Tourism Culture & Communication

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Volume 22, Number 2

SPECIAL ISSUE
The Interface of Culture and Communication Through Tourism
Guest Editors: Jundan Jasmine Zhang and Adam Doering

Introduction: The Interface of Culture and Communication Through Tourism – 105
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579543

Jundan Jasmine Zhang* and Adam Doering

*Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
†Faculty of Tourism, Wakayama University, Wakayama, Japan

The introduction to this special issue explores why in an “age of communication” it has become increasingly important to revisit a somewhat lost sense of communication that we describe as the interface of culture and communication. Inspired by Karen Barad’s work and the diverse range of contributions to this special issue, we reflect on the fragmented, multiplied, and diffracted sense of communication that has emerged in recent years. We examine this emergent form of communication through three interlinking yet distinct areas of study: “affective communication,” “tourism media interface,” and “interface of the human and nonhuman.” Providing grounded empirical research alongside unique theoretical insights, the eight articles bring together a diverse and complex range of contexts that would otherwise not enter into conversation with one another. And yet in their own ways each contribution challenges how communication has been approached and perceived in specific tourism settings and opens up spaces for understanding communication as diffraction and differentiation rather than a coming together. By revisiting communication in this way, previous relationships embedded in tourism can be seen in new and interesting ways. The introduction to this special issue offers an initial exploratory conceptual framing of what we call the interface of culture and communication in effort to forefront new ways of thinking and engaging with culture and communication in tourism studies and beyond.

Key words: Critical tourism studies; Communication studies; Tourism culture; Intercultural communication; Diffraction

Cross-Cultural Communication Through Affect: The Potential for Postdisaster Tourism in Japan – 115
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579570

Annaclaudia Martini* and Anna Vainio†

*Department of History and Cultures (DiSCi), University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
†School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

The success of tourism encounters can be aided by devising cross-cultural strategies so that conscious feelings (emotions) and subtle impressions (affects) of locals are communicated effectively to tourists. This article investigates how postdisaster tourism narratives, practices, and landmarks can be used to “attune” the feelings of culturally different groups. After the Triple Disaster of 2011 in the Tōhoku region of Japan, the recovering communities have used tours as a way to support the local economy, confront their loss, and overcome trauma. As global attention moves to new disasters, communities feel the need to attract more visitors and create new jobs for the locals. However, this has proven difficult: differences in expressing emotional responses caused tensions and dissatisfaction among locals and internationals, as locals feel misunderstood and tourists do not see their expectations met. This hinders the tourist encounter, which is seen by some of the communities as crucial, as they feel that “being able to tell their stories” and “being remembered” is a central tenet of the recovery process. In the case of Japan, we argue, affect can constitute an appropriate means to negotiate meaning and memory between Japanese and internationals. Affective elements are often overlooked by academics, as they are considered volatile and unstructured. There is no research that utilizes geographical and interdisciplinary theories of affect to gain an in-depth understanding in the ways to communicate heritage and memory cross-culturally in disaster sites, as well as rigorous and appropriate approaches to affective methods. Affect can benefit both locals and visitors, as it bridges understandings of the delicate and complex issues pertaining to disaster memory and heritage, and may lead to more socioculturally and politically sustainable approaches to planning, development, and management of tourism.

Key words: Cross-culturality; Affect; Japan; Postdisaster tourism; Heritage

“What Your Head!”: Signs of Hospitality in the Tourism Linguistic Landscapes of Rural Japan – 127
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579561

Adam Doering and Kurara Kishi

Faculty of Tourism, Wakayama University, Japan

This article explores signs of hospitality in the tourism linguistic landscape (LL) of the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Trail in Wakayama, Japan. We argue that the multilingualization of visible tourism public signage in this rural region raises important philosophical questions of hospitality. With the help of Jacque Derrida to navigate this terrain, we examine how rural communities communicate and negotiate hospitality in a rapidly internationalizing rural tourism destination. Combining photographic data, participant observation, and open-ended interviews, we offer a close reading of the tourism LL at three gathering points along the Nakahechi route: Shingu City station, Kumano Hongu Taisha, and the small village of Chikatsuyu. The article is structured as follows. We begin by defining LL studies and draw attention to the current research in tourism settings. Next, an overview of Derrida’s contribution to the philosophy of hospitality is presented, which acts as a guide for reading the trail’s tourism LL. The discussion then revolves around three main themes: the host as hostage to hospitality; the reproduction of the conditional hospitality through tourism LL; and the work of hospitality understood as an ethic of negotiating the threshold of the unconditional and conditional, the impossible and the unavoidable. Bringing together a philosophy of hospitality with tourism LL research, the article adds new theoretical perspectives to the study of LL. It also deepens our understandings of the relationship between hospitality, tourism, and linguistic landscapes.

Key words: Hospitality; Linguistic landscapes (LL); Rural tourism; Japan; Philosophizing tourism

Digital Tourism Communication and Democracy – 143
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579589

Ana Maria Munar* and Richard Ek†

*Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
†Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden

Political philosophy is applied to analyze the democratic potential of tourism social media. This study shows that while these media have deliberative potential, they also reflect the postpolitical and postdemocratic condition in tourism digital communication. This analysis is illustrated through the discussion of three metaphors: the menu, the stranger, and the tourist-light. The menu represents the increased invasion of lifeworlds by the commercialization and corporate regulation of the tourism social Web. The stranger symbolizes the weak accountability of online communities. The tourist-light embodies the relevance of hedonism in virtual worlds. Social media contributes to digital narcissism and supports consumer centricity. Digital communication produces a sanitized version of tourism and entails a subtle constraint of political citizenship.

Key words: Social media; Political philosophy; Cyberactivism

The Dual Journey: Traveling On-Site and Online – 157
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579615

Michelangelo Magasic

Curtin University, Bentley, WA, Australia

Travel is increasingly imagined as a sociotechnical practice wherein ICTs are integrated with experience. In this context, in addition to the movement of the traveler within and between places, and encounters with peoples, cultures, and landscapes, the activity of travel is constituted within various forms of online interactions. Emphasizing this point, emerging industry and theoretical paradigms such as “smart tourism” propose the use of social media and digital devices as ubiquitous and essential to the future of tourism. This article uses the theoretical concept of mediatization—the integration and influence of media forms within social practice—to explore how the embeddedness of ICTs influences tourism, focusing on the avatar of online communication in particular. ICTs bridge distances in time and space, support the construction of personal identity and community, and channel the data flows permitting informationization, with these characteristics likewise being reflected in the textures of contemporary tourism. Tourists’ use of ICTs is conceptualized through the model of the “dual journey,” a vision of hybridized travel in which online and physical spheres are interwoven in the construction and consumption of tourist experience. The purpose of this conceptual investigation is not only to consider the intensification of communication within tourism but also to highlight the ways in which tourists’ communicative practices are enfolded within, and become, tourism.

Key words: Mediatization; Travel experience; Communication; Social media; Information communication technologies (ICTs)

Surrogate Tourists on Instagram: An(Other) Kind of Mimetic Gaze – 169
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579606

Megan Arzbaecher, Toni Sillanpää, and Desmond Wee

International Tourism Management, Faculty of International Business Cologne Business School, Cologne, Germany

From influencers to established travel brands to casual consumers, there are a number of existing organisms in the online ecosystem of Instagram simultaneously producing and consuming content. At first glance, the nature of these relationships seems simple—sharing and engaging via a visual medium—but upon prolonged review, deeper questions about the interwoven complexity existing between these organisms and their content emerge. The authors illuminate several discernible patterns through a deep theoretical framing of the gaze, mimetic reproduction, and ownership followed by a conceptual modeling through a review of everyday Instagramic practices. What becomes apparent are a number of stages of development in this process. Firstly, the practice of photographic mimicry becomes a form of consumption in which the consumer “consumes places” vicariously across space and time, making image reproduction an embodied practice. Secondly, the Instagram feed of an individual consumer (or influencer) becomes a sort of living autobiography, curating and aggrandizing the glossiest images that form a projected extension of self that is not grounded necessarily in authenticity, but in reproduction. Finally, the proliferation of communication between consumer and consumer reproduces a surrogate type that creates a constantly evolving circular content loop where the flow of influence and information becomes muddled and originality becomes less distinguishable. This article critically explores how Instagram has collapsed traditional influence and consumer relationships, particularly in how tourist experience and imagery are shared, resulting in a complex online community that resembles a cultural colonial organism fed by communication feedback loops. The result of this article is the positioning of a surrogate tourist embodied within a collection of individual entities performing specialized tasks dependent on other individuals in the community in which the function and nature of the individual recedes in importance to the relationship existing between organisms.

Key words: Surrogate tourist; Mimetic reproduction; Tourist gaze; Instagram

Sensitive Communication With Proximate Messmates – 181
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579624

Emily Höckert,* Outi Rantala,* and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson†

*Multidimensional Tourism Institute, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
†Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

The research at hand experiments with the communication that occurs in the encounters and entanglements between human and more-than-human agencies. It builds on the emerging debates on qualitative methodologies informed by new materialism, which help us recognize how more-than-humans can communicate and participate in producing and sharing knowledge. The main purpose of this article is to introduce the approach of sensitive communication with human and more-than-human others in tourism settings. The article explores and tests sensitive reading as a way of conducting research on sensitive communication in proximate surroundings by presenting two empirical examples from Iceland and Sweden. The research is driven by curiosity about the different ways of communicating with and about mundane and ordinary places in the context of proximity tourism. The idea of proximity refers here to curious and caring relations toward our proximate surroundings, beings, and thoughts. This approach to proximity tourism reopens ideas of nearness and farness and offers an alternative approach to current quantitative macrolevel discussions and inquiries of the Anthropocene.

Key words: Communication; More-than-human; New materialism; Sensitive reading; Proximity tourism

Interaction, Attentiveness, and Intimacy: Communicating With Waves in Surf Tourism – 193
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579633

Sarani Pitor Pakan

Department of Languages, Arts, and Culture Management, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Surf tourism places are comprised not only of surfing activities but a myriad of actions and interactions on land and at sea of which surfing and surf tourism business are a part. However, surf tourism literature has rarely emphasized the presences of other modes of encountering and interacting with waves, such as fishing and seafaring, especially among local inhabitants. This article puts the emphasis on a broader everyday busyness of living in a surf tourism place, by paying attention to the various ways local people attend to and interact with waves in which they inhabit. The everyday of surf tourism is explored through field research conducted at Ebay, a typical surf tourism place located in Siberut, Mentawai Islands, Indonesia. Drawing on more-than-human and relational ontologies, the mundane relationalities between waves and humans are analyzed as everyday practices of attentiveness and interaction, through which the entangled actors—humans and waves—further cocreate the uneasy notion of intimacy. In addition to challenging the “Nirvanification” of surf tourism places by narrating less touristic and more mundane, everyday situations involving waves and humans, this study also furthers our understanding of communication and culture by showcasing the possibilities of understanding local interaction between humans and nonhumans in a tourism context.

Key words: Attentiveness; Waves; Surf tourism; Human–nonhuman interaction; Everyday life

Filmmaking, Affective Communication, and the Construction of Tourism Imaginaries: Putting the Wow Into Sustainable Whale Watching – 205
https://doi.org/10.3727/109830421X16296375579651

Wiebke Finkler* and Lloyd S. Davis†

*Department of Marketing, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
†Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

The advent of filmmaking provided a means for affective communication, whereby what was real and what was filmed became conflated, helping to create tourism imaginaries that, in turn, drove tourism. However, increased tourism created negative impacts, especially for charismatic subjects like whales that elicit strong emotional responses of connectedness in viewers. In the whale-watching industry, getting too close to whales to satisfy visitor expectations has a major detrimental impact. Here, we test whether the very characteristics of film that have helped create the problem, might be used to fix the problem by re-creating tourism imaginaries and changing visitor expectations. We produced a video about sustainable whale watching using a formula designed specifically to enhance its affective and emotional qualities. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to Test and Control Groups, and shown the video either before or after recording their likelihood of going whale watching in the future. Those in both groups that were Likely or Very Likely to go whale watching identified affective qualities of the video nearly identically. Elements of the video associated with affective communication (imagery of whales in their natural environment and authentic reactions of tourists seeing whales) were most liked equally by Test and Control Group subjects. However, significantly less of the Test Group found the imagery of close encounters between whales and humans to be their favorite aspect of the video, while significantly more of them noted that the clarity of the message or the way it was told (editing) were their most liked aspects. In sum, the affective features of filmmaking that influence tourism imaginaries, also offer the potential to thwart the negative effects of tourism by invoking changes in attitudinal and behavioral intentions that should lead to more sustainable tourism practices.

Key words: Tourism imaginary; Affective communication; Filmmaking; Whale watching; Sustainable tourism