Scripted Journeys

Authenticity in Hypermediated Tourism

Tom Nuenen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110700589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Hostelería, viajes y turismo

The ubiquity of computation in daily life has had decisive influence on the imaginative aspects of tourism. Online knowledge of the world is readily available through mapping services, social media, travel blogs, and online reviews. From booking and Googling, to posting and reminiscing: all stages of one's trip can be guided and augmented by increasingly connective, personalized, and optimized algorithmic systems.

In the face of this informational abundance, hypermediated tourism is fixated on access to authenticity. Peer to peer accommodation offers tourists a chance to "live like a local." Professional bloggers instruct not just on where, but on how to travel. Review websites aggregate the feedback of millions into "objective, " data-driven authentication of destinations. And virtual technologies take users to places they could not dream of reaching physically.

Based on a comparative ethnography of touristic blogs and vlogs, review websites, and video game environments, Scripted Journeys presents a critical analysis of touristic practice in digital ecologies. This hypermediated tourism engages technology as a harbinger of self-possession and waywardness, yet produces its own forms of digital dependence. The resulting "scripted journeys" internalize a tension between authenticity as autonomy and control, and the implicit compliance of making use of technological extensions.

1 To Boldly Go

Fig. 1.1: First World Problems meme. Photo credit: Andrea Piacquadio.

Silvia Bottini is the face of first world problems. The stock photo on which she features was used for an Internet meme that makes fun of the trivial inconveniences of privileged individuals in highly-developed countries. The version of the meme shown in Fig. 1.1, however, presents a particular sense of disappointment: one of the main affordances of travel – to explore and experience the unknown – has disappeared, and we, late modern globetrotters, will not live to see its return. As with all memes, the bold Impact font suggests insouciance, and the catchphrase is playful. The message, however, is a variation of Chuck Palahniuk’s famous complaint: “we are the middle children of history” (2010, p. 166).

The meme echoes a sentiment expressed by many a travel writer living sometime between the nineteenth century and the present. Wilfred Thesiger, in the preface to his postwar travel novel Arabian Sands, looked back nostalgically on his attempt to capture the lives of the Bedu tribes. “For me this book remains a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people” (2007 [1959], p. 7). The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, when traveling to Pakistan, wished he could view the country with other eyes. “I should have liked to live in the age of real travel, when the spectacle on offer had not yet been blemished, contaminated, and confounded; then I could have seen Lahore not as I saw it, but as it appeared to Bermer, Tavernier, Manucci” (1961, p. 44). Lévi-Strauss realizes that his own writing will suffer the same fate; wryly, he adds that “in the centuries to come, when another traveler revisits this same place, he too may groan aloud at the disappearance of much that I should have set down, but cannot.”

Some decades later, cultural historian Paul Fussell wrote about the “young and clever and literate” travel writers of the interbellum – the period he casually labels as the “final age of travel” (Fussell, 1980, p. vii). The sightseers of late modernity, it seems, were destined for disappointment. One of them, popular philosopher Alain de Botton, found himself struck by a “combination of listlessness and self-disgust” on his first visit to Madrid. Thinking of the discoveries of Alexander von Humboldt on the South American continent, the philosopher realized that “in Madrid everything was already known; everything had already been measured” (2008, p. 144). De Botton’s own fruitless lot was to perform a habitual touristic response to the sights he encountered, unable to properly engage with them.

Notwithstanding the varying degrees of irony in their accounts, these authors point to the same realization: that which was once called exotic, strange, or unheard of, tends to become corrupted – whether by the masses, or by the simple passage of time. Anyone who has been abroad will recognize the discourse, whether presented through brochures of “unspoiled” destinations, or performed by backpackers lamenting the disappearance of “the real Bali” while sipping on their hostel coffee. We seem to face a simple truth: the more we chase the hidden treasures of the world, the more they seem to evade us. We should either accept this truth wistfully, or resist it by chasing the next secret. This, in short, is the problem of authenticity.

The world as excess

Throughout recorded history, the Western idea of travel has been associated with the adventure of entering unfamiliar or unknown territory, leading to new experiences that could be amazing and frightening. It could involve navigating uncharted seas or traversing vast spaces, often without being able to know or even imagine the destination. Today, however, leisurely travel takes place in a world that is comprehensively known and mapped. Over a few decades, the expanding middle classes of the First World’s nations have achieved greatly increased access to air and sea travel around the world: globalization and mobility, to them, have gone hand in hand. The United Nations World Tourism Organization reported 1.4 billion tourist arrivals in 2019, and the export earnings generated by tourism have grown to USD 1.7 trillion (World Travel Organization, 2019). On a more conceptual level, it has been noted that late modernity takes place in a “world of flows” (Crang & Franklin, 2001, p. 10), underpinned not only by tourism but by labor migrations, commuting, and economic transference of goods and services. Mobility has become normalized, and in the last twenty years it has emerged as a significant area of research across social science disciplines. Tourism, across these disciplines, plays a key role (Hannam, 2009; Hannam, Butler, & Paris, 2014; Sheller & Urry, 2004; Vannini, 2010).

Indeed, to many citizens of the first world, technology is synonymous with worldly access – both physically and informationally. The industrial technology discussed above has led to charter flights covering an ever-increasing percentage of the globe, while private digital technology provides numerous forms of information about these destinations. As we move across the globe, we interface with sites, apps, and databases. Our phones, tablets and laptops are trusted experts – increasingly seductive, accurate, and fast. We are surrounded by a remarkable profusion of travel possibilities that would have seemed miraculous even a few decades ago, let alone for those living in previous centuries.

Scholars have suggested that tourists take part in a hermeneutic circle, reproducing a set of images that have been encountered in existing media (Albers & James, 1984; Urry & Larsen, 2011). This now goes far beyond images or wayfinding, and includes the vetting of restaurants and hotels, of expert opinions and anonymous reviewers, of choices made today and to be made tomorrow. There is no end to this intersubjective negotiation of places and subjects, this continuously updated multiplicity of informational rhythms, flows, and fluxes (Scarles, 2009). With mobile Internet access becoming increasingly common and global data plans becoming increasingly affordable (Alliance for Affordable Internet, 2018), tourism now implies interfacing with aggregate knowledge frameworks to relate to the joyful, unexpected or worrisome eventualities of the trip. The efficiency and portability of mobile, networked media tends to complicate the “sense of tourism” – the division between being at home and going away, between work time and leisure time, and between the ordinary and the extraordinary (Jansson, 2007). To be a tourist means to be encapsulated by global geographies of communication: systems that guide us, that extend our cognitive capacities, and that eliminate at least some of the socio-cultural friction of touristic mobility.

This late modern infrastructure of tourism – being increasingly efficient, calculable, and affordable for the middle classes – deepens the issues mentioned by Lévi-Strauss and Fussell. In a context of mass tourism, it is not straightforward to fulfil the promise of an unfamiliar, uncanny, strange, exotic, dangerous or inexplicable experience. Instead, tourism seems to have become an “anonymous, undistinguished affair” (Youngs, 2019, p. 133; see also Ashcroft, 2015). No one with an Internet connection and a smartphone is in danger of getting lost on the road: both literally, as an issue of navigation and cartography, and metaphorically. This, as I will argue in this book, is why touristic technology continuously promises us access to “real,” “unspoiled,” “genuine” places and selves. Airbnb offers housing by locals, telling us to “don’t just go there, live there”. If we want to see the outskirts of the world, VR experiences such as Everest VR take us to places we could not dream of reaching ourselves. And as long as we are quick enough to act, Tripadvisor can show us the way to an “unspoiled” local bar. Yet at the same time, many critics view the widespread and granular information about the world with suspicion. The question is no longer “What can I get to know?” but “What remains hidden? What do I not know?”

This book explores how the construction of touristic authenticity can be understood as the management of calculability and rationalization on the one hand, and risk and surprise on the other. Through hypermediated technology, tourists are tasked with resolving this tension. The touristic goal is, still, to be enchanted by what we encounter – but technology creates new responsibilities of attaining that state. Authenticity imprints itself as a constant responsibility: it becomes a technologically-aided and individual task to balance the pros and cons of each choice, to “put the information to work,” to figure it out.

Rational enchantment

Anticipating the issues of rationalization and calculability over a century ago, Max Weber developed his concept of Entzauberung, or disenchantment, to understand the “sober bourgeois capitalism” of his time (2005 [1930], p. xxxvii; see also Brubaker, 1991). Weber diagnosed his own society as one marked by means-end rationality – a purposeful, instrumental, and calculated way of dealing with the world and other people. This value system had replaced pre-modern forms of substantive, ethical value-creation, which could traditionally be found in religion and were accompanied by belief in magic and spirits. Weber saw means-end rationality realized in the strict bureaucratic management and accounting systems of the day – but it also applies to large technological infrastructures or systems (Hughes, 1987). These systems were responsible for Weber’s famous inescapable “iron cage”.

In the succeeding century, many sociologists have complicated these points. For one, rationalization might not be as stifling as Weber held it to be. It may be responsible for a uniform proliferation of technological systems, but it also enmeshes us in heterogeneous mediated interactions in complex societies (Schroeder & Ling, 2014). Modern tourism is a perfect example of this double bind of technology. Take transport: from the steam trains and ships that accommodated the first package tours by Thomas Cook (Armstrong & Williams, 2005; Freeman, 1999), to the individualized movement afforded by the car (Greenwood, 2011; Seiler, 2008), to the development of flagship air carriers after World war II (Doganis, 2005), technology enables a wide diversity of touristic encounters. Yet, what Weber described as the rational restlessness of capitalism, arising from market competition and open-ended profit-seeking, still sounds very recognizable. The hurried search for novel consumption experiences is not hard to detect in modern life (Campbell, 2018) – or, for that matter, in tourism.

Weber’s rationalization thesis fits in with another great influence on tourism: the prevalence of neoliberal politics since the 1980s, and their focus on the “homo economicus” and the virtues of the free market. Aircrafts may be technological products, but their great popularity can be traced back to the government ownership of and investment in major airlines from the 1940s to 1980s, followed by their deregulation and large-scale privatization following the mid-1980s, which led to aggressive, below-cost pricing, additional capacity offerings, and a concomitant explosive growth in demand for air travel, as well as a new style of low cost airlines (Thomas, 2011). The story of modern tourism is one about sustainability, with cheap hotels, all-inclusive holidays, and more recently the popularization of online rental marketplaces such as Airbnb contributing to overtourism: the congestion or overcrowding from an excess of tourists, and the conflicts with locals it results in.

Yet despite this race to the bottom, anyone who has traveled abroad will know that tourism did not simply slip into Weber’s iron cage of bureaucratic rationality. Yes, tourists require the calculable, institutional edifices of global mobility in order to travel at all – booking platforms, flight schedules, and so on. But they are also highly sensitive to a number of substantive values: they want to be enchanted, wooed, to encounter something new or unexpected. Tourism is both a simple, calculated practice, and a window into the anxieties and dreams of our age. It is both instrumental and magical.

In that light, it is worth noting that the enchantment, in our meme, branches out forwards and backwards. A technological self-confidence informs it: humanity will explore the galaxy one day, we just will not be there to partake in it. Such optimism traditionally belongs to the science fiction genre, but is also part and parcel of a certain kind of everyday conversation, which Jaron Lanier designates as “Silicon Valley metaphysics”: the utopian visions of Western tech companies, leveraged in inspirational talks, startups and courses in which “[w]e will not have to call forth what we wish from the world, for we will be so well modeled by statistics in the computing clouds that the dust will know what we want” (2013, p. 12). Surrounded by these visions of a precisely attuned technological future, our First World Problems meme demonstrates a type of late modern tourist who is captivated by two temporal imaginaries, and thus captured by two sentiments: one of apprehension, and one of confidence. What we see then is the ongoing dialectic movement: a newfound enchantment based on technological calculus.

This dialecti...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 To Boldly Go
• 2 Click to Follow
• 3 Raising the Stakes
• 4 Enchanted Images
• 5 Playing Around
• 6 Uncanny Immersions
• 7 How to be a Tourist
• Index