Tourism and visual culture, volume 1 theories and concepts

The Robert Hughes quote from his 1980 tour de force, The Shock of the New, made a somewhat prescient point that applies even more in the early 21st century than it did when he wrote it some three decades ago. Taking a cue from a more recent cultural icon (if not commentator), Madonna assures us that ‘we live in a material world’, and it is argued in this book that tourism is an image-rich cultural and commercial part of the material world (and the ironic double meaning Madonna attaches to her epigram). One only has to consider the rapid transition from the 20th-century passive consumption of visual materials (photographs, brochures, TV documentaries and postcards) to the greater interactivity of the 21st century such as home-made videos, manipulable digital images, interactive websites and the like. This introduction makes it clear that economics, planning, impact studies and even anthropology are not enough to explain tourism in late capitalist systems. In this sense, the time is right to claim that tourism studies have come of age.

Từ khóa: Tourism culture, cultural icon, visual communication, service economy, cultural economic, du lịch văn hóa, kinh tế du lịch