Panel Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, the neoliberal destruction of welfare, the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing cost of living crisis prompted anxieties, renewed precarities and discourses of uncertainty. In the aftermath of the disruption of aviation and tourism services during the early pandemic, hopes for sustainable mobilities and touristic exhilaration resurfaced. Discussing spatial media practices in a variety of tourism contexts, this panel examines how visual geomedia reconfigure travel and touristic experiences. Mobile media facilitate new forms of visual culture and imaginings of tourism destinations (Sinanan, 2022). Although often perceived as a fleeting phenomenon of the leisure sphere, tourism often acts as a force of world ordering and an agent of re-territorialisation (Tesfahuney and Schough, 2005). The overarching aim of the panel is to bring together scholars who assess the role of imaginations, discourses and geomedia technologies in rural and urban tourism.
Exploring new directions in the study of geomedia technologies, the panel will elucidate both places-in-media, i.e. representations of touristic everyday practices and working lives, and media-in-place, i.e. mobile media artefacts enhancing tourist experiences (Adams, 2009). The panel will also address issues of postcolonialism, gender equality, and diversity in connection with the global distribution of mobile tourism media. Geospatial information technologies make possible new place-making practices (Ritter, 2022). Discussing outcomes from four current case studies, the participants of the panel will engage with various perspectives on mobile media, visual storytelling, mobile infrastructures, and geospatial tactics of leisure travel.
Christian Ritter and Georgia Aitaki: Broadcasting tourist experiences: Travel videos in the global streaming economy
Drawing on the case of the travel destination Singapore, this paper explores how TV celebrities and travel influencers mediate the tourist experience. Both groups of travel opinion leaders produce place images of tourist attractions (Adams, 2009). The main aim of this paper is to discuss commonalities and specificities of videomaking strategies against the background of the highly globalized tourism industry and the effect of global streaming services on production and distribution practices. TV celebrities, such as Darley Newman and Anthony Bourdain, tend to develop their own signature style and a unique relationship with the audience, while portraying local people and cultures in an engaging manner and giving voice to various local stakeholders. They often bring professional film crews to their travel destinations thus maintaining high production values. In stark contrast, video-sharing platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube, are used by travel influencers who portray tourism destinations in new ways. Seeking to monetize their travel content on video-sharing platforms, travel influencers are predominately committed to an embedded videomaking style, portraying tourism destinations alongside their personal experiences while mainly using Go-Pro cameras and mini tripods. Drawing from literature that focuses on how destinations are constructed through audiovisual media texts (Reijnders, 2011) and contributing to debates on transdisciplinary dialogues in media studies (e.g., Ginsburg, 2012), this paper juxtaposes the global production networks of streaming services and amateur filmmaking communities.
Jolynna Sinanan: Digital infrastructures, imaginations and futures in the Everest tourism industry
In the wake of the Mount Everest avalanches of 2014 and again in 2015 due to the Nepal earthquake, the state government and private telecommunications corporations have made a committed effort to increase digital connectivity in the largely remote and underdeveloped Khumbu region. This recently improved digital infrastructure has coincided with an increase in the number of tourists arriving in the region between 2016 and 2018. Arguably, Everest has always been mediatised: historically, its appeal as an idea has existed in part through technologies of visual cultures. Tourist experiences and mobile livelihoods are dependent on configurations of fixed, dispersed and mobile digital infrastructures, to varying extents. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in the Solukhumbu region with guides, porters and tourists and argues that digital practices contribute to maintaining gradients of visibility of visual narratives of Everest. On the one hand, the production and circulation of images through digital technologies shape how tourists imagine and experience Everest; indeed, capturing images of Everest is a significant motivation for embarking on treks. On the other hand, digital practices of guides and porters become part of strategies for livelihoods, meeting aspirations and have the potential for creating alternative narratives of Everest, based on regional knowledge and experiences of work. The paper engages with infrastructures as relations by interrogating the relationships of power in representing Everest through contemporary digital practices and the tensions between the valorisation of regional knowledge and neo-colonial imaginations.
Karina Kirsten: Travelogues: New visions of travel?
Travelogues are a form of travel movies which have dominated the early cinema from 1895 to 1905 and flourished throughout many film genres ever since, i.d. documentaries, ethnographic film, avant-garde, and home movies (Ruoff, 2020). With the introduction of smart camera technologies such as the GoPro, people were given new means for not only recording individual lifestyle and tourism mobilities but also exploring the world in a new visual and sensory way. Against this background, the paper seeks to elaborate on the cinematic geographies which now result from traveling with a GoPro. Considering traveling with a GoPro as form of travelogue takes into account how our modern world continues to be shaped by industrialized forms of representation and modes of transport intersecting in travel, tourism, and colonialism. The few studies on travelogues emphasize the move to look beyond cinematic realism and the reality effect by appreciating how those films (and their filmmakers) actively produce the world they represent. So far, it remains unanswered how the GoPro incorporates a new mode of vision to the array of travel images. What kind of world emerges from this ‘programmatic technology’ characterized by mods, fish-eyes, companion views or exo-centric images (Gerling & Krautkrämer, 2021)? Does there lie critical potential in a view beyond human’s natural perception?