offsite markers to visit onsite markers; multimedia can provide visual, aural and potentially tactile (virtual reality gloves) and olfactory (see the Paris science museum La Cite which can fill a room with scents (perfumes) of images on a screen, such as the smell of roses when viewing a rose - Cité des Sciences à Paris. http://www.cite-sciences.fr/francais/indexFLASH.htm)

 

 

Modeling the vicarious experience of tourism in the context of the Internet

Web surfing as tourism can have similar vicarious qualities as mobile tourism. U.C. Berkeley Professor Nelson Graburn represents the touristic experience as liminal in contrast to the structured workaday experience of daily life. In the diagram below, for example, the lower levels of the diagram represent ordinary, workaday, structured experience, where the upper level reflects a heightened, liminal, sacred, touristic experience. This structural/liminal model reflects classic anthropological interpretations of ritual experience where an initiate with one status (lower level left – e.g. a boy) symbolically dies as he ritually passes (high level) through initiation to achieve a new status (lower right level – e.g. a man).


This paper attempts to argue that within the context of the Internet, the vicarious experience of the tourist above can best be modeled as being encompassed by the Internet potentially at every phase of the tour, as suggested by the diagram below.

The touristic experience, both mobile and digital, is encompassed by the Internet, potentially affecting all phases of it by amplifying and extending it in multiply ways. In this characterization of tourism as defined as a liminal state, I want to argue that Parrinello’s definition of tourism as requiring mobility needs expansion.

 

Conclusion

In relation to tourism, the Internet and the discourse it shapes are superseding and incorporating modernism, post-modernism, and advertising discourse by both providing the medium through which these conditions are discussed and reshaping them through changing the dynamics of society; tourism is affected in every phase. Alienation as a condition of modernity, in light of Baudrillard and Thurot and Thurot, becomes reshaped by hyperreality; commodification, i.e. the tour, in this new linguistic sphere, no longer links itself to use value or utility but is linked to desire. The tourist responds through wanting more travel.

In the post-modern condition, the tourist acknowledges that s/he are part of a pastiche, a knowingly played game. Post-modernism, in general, also presents by definition, “an incredulity toward meta-narratives.”[33] However, the Internet seems to combine innumerable micro-narratives (web sites, programming languages, web content including post-modern analysis) in one macro-narrative; the touristic experience engages any aspect of this/these post-modern effects in many phases of tourism through the Internet.

Advertising / industry discourse, too, is incorporated into all phases of the Internet and supersedes Thurot and Thurot’s micro-milieu / macro-milieu distinctions, by changing the relationship of one-to-many media analysis inherent in Thurot & Thurot’s analysis to a many-to-many analysis, but where ownership issues of the Internet are in a formation process.

In this paper, I have argued that Internet touristic experience, contrary to Parrinello’s analysis, is digital, in addition to mobile, because similar liminal experiences are experienced in both states.

In potentially superseding and incorporating modernity, post-modernism, advertising touristic discourse, and Parrinello’s analysis, the Internet ("internetity") shapes a new hyper-touristic experience. Gazing at the computer shapes touristic experience in every phase by resituating it in terms of hyper-real networks of information, thus reforming the tourist’s cultural identity.

 


Bibliography

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1995b The Past in the Present in Japan: Nostalgia and Neo-traditionalism in Contemporary Japanese Domestic Tourism. Changes in Tourism: People, Places, Processes. Pp. 49-61. London: Routledge.

1998 A Quest for Identity: Museums and Tourism. Museum International (UNESCO, Paris). Pp. 13-14.

Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic. New York: Random House.

Lanfant, Marie-Françoise, John B. Allcock and Edward M. Bruner, eds. 1995. International Tourism: Identity and Change. London: Sage.

Lanfant, Marie-Françoise. 1999. Patrimony, Identity, Memory and Global Tourism. Translated by CARG and N.H.H. Graburn. Draft version.

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Lyotard, Jean Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition, Trans. Bennington and Massumi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

MacCannell, Dean. 1999. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/mm.html

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Parrinello, Giulia Liebman. 1999. New Sciences and High Technology in Tourism Research and Praxis. Mobility and the New Sciences. The Technological Body and the     Subject. Draft version.

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[1] MacCannell, 42. For the purposes of this paper, tourism can be defined as visiting marked sites, often involving travel, or more specifically, following offsite markers to onsite markers.

[2] I employ Castells’ definition of technology, which he gets directly from Harvey Brooks and Daniel Bell as the “the use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner.” (Brooks, (1971: 13) from unpublished text, quoted with emphasis added by Bell (1976: 29), in Castells, 2000).

[3] Scott. Globalization can be defined, for the sake of argument, as “the increasingly rapid and dramatic movement of goods, capital, information and people across ever more permeable geographical, cultural and political boundaries.”

[4] The Internet is a world wide, decentralized network of computers capable of digitally transmitting data, photos, text, images and video.

[5] Urry, 1990: 100

[6] Thurot and Thurot, 1983: 178

[7] Thurot and Thurot 1983: 188

[8] Thurot and Thurot 1983: 187

[9] Parrinello, p. 2

[10] Parrinello 1999: 7

[11] Parrinello, p. 16

[12] Parrinello, p. 17

[13] Parrinello p. 20

[14] These paragraphs derived from Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 18 Apr 2001

[15] Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 18 Apr 2001

[16] Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 18 Apr 2001

[17] Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 18 Apr 2001

[20] Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 16 Apr 2001

[21] Manuel Castells’ UC Berkeley “Society and Information Technology” Lecture 07 May 2001

[23] See Thomas Friedman’s “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” for a more complete analysis of these themes.

[25] Poster, p. 1

[26] Poster, p. 1

[27] Poster, p. 2

[28] Freidman

[29] http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/

[30] http://www.louvre.fr/

[31] http://www.unesco.org/whc/nwhc/pages/sites/main.htm

[33] Lyotard

 

 

Special thanks to U.C. Berkeley Professor Nelson Graburn and the anthropology 250v "Tourism, Art and Modernity" class

 

Citation:

MacLeod, Scott Gordon K. 2001. Gazing at the Box: Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization. Accessed online March 17, 2009. Berkeley, CA: http://scottmacleod.com/anth250v.htm.

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