The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures

Tourism studies and media studies both address key issues about how we perceive the world. They raise acute questions about how we relate local knowledge and immediate experience to wider global processes and both play a major role in creating our map of national and international cultures. The Media and the Tourist Imagination adopts a multidisciplinary approach to explore the interactions between tourism and media practices within a contemporary culture in which the consumption of images has become increasingly significant. The contributions are divided between those written from media studies awareness, concerned with the way the media imagine travel and tourism; those written from the point of view of the study of tourism, which consider how tourism practices are affected or inflected by the media, and those that attempt a direct comparison between the practices of tourism and the media. A number of common themes and concerns arise with particular emphasis upon the image as the object of consumption. collection is also concerned to mark out their different approaches to the structuring and organizin of experience and the way in which this leads to a dynamic interchange between them. Tourism and the media are discussed as separate processes through which identity is constructed in relation to space and place.