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The end of tourism - we are all tourists now
As stated before, there was a time, before contemporary society with its
modern systems of transportation and mass tourism, when people in
general did not travel very much, and certainly not over very long
geographical distances. To go elsewhere and experience whatever could be
found there was, for the majority of people, not a real option. For them,
those other potential places were in practise clearly separated and
differentiated from their own everyday lives and home environments. In
other words, there was then a much sharper geographical demarcation
between other places there and the everyday life places here.
This pre-modern world and its geography were all to change through
processes of modernity and, notably, the emergence of nation states.
Through various developments, in which technology played a fundamental
role by paving the way for new forms of mobility, the nation became
gradually geographically accessible for its modern citizens. Books and
newspaper became accessible for a wider portion of the populations and
distributed various imaginationings of the near and far. Bicycles, trains,
busses and cars opened up new geographical possibilities for reaching and
encountering other lives and places beyond the home, and so eventually
domestic tourism developed. For international mass tourism aeroplanes
later came to play a similar role in making other places accessible, so that;
in the 1970s it became possible for the swelling ranks of affluent
Americans and Europeans to travel outside their nation states and
geographical regions (Franklin 2003, p. 265).
The development of the modern world and its modern tourism is a
pace with globalisation. In this context it refers to how everyday life in
many societies has increasingly become folded and braided internally and
externally with various tourist/tourism spaces. Keeping in mind that we
here (as elsewhere in this report) do write within the limited frame of a
Western tourism discourse (in relation to the world population, tourism is
still for those affluent), we can say that what was once accessible only
“over there” can now be readily experienced, even inversely in one’s own
neighbourhood. The food once signified as “exotic” and possible to try
only when visiting a distant country can now be bought in the local shop.
As Franklin notes:
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