The Media and the Tourist Imagination

Converging Cultures

David Crouch, Rhona Jackson, Felix Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134340651
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Tourism studies and media studies both address key issues about how we perceive the world. They raise acute questions about how we relate local knowledge and immediate experience to wider global processes, and they both play a major role in creating our map of national and international cultures.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores the interactions between tourism and media practices within a contemporary culture in which the consumption of images has become increasingly significant. A number of common themes and concerns arise, and the contributions included are divided between those:

• written from media studies awareness perspective, concerned with the way the media imagines travel and tourism
• written from the point of view of the study of tourism, considering how tourism practices are affected or altered by the media
• that attempt a direct comparison between the practices of tourism and the media.

Incorporating case study material from the UK, the Caribbean, Australia, the US, France and Switzerland, this significant text - ideal for students of culture, media and tourism studies - discusses tourism and the media as separate processes through which identity is constructed in relation to space and place.

1 Introduction
The media and the tourist imagination

David Crouch, Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson

In addressing the connections between the media and tourism this collection breaks new ground. There are a multitude of tourist practices and an extended range of media. We are, therefore, immediately engaged in a process of multiplication. There are many connections, overlaps and disjunctures between tourism and the media and equally between the disciplines of tourist and media studies which the authors here explore in diverse fashion. This new area of investigation throws up pluralism of debate from the very start. It is worth immediately emphasizing the fact that we are dealing with two disciplines as well as the two different objects of study. It will readily become apparent when reading the contributions that there is no one theoretical perspective, no single angle of approach and indeed no obvious starting point.

Nevertheless it is well to think of strategies to encompass such variety of discussion and offer potential for the assorted contributions in this new field of study to become productive through cross-fertilization. At one level this can be addressed by considering recurrent debates across the range of these contributions. At another level it is suggested here that there is an overarching and necessary interdependence between tourism and the media. This is explored through the notion of the tourist imagination. To discuss the tourist imagination as a kind of bridging concept is to recognize the shared vitality which lies as much in the sense of global mobility engendered by the media in our daily consumption of films, books, television, newspapers and photography as it does in the actual activities of travelling, enjoying and exploring. The media are heavily involved in promoting an emotional disposition, coupled with imaginative and cognitive activity, which has the potential to be converted into tourist activity. Indeed, the activity of tourism itself makes sense only as an imaginative process which involves a certain comprehension of the world and enthuses a distinctive emotional engagement with it. This is true even if the experience of tourism is only confined to a cycle of anticipation, activity and retrospection.

Equally, holiday images can feed back into the imaginative activity of the media. This is suggested here, not just in obvious examples such as holiday programmes (David Dunn), but also in advertisements for Stella Artois beer (Phil Powrie), the coverage of the Sydney Mardi Gras (Gary Best), the representation of the Third World in the cinema (Felix Thompson) and photographs of holiday activities (David Crouch/Richard Grassick; Claudia Bell/John Lyall). The strength of imaginative media activity associated with tourism may be measured by the growing interest in the notion of post-tourism. As Neil Campbell argues, the mobility of vision offered by the media encourages a new kind of virtual travel along a multitude of paths open to those engaging with representations of the USA.

If we recognize the power of this imaginative force which links tourism to the media, what exactly do we mean by the tourist imagination? We are arguing that the forms and experiences of tourism and the media are substantially distinct even if, as Solange Davin suggests in this collection, they frequently intersect or operate in parallel. We propose the tourist imagination as a bridging concept to explore both the parallels and the differences. It is a notion modelled on accounts of melodrama as an aesthetic mode, conceptualized by Peter Brooks (1995) as the melodramatic imagination, to explore its pervasiveness across theatre, cinema and television in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The melodramatic imagination is a model of an imaginative activity that crosses over aesthetic boundaries, particularly useful, therefore, to consider in parallel to exploration of the imaginative dimensions of tourist activities, which pass between different spheres of life. However, it must be recognized that the concept of the melodramatic imagination devised by Peter Brooks is presented as a kind of ideal type which, in practice, may only be partially realized. When we return to a contrast between the tourist imagination and the melodramatic imagination, partial or imperfect realization, or indeed absence of realization, of the ideal type can be just as significant for the interpretation of intersections between tourism and the media. In introducing the tourist imagination then we do so for heuristic purposes rather than as an absolute defining essence of tourism or the discourses of tourism in the media.

The tourist imagination

The tourist imagination as a concept is capable of capturing the mobility of relationships between tourism and the media. It designates the imaginative investment involved in the crossing of certain virtual boundaries within the media or actual boundaries within the physical process of tourism. These boundaries provide many of the familiar dichotomies associated with tourism: work or domestic routine versus travel and holidays; physical restriction or immobility versus movement or virtual movement; a sense of freedom in bodily and mental pleasures associated with travel as opposed to a strict rationing of pleasures required by the needs of everyday subsistence. The importance of the tourist imagination is that of suggesting a creative potential inherent in free movement between different spheres of life. One way of conceiving this creative potential, which has wide currency, is to stress the utopian dimension of tourism or holidays. Thus, at the beginning of his The Delicious History of The Holiday, Fred Inglis talks of the cognitive and emotional dimensions of tourism in which holidays are a dream-like emancipation from the world of work. If holidays prefigure utopia then the media play a large part in that kind of anticipation:

Television is the source of the imagery with which we do our imagining of the future, and the holiday imagery now so omnipresent on the screen – in the soaps as well as the ads and in the travel programmes of all sorts – is one of the best places to find our fantasies of the free and fulfilled life.

(Inglis 2000: 5)

Comparing the role of the tourist imagination in the media with that of tourist activity itself it is clear that the roles are not the same. While both may share the gaze and sound, the direct experience of physical mobility in the activity of creative exploration (with associated smells) is only available through tourism. Tourism involves the actual performance of roles while the tourist imagination within the public discourses of the media can only suggest the possibility of a multitude of roles. Alternatively, with greater scope for fictionalization, the tourist imagination may seem less bounded within the media. Yet media forms, just as much as the actual practices of tourism, are circumscribed in terms of utopian unboundedness, particularly through their own discursive structures and a preoccupation with discourses of conflict. Nevertheless, an appeal to unboundedness must always be there in whatever manifestation of the tourist imagination. This has a multi-directional quality. The imagination is taken from the everyday world into the tourist activity but equally may be brought back from the tourist world as an enhanced imaginative facility. It may be used to appropriate fictions in support of the physical mobility of travel but, equally, travel may be the inspiration of fictions.

In practice it is important to insist that the tourist imagination can never be totally free flowing. While there are always appeals to this ideal of a free flowing imagination, right at the centre of the concept are reasons why it cannot be so. Unboundedness gains its meaning from a promise, but nothing more than a promise, that boundedness can be transcended. We have already noted the role of tourism in offering some kind of movement across major dichotomies of social existence and against the restrictive spheres of everyday life. Yet these boundaries are still there. There is always a recurrent tendency to encounter restrictions which impair the true liberating potential of a tourist imagination. Indeed the juxtaposition of a tourist imagination with non-utopian and conflict-oriented discourses within the media should constantly alert us to the pole of boundedness which threatens to rein in the utopian aspiration. It is in debates about restrictions and unboundedness that much of our understanding of the tourist imagination can be developed.

The tourist imagination in debates about tourism and the media

To examine tourism in this way and the scope for the tourist imagination within the media is precisely to ask about the scope for the utopian in relation to everyday life. As such, the tourist imagination should be seen as a mode of both understanding and feeling about the world which recognizes the utopian aspiration at the individual level but also recognizes that, by the very nature of utopianism, there is inevitable limitation. Thus, the various contributions here can be seen as leaning in different directions – either towards utopian individualism (Neil Campbell, David Crouch/Richard Grassick, Solange Davin) or towards the expectation of utopianism which has not or cannot be realized (Gary Best, Marcella Daye, Rhona Jackson, Felix Thompson). Yet this is not some absolute contradiction. Rather, the appeals by Neil Campbell or David Crouch and Richard Grassick to the axis of freedom in the tourist imagination are simply stressing one term out of the pair which is necessary for understanding of the tourist imagination. The restrictiveness signalled by Marcella Daye or Gary Best emphasizes that the unboundedness, which preoccupies Campbell and Crouch/Grassick, is often denied.

Institutional power in tourism and the media

Contrasting attitudes between unboundedness and restrictiveness then raise a whole area of debate about tourist and media institutions. This includes questions about appropriate methodologies to understand their relationship. For instance, a broadly empirical approach is taken by Marcella Daye. She details the limited range of images evoked by travel writers in their accounts of the Caribbean holiday destinations. Similarly, Gary Best’s description of the domestication process by which Australian television attempts to reassure a perceived conservative audience that the gay parade of the Sydney Mardi Gras is legitimate entertainment with the status of a tourist attraction, points up the more radical impulses behind the carnival which are being thereby set aside. Both chapters interrogate the institutional power of the media to produce restrictive definitions of tourist activity. What we have here is a paradigmatic opposition between the power of the media institution on the one hand and the actual tourist sites and practices on the other. This paradigm directly parallels the classic media studies opposition between media institutions and audiences and, indeed, there is a direct overlap, as the readers of the newspapers described by Daye and the viewers of Australian television coverage of the Sydney Mardi Gras are also potential tourists.

The power of tourist and media institutions is also the target of a number of studies in this collection which lean more towards ethnographic approaches in considering how tourists negotiate their own meaning and space. These vary in the degree to which they allow scope for the self-definition of the tourist. In Sarah Cohen’s examination of Beatles’ tourism in Liverpool, negotiation occurs within the framework of overlapping economic and cultural institutions. For Nick Couldry, the rituals of visits to the set of Coronation Street at the headquarters of Granada Television and the meanings which individual tourists find there are discussed in terms of the ultimate division of power between the dominant media institution and the mass audience. Crouch and Grassick’s photography project concerning tourism in the North East of England is more optimistic, intended to counter the ‘dominant media images of the Northumberland and Durham Tourist Board’. They emphasize the greater freedom for negotiation against the emphasis on the power of the media or tourist institutions to restrict the implications of the tourist imagination by imposing categories. As Davin points out, there are parallels in the disciplines of media and tourism studies in the challenge to passive accounts of tourists or the media audience who will become tourists.

The industries and their consumers

Davin’s argument also raises the question about whether the active audience or tourist develops utopian aspirations within a reality jointly constructed by the media and tourist institutions. The parallel discourses and debates between the disciplines of tourism and media studies are brought together particularly by the emergence of the hyper-real. Both the tourist experience and fictional representation in drama heighten our expectations of what reality should be, causing reality to be reorganized to fit our expectations. The experience of the media in everyday life tends to converge with tourism spurred by an overlap between an entertainment industry which creates images of the tourist destinations as well as the theme park destinations themselves (Disney). The worlds of tourism and the television thus overlap as ‘a complex web of texts and hypertexts’ and it is not surprising that she points to the possibility that the boundary between television watching and tourism might almost disappear.

There is then the obvious need further to investigate the connections between the two industries. But in terms of our investigation of the tourist imagination, how can the position of the consumers these industries seek be understood in terms of the two poles of unboundedness and restriction which we have associated with the tourist imagination? The utopian aspiration which is suggested by the vision of a world re-formed in the image of the media or tourist promotion, as suggested by Davin, inevitably collides with the implications of the other pole, the restriction of such aspirations. In particular, it is interesting to ask what happens when the utopian dimension completely fails – a situation of acute consumer dissatisfaction. Rhona Jackson examines the role of unpleasure, of a failure of the tourist mode, in a visit to Los Angeles. In her consideration of a range of analytical perspectives drawn from media studies on this moment of touristic disenchantment she concludes that the individual failure of the tourist mode cannot be satisfactorily explained by the more politicised perspectives such as Althusserian Marxism or mass culture theory. More progress can be made by using theoretical approaches which can incorporate the notion of self, drawing on the work of Christian Metz and the notion of the cinematic gaze. Yet in her discussion of the relation between the tourist gaze, as developed by John Urry, in relation to the cinematic gaze it becomes apparent that there cannot be a straightforward reconciliation between central concepts developed in the two different disciplines. There are many aspects of critical discourses used in media studies which have been developed in relation to different objects and therefore cannot be unproblematically transferred to discussions of tourism. The media studies approaches which she applies all insist upon an inherent role for conflict in understanding the media, including the conflicts within the psyche of Freudian theory examined by Metz. Such conflict-based approaches will not be easily assimilated to the pole of unboundedness which we have associated with the tourist imagination.

Discursive structures and semiotic potential

It is also important to recognize that both media and tourist forms have quite divergent implications, arising simply from their contexts within their specific industries and different functions in relation to audiences or tourists. For instance, even in the television holiday programmes from the 1990s discussed by David Dunn, he detects an increasing role for the celebrity system. Performance of media celebrity by presenters, who are supposed to sample holiday destinations on behalf of the viewer, becomes more important than the role of the programmes as consumer guides to holiday choice. This slippage of meaning within the practices of the media will be ascribed to ‘semiotic potential’, adopting a term introduced by Robert Fish. Such a slippage is possible because, once tourist images are placed within the broader contexts of media forms, there is always more available meaning than can be summed up as purely touristic intent. For Fish, in his viewer-oriented account, the semiotic potential of television dramas in a rural setting is only the start of a process of negotiation. Viewers have alternative choices beyond the stated intentions of the programme makers. They can choose between accepting an idyllic notion of the rural world, open to appropriation by tourist discourse, or a more conflict-based approach arising from the problems of this world which serve to provide dramatic tension. The semiotic potential of rural images can either feed tourist discourse or become bounded within the structures necessary for television drama. Discursive structures of the media can thus provide their own formal constraints to the tourist imagination, an issue to which we will return when considering melodrama in the media.

Consideration of such discursive structures also highlights the methodologies of textual analysis. Even in the more empirical contributions dealing with the role of institutions, close textual analysis, revealing the work of underlying discursive structures, plays a vital role. For Marcella Daye, the effect of Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘Imperial I/eye’ in restricting the range of tourist representations is central to travel writing about the Caribbean. By contrast, analysis of discourses of tourism in the media also shows how tourist images can be easily absorbed in the imaginative processes of the media. Indeed, the tourist associations may shrink to the size of a distant vanishing point. Phil Powrie’s textual analysis of advertisements for Stella Artois beer illustrates the way that they filter out the direct associations with the authentic roots of tourist destinations, such as Provence, and the authenticating discourses such as novels or films located in the tourist destination. In the post-tourism of the advertisements what remains is a kind of free scope to draw on these starting points of tourist destination, novels and films as no more than imaginative resources.

But, equally, if the media have the ability to re-accent tourist images according to their own purposes, the very phenomenology of the tourist site can redefine the implications of media images. Tim Edensor’s argument about the Wallace memorial considers how the globalized entertainment industry of Hollywood impacts on the experience of the tourist site. The name of Hollywood evokes one whole swathe of possible restrictions upon the tourist imagination although this does not necessarily mean passive acceptance. Just as Neil Campbell points to the possibility of negotiation with media images of the USA in his account of post-tourism, so the visitor to the Wallace memorial negotiates between Hollywood and more local meanings. In both cases, negotiation is within and against bounded options. The tourist has to decide either to accept the globalized media images of Rob Roy or the implications of the layout of the tourist centre with its panorama which suggests further Scottish landscapes to explore. The layout here suggests bodily activity, an engagement with the monument space and the open spaces beyond as an alternative to the mediated melodrama. This is the case despite the presence of videos and other visual material produced specifically for the site which cannot contain the wider matrix of meaning in which the tourist moves. Yet it is also possible that a kind of media production takes place within the tourist site itself which will be part of the multiple flows of meaning from the tourist site and back again.

Media production within the tourist destination has long been possible with the photograph or the home movie camera. Claudia Bell and John Lyall record a new phenomenon of digital production from the mobile phone, enabling the tourist activity to become increasingly intertwined with media production. This allows a third possibility between the potential effects of media categorizations of tourist destinations and the implications of meaning inherent in the geographical positioning and physical layout of the destination. In this case, through the mobile phone, texting, and the mailing of digital images, the very accessibility and immediacy of digital media production allows the tourist to become central to the theatrical drama of their own lives. The flexibility and informality enable escape from the restrictions of collectively produced media forms, even allowing one interviewee to present himself in the middle of active war zones.

Conflict and tourism

Such an escape from the restriction of mass mediated forms only serves to emphasize the boundedness that media discourses operate in general, such that the connection of tourism with contemporary war would be more likely to be considered problematic (even if an option taken by some). As Robert Fish argues, media narratives in such dramas as Heartbeat and Peak Practice require ‘figures of suspicion, derision, deviancy and pity’ which are at odds with the requirement to promote idyllic tourist images. Yet, the primacy of the media in handling issues of conflict is not an absolute rule. Tourism may provide alternative frameworks which can accommodate better to conflict th...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• The media and the tourist imagination
• Contemporary geographies of leisure, tourism and mobility
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1: Introduction: The media and the tourist imagination
• 2: Mediating tourism: An analysis of the Caribbean holiday experience in the UK national press
• 3: Media makes mardi gras tourism mecca
• 4: Amber films, documentary and encounters
• 5: On the actual street
• 6: Screaming at the Moptops: Convergences between tourism and popular music
• 7: ‘Troubles Tourism’: The terrorism theme park on and off screen
• 8: Mediating William Wallace: Audio-visual technologies in tourism
• 9: Mobile viewers: Media producers and the televisual tourist
• 10: ‘I was here’: Pixilated evidence
• 11: ‘I’m only here for the beer’: Post-tourism and the recycling of French heritage films
• 12: ‘We are not here to make a film about Italy, we are here to make a film about ME…’: British television holiday programmes’ representations of the tourist destination
• 13: Tourists and television viewers: Some similarities
• 14: Converging cultures; Converging gazes; contextualizing perspectives
• 15: Producing America: Redefining post-tourism in the global media age
• 16: Journeying in the Third World: From Third Cinema to Tourist Cinema?