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these social relations are often mediated by technologies like mobile
phones, aeroplanes and computers.
One clearly identifiable line of contemporary reasoning about
tourism thus suggests that “[t]here is much less ‘tourism’ per se that occurs
within specific and distinct kinds of time-space” (Urry 1990/2002, p. 161).
This again means that the line between the everyday and the touristic, the
mundane and the exotic, has become increasingly socially and
geographically blurred. Regarding tourism theory this puts a serious
question mark around traditional definitions of tourism as travel between
an exotic extraordinary other and mundane home geographies and
everydayness of social life. This spatial and theoretical binary, by which
the tourist experience has been separated from everyday life, has been
challenged since the 1990s (Uriley 2005) and is now increasingly
considered obsolete. In the words of Franklin:
the everyday world is increasingly indistinguishable from the touristic
world. Most places are now on some tourist trail or another, or at least,
not far from one (Franklin 2003, p. 5).
According to the likes of Franklin we are, however, not only living
in societies where touristic spaces are folded and blurred with the
everyday. Instead of being an exclusive reservoir of escape from the daily
grey routines of work, tourism has become a social and cultural
characteristic of life in consumer society producing the by now well
known euphemism “we are all tourists now”. It does not matter whether
we go shopping in our own home environment or go vacationing since the
social world itself, regardless of where it takes place, has become
“touristified”. In other words, the term “tourist” is cut loose from its sole
reference to people spending vacation time on the beach, or hiking in the
mountains while on holiday elsewhere. To be a “tourist” thus becomes:
a metaphor for the way we lead our everyday lives in a consumer
society. So rather than being an exceptional or occasional state of being
in modern societies, or even as some have said, an escape from it, the
manner of the tourist has come to determine a generalised stance to the
world around us (Franklin 2003, p. 5).
There are many roots to this way of conceiving, understanding and
explaining contemporary relations between tourism and the social world,
but one of the most important in tourism theory leads us directly back to
MacCannell. Indeed, the central organizing metaphor of his classic The
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