Travel Connections

"Informative and insightful." - S. A. Mason, CHOICE, Vol. 50, No. 07 "The text is structured in 8 fascinating chapters, which explore how technology has forged a new sense of being together during travels... This book exhibits a masterful theoretical background that enthralls it as one of the best studies I have read in the fields of cultural studies." Maximiliano E Korstanje, Tourism Analysis: an interdisciplinary Journal

Autorentext

Jennie Germann Molz is an assistant professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the social and civic implications of tourism mobilities and technology. She is the co-editor of Mobilizing Hospitality and an editor of the journal Hospitality & Society. She has published extensively on the topics of tourism, mobility, hospitality, globalization, cosmopolitanism and new technologies.

Klappentext

This book offers a detailed and unified account of travelers' lived experiences of travel and technology use, and an ethnographically-informed analysis of the social, cultural and spatial implications of the intersection between travel and technology.

Zusammenfassung

Living in a world that is increasingly 'on the move' means that many of us now rely on mobile devices, social media, and networking technologies to coordinate togetherness with our social networks even when we are apart. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the emerging practices of 'interactive travel'. Today's travellers are more likely than ever to pack a laptop or a mobile phone and to use these devices to stay in touch with friends and family members as well as to connect with strangers and other travellers while they are on the road. New practices such as location-aware navigating, travel blogging, flashpacking and Couchsurfing now shape the way travellers engage with each other, with their social networks, and with the world around them.

Travel Connections prompts a rethinking of the key paradigms in tourism studies in the digital age. Interactive travel calls into question longstanding tourism concepts such as landscape, the tourist gaze, hospitality, authenticity and escape. The book proposes a range of new concepts to describe the way tourists inhabit the world and engage with their social networks in the twenty-first century: smart tourism, the mediated gaze, mobile conviviality, re-enchantment and embrace.

Based on intensive fieldwork with interactive travellers, Travel Connections offers a detailed account of this emerging phenomenon and uncovers the new forms of mediated and face-to-face togetherness that become possible in a mobile world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, tourism and hospitality, new media, cosmopolitanism studies, mobility studies and cultural studies.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Tourism, Technology and Togetherness in a Mobile World 2. Fieldwork on the Move: Mobile Virtual Ethnography 3. Landscape: Connecting to Place, Connected Places 4. Gaze: Mobilizing and Mediating the Tourist Gaze 5. Hospitality: The Mobile Conviviality of CouchSurfing 6. Authenticity: Representation, Commodification and Re-Enchantment 7. Escape: Unplugging from Modernity 8. Conclusion: Performing Mobile Sociality