Abstract
This paper is concerned with the personal usage of social media to record and share travel experience and the impacts this has upon the practice of travel. It presents two conceptual frames for understanding the use of social media during a journey: firstly, the concept of ‘selfie gaze’ builds on John Urry’s (The tourist gaze: Travel and leisure in contemporary societies. Sage, London, 1990) seminal theory of the “tourist gaze” in order to explain how the presence of a social media audience influences the tourist’s perception of travel. Second, the concept of ‘social media pilgrimage’ highlights how the usage of social media during travel produces a specific set of behaviours which are related to internet usage and the online persona of the traveller. These frames build upon the author’s previous empirical research on social media usage during travel and form part of a larger interpretivistic study into the relationship between online and offline travel texts.
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Magasic, M. (2016). The ‘Selfie Gaze’ and ‘Social Media Pilgrimage’: Two Frames for Conceptualising the Experience of Social Media Using Tourists. In: Inversini, A., Schegg, R. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28231-2_13
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