Tourism, Travel, and Blogging

Tourism, Travel, and Blogging

Travel often inspires the creation of narratives about journeys and destinations,

more so with the increasing availability of online platforms, applications for

smartphones and tablets, and various other social media technologies. This book

examines travel blogs and their associated social media as a form of self￾presentation that negotiates the tensions between discourses of travel and tourism.

As such, it addresses how contemporary travellers use online platforms to

communicate their experiences of journeys and destinations, and how the traveller/

tourist dichotomy finds expression in these narratives. Addressing the need for

more in-depth analysis through a study of blogs, this exploration of networked

narratives of an individual’s travel experience considers personal motivations,

self-promotion, and self-presentation as key factors in the creation of both personal

and commercial travel blogs. As this text applies concepts such as self-presentation

and heteroglossia, it will be of interest to both students and scholars of tourism,

new media, sociology, cultural studies, and discourse studies.

Deepti Ruth Azariah teaches professional writing and publishing, creative

writing, and web communication in the School of Media, Culture, and Creative

Arts, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Her research interests include

discourse analysis, travel writing, and digital publishing. She has also taught mass

communication at the University of Mumbai and has published a number of short

stories for children with The Hindu, an Indian national daily.

New Directions in Tourism Analysis

Series Editor: Dimitri Ioannides

E-TOUR, Mid Sweden University, Sweden

Although tourism is becoming increasingly popular both as a taught subject and

an area for empirical investigation, the theoretical underpinnings of many

approaches have tended to be eclectic and somewhat underdeveloped. However,

recent developments indicate that the field of tourism studies is beginning to

develop in a more theoretically informed manner, but this has not yet been

matched by current publications.

The aim of this series is to fill this gap with high quality monographs or edited

collections that seek to develop tourism analysis at both theoretical and substantive

levels using approaches which are broadly derived from allied social science

disciplines such as Sociology, Social Anthropology, Human and Social Geography,

and Cultural Studies. As Tourism Studies covers a wide range of activities and sub

fields, certain areas such as Hospitality Management and Business, which are

already well provided for, would be excluded. The series will therefore fill a gap

in the current overall pattern of publication.

Suggested themes to be covered by the series, either singly or in combination,

include consumption, cultural change, development, gender, globalisation,

political economy, social theory, and sustainability.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/New￾Directions-in-Tourism-Analysis/book-series/ASHSER1207

37 Being and Dwelling through Tourism

Catherine Palmer

38 Dark Tourism

Practice and interpretation

Edited by Glenn Hooper and John J. Lennon

39 Tourism Destination Evolution

Edited by Patrick Brouder, Salvador Anton Clavé, Alison Gill and

Dimitri Ioannides

40 Tourism, Travel, and Blogging

A discursive analysis of online travel narratives

Deepti Ruth Azariah

Tourism, Travel, and

Blogging

A discursive analysis of

online travel narratives

Deepti Ruth Azariah

First published 2017

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Deepti Ruth Azariah

The right of Deepti Ruth Azariah to be identified as author of this work has

been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from

the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation

without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-4724-5981-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-55068-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

For Miguel

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Contents

Lists of figures ix

Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction: tourism, travel, and blogging 1

2 A pioneer in the blogosphere: Tony Wheeler’s Travels 20

3 The voice(s) in the paratext: presenting the author(s) of

sponsored travel blogs 41

4 With the reader in mind: self-presentation and the

independent travel blog 69

5 Beyond the borders of the blog: the networked self of the

independent travel blogger 97

6 Worth a thousand words (or more): framing the discursive

tensions in travel photographs 131

7 Mapping the travel blog: conclusions on the discourses of

travel and tourism 160

Index 174

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Figures

1.1 Stine Lomborg’s typological dimensions for categorising weblogs 10

4.1 Screenshot of title banner of Traveling Savage 71

4.2 Screenshot of title banner of foXnoMad 72

5.1 Screenshots of widgets on Traveling Savage 100

5.2 Screenshot of Check-ins tool 105

5.3 Screenshot of Bondi Beach post 112

5.4 Screenshot of Nomadic Matt’s Twitter page 119

6.1 Screenshot of Keith Savage’s photograph of Edinburgh Castle as

seen from the Sir Walter Scott monument 136

6.2 Screenshot of Nomadic Matt’s Instagram image 140

6.3 Screenshot of photographs of Auschwitz 145

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Acknowledgements

This book owes its completion to the support and encouragement of many people.

It is a pleasure to thank all those who made this possible.

The editorial team at Taylor and Francis have been of immense help and their

guidance has been instrumental in the writing of this research monograph. In

particular, I would like to thank Philippa Mullins and Emma Travis for believing

in my proposal and for supporting me.

My family has been a constant source of inspiration during the long and

sometimes difficult journey that has been the writing of this text. As always, they

have been the best of travel companions. I would like to thank my parents,

Chandran and Rani, and my brother, Rubik, for their faith in me, for their patience,

for impromptu proofreading, and for simply being there when I needed them.

I have been fortunate to have two excellent colleagues and doctoral supervisors

in Deborah Hunn and Tama Leaver of Curtin University. They have been my

pathfinders when I lost my sense of direction. Their guidance and constructive

criticism of my writing has been invaluable and I appreciate their keen interest

and enthusiastic support. I would also like to thank Tim Dolin for his contribution

to the writing of my thesis.

I would like to thank all the friends I have met along the way, whose help and

advice has been invaluable. In particular, I am grateful to Robyn Creagh, Alana

Arcus, Jane Armstrong, and Joey Wu for coffee and conversation and especially

for listening and offering a shoulder to lean on when the going got rough. I also

thank my other friends at St Martin-in-the-Fields, especially Bill and Judy

Mackintosh and Ken Bennett, and others who are too many to name, but whose

care and support is not too little to be forgotten. Finally, Miguel, for you were

there at the journey’s end and have made all this worthwhile.

Because of you, I have reached my destination.

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1 Introduction

Tourism, travel, and blogging

More often than not, it is preferable to be perceived as a traveller than a tourist, or

so researchers and writers of travel narratives would have us believe (Fussell

1980; Galani-Moutafi 2000; McCabe 2005; O’Reilly 2005). Travel is associated

with authenticity, adventure, and spontaneity. Tourism, on the other hand, has the

less desirable connotations of being planned and superficial. This view is

emphatically encapsulated in American historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s observation

that: ‘The traveller was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of

adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to

happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing”….’ (1992, p. 85).

These associations are not particularly new – the question of a distinction

between travel and tourism and whether such a dichotomy does indeed exist has

long engaged academic debate in tourist studies (Franklin and Crang 2001).

Following the rise of mass tourism, this has found expression in many works of

travel literature. Writers such as G. K. Chesterton and William Wordsworth have

denigrated the tourist and deplored the decline of real travel. Other more

contemporary theorists have suggested that that the traveller no longer exists, but

has been supplanted by the mass tourist (Fussell 1980; Urry 2002). This book

adds to this longstanding discussion with its exploration of how the tensions

between travel and tourism are discursively expressed and negotiated in a

relatively new form of travel-related communication – the travel blog.

Travel has long inspired writing. Over the centuries, it has generated texts

both fictional and promotional, ranging from the travel books, diaries and

photographs that recount personal holiday experiences or record journeys of

exploration to the brochures, guidebooks, postcards, and posters that are integral

to commercial tourism. More recently, social media platforms such as blogs,

social networks, microblogs and photo-sharing services, and applications for

mobile phones and tablets have made it easier for those who travel to publish and

publicise personal narratives of their travel experiences. This has introduced a

variety of new discursive forms to an already extensive body of travel-related

communication. Blogs have proved particularly popular. Generic platforms such

as Blogger and Wordpress and travel-specific blogging sites such as TravelBlog,

TravelPod, BootsnAll, MyTripJournal and OffExploring have enabled individuals

to capture their travel experiences in words and images and share these with a

2 Introduction

large and diverse online audience. These online narratives incorporate various

narrative techniques and discourses, the examination of which is the central

purpose of this book.

In order to understand how discourses of travel and tourism inform travel blogs,

it is first necessary to understand these texts as a narrative form. Blogs, otherwise

known as weblogs, evolve from the traditions of diary writing and like their

forerunners are usually serialised topical and personal narratives (McNeill 2003;

Serfaty 2004a; Sorapure 2003; Van Dijck 2004; Walker Rettberg 2014).

Interestingly, there is an allusion to travel in the terms ‘blog’ and ‘weblog’, which

originate from the word ‘log’, referring to the nautical record of a journey (Walker

Rettberg 2014, p. 30). Travel blogs resemble early travel diaries in that they are

usually written as public documents intended for others to read. Yet, some

significant differences also exist. The authors of the latter were, in general,

renowned individuals whose travel narratives were usually sanctioned by the

state. Moreover, unlike diaries, entries in a blog appear in reverse-chronological

order, usually contain hyperlinks to other online resources and generally allow

readers to comment on the content (Bruns and Jacobs 2006; Walker Rettberg

2014). In comparison with personal diaries and early travel diaries, blogs are, for

the most part, participatory rather than exclusive and democratised rather than

elitist. As such, they are personal narratives, yet they are also public by nature.

Given their personal yet public quality, it is hardly surprising that blogs are

often interpreted from the symbolic interactionist perspective, which stresses the

importance of social context to the concept of self. Erving Goffman’s

conceptualisation in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969) of social

interaction as a stage performance has proved an appropriate metaphor for

understanding how individuals position themselves online and interact with their

audiences (see, for example, Bullingham and Vasconcelos 2013; McCullagh

2008; Papacharissi 2009; Pinch 2010; Reed 2005; Robinson 2007; Sanderson

2008; Schmidt 2007; Trammell and Keshelashvili 2005). Within this context,

blogs may be described as a narrative form of self-presentation. Blogging in this

sense is a ‘performative act’ (Baumer et al. 2011). Blogs themselves are

‘straightforward indexes of self’ available to a wide audience (Reed 2005, p. 27).

As Jan Schmidt notes, ‘publishing a blog is a way of self-presentation that has to

meet certain expectations about personal authenticity while maintaining a balance

between staying private and being public’ (2007, p. 1413), which conclusion

succinctly articulates both the social aspects of these texts and the needs of their

audiences while also emphasising the centrality of the self in the narrative.

Extending this view to travel blogs, this book examines these narratives

principally as forms of self-presentation since the description of travel experiences

often involves the presentation of a traveller self. However, this is but one of

many other roles that travel bloggers may occupy – other examples discussed in

this book include adventurer, explorer, foodie, travel writer, tour guide, travel

advisor, technology expert, teacher, and so on. It is necessary, therefore, to

acknowledge that this self-presentation comprises multiple voices and many

discourses including those of travel and tourism. This ‘presentation of multiple