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co-creator of tourist spaces” (Ek, Larsen, Hornskov, and Mansfeldt 2008, p. 124). The point to be made here is that there is no longer a single tourist customer onto which a clear cut destination image can be projected. The tourist now empirically and conceptually appears in the plural, but in addition they are not only tourists. Emerging from the narrow focused business and marketing research is also the other side of the visual paradox of tourism studies. It is readily apparent that a touristic site involves more than sightseeing and it seems very likely that “[t]tourists know that looks deceive” (MacCannell 2001, p. 31). Yet, it may also be the case that emerging mobile technologies “are changing the nature of vision for both tourists and tourism researchers” (Feighey 2003, p. 82). As Jansson notes: The nature of visual representation is becoming more negotiable. Digital photography and video enable tourists to watch their recordings immediately and decide whether to keep them, or to delete and create new images (Jansson 2007, p. 13). Tourism images in digital code are now instantly made and easy to move, remove, edit, distribute and show in different environments and circumstances. A case in point indicating the lack of research engagement is the fact that “tourist videos have largely been ignored in tourism studies” (Feighey 2003, p. 81), and these are mostly very easily accessible. For example, on “You Tube” (one day in spring 2009) we found about 33.400 video results when typing “Iceland”, 305 on “Images of Iceland”, 25 on “Iceland and Tourism”. In other words, there is now a vast expanding pool of empirical visual evidence of tourism and tourists that at the same time is almost not being researched by tourism researchers. 36 So it is that there is considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies and social media within the context of leisure and tourism, yet little is known about how tourists actually incorporate these technologies into their tourism practices. Research on tourism and technology has tended to focus on the implications of information and communication technologies for the tourism industry, with less attention paid to the creative and often playful ways in which tourists use new mobile technologies and social media to organize their journeys, interact in tourist places, or share their experiences with friends and family. For example, how are gadgets like iPhones and GPS devices, social 36 In a recent (2009) session call for the Annual conference of the Association of American Geographers this was recognised. 88
networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and social media like travel blogs and video sharing sites shaping tourist and tourism imaginationings? Another case in point is photography. Although it has a long reputation of being essential for the touristic experience it appears that: Few studies have analysed how tourists picture the places the[y] visit; what sort of photographs they take and how they exhibit and circulate them (Ek et al. 2008, p. 136, see also Scarles 2009, p. 465). Another related aspect of this second facet of the visual paradox in tourist studies is that when tourist researchers have been using images it seems that the visual often has been relegated to stories about the visual in plain text, or that they are inserted merely for illustrative purposes: There seems to be a profound mismatch between the importance assigned to the visual in terms of its relation to ‘knowing’ and the low status of visual data in social research in general and in tourism studies in particular (Feighey 2003, p.79). If images are on the move, through different mediums in different guises, textual and visual, and if they (dis)appear under a variety of circumstances and locations, then this suggests a need to transcend traditional research methodologies where: imagery is a non-empirical phenomenon that occurs when a discourse fixes social experience in terms of a language shared by some social group. In tourism studies, researchers have yet to establish the relationship between the phenomenon of imagery and the mechanism of its discourses, the iconography of the tourism experience (Hunter 2008, p. 356). Research in tourism studies then needs to place, and methodologically approach, images in a broader frame, rather than, say, conceive of images as objects travelling in a neutral medium between sender and receiver. In what ways, for example, may film influence people’s travel decisions and induce them to visit, or avoid visiting, particular destinations they have seen on the cinema screen or on TV? How do images from the movies reverberate with those in books, advertisements, “blogs” or, for that matter, good old photography? How 89
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© Icelandic Tourism Research Centr
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Table of Contents 1. Introduction .
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esearch but also “education and c
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Tourism images have had a longstand
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gradually expanded and become more
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Tourism - an earthly business For u
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Image 1.3: The Island of tourism &
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2. Image & destination The actual a
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variety of sources could be used in
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consequences for how she or he will
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either the textual or the visual, a
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Composed of numerous small encounte
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materiality. Yet, you are able to r
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demand it is mediated by investment
Page 31 and 32:
tourism reflects broader social and
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signification, not the least in tou
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usiness and market to potential cus
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ound to cross traditional disciplin
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sightseeing and whatever activities
Page 42 and 43: Social science research is carried
Page 44 and 45: environment. If they had, they were
Page 46 and 47: Our argument is that it is importan
Page 48 and 49: able to cross the minds of many tho
Page 50 and 51: Eight on my list is the heritage of
Page 52 and 53: The cartography of tourism imaginat
Page 54 and 55: Images of Iceland as a tourist dest
Page 56 and 57: Whatever the specifics and forms of
Page 58 and 59: Are you dressed in the road map of
Page 60 and 61: Summing up It has often been lament
Page 62 and 63: A challenge for tourism theory and
Page 64 and 65: carved in stone, they are not given
Page 66 and 67: some of the things that signalled t
Page 68 and 69: Tourist was in fact that “we are
Page 70 and 71: globalisation gets attributed excep
Page 72 and 73: do so on the basis of its own speci
Page 74 and 75: Arguing for or against the idea of
Page 76 and 77: pushed many economies towards crisi
Page 78 and 79: Whatever new ideologies of tourism
Page 80 and 81: The IPCC Reports are based on reach
Page 82 and 83: As evidenced by the Davos Declarati
Page 84 and 85: supports the position that signific
Page 86 and 87: “voluntary compensation is still
Page 88 and 89: terms of both adaption and mitigati
Page 90 and 91: Pratt and Watts 2000, p. 840). What
Page 94 and 95: can researchers use photography and
Page 96 and 97: latter, in order to set the scene f
Page 98 and 99: Even though the Earth is mentioned
Page 100 and 101: [M]ost significant phenomena that t
Page 102 and 103: social science when it presents its
Page 104 and 105: They further argue that “[t]ouris
Page 106 and 107: meaning and matter. The research ag
Page 108 and 109: REFERENCES Aramberri, J. (2009). Th
Page 110 and 111: Franklin, A. (2004). Tourism as ord
Page 112 and 113: Jóhannesson, G.Þ. and Huijbens. E
Page 114 and 115: Shaw, G. and Williams, A. (2004). T
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