John Urry’s, The Tourist Gaze (2002), interpolates the discussion of tourism in pleasure sought in environments outside the “normal”. The intersectionality of cultural discourse and the interoperability of the socioeconomic aspect of tourism, in part, consists of “consuming goods and services which are in some sense unnecessary” (1). There is a corollary between “supposedly” generated forms of “pleasure experiences” which are desired for their atypical “set of different scenes” (1). “Landscapes or townscapes [which] out of the ordinary” produce interest and curiosity (1). The ‘untravelled’ geography, draws a person, carrying his or her heterogeneous baggage or preconceived notions, in anticipation of what will be “encounter[ed]” (1). These …show more content…
Before one ‘tours’, they are taught the semantics and language of a “circumscribed world by surrogate parents [who] relieve the tourist of responsibility and protect him/her from harsh reality” (7). However, children also rebel against authority, fixated by potential objects that are not “certain approved objects” (7). I had viewed Cuba through a set of “particular signs that indicate[d]” to me that the Guevara rendering was indeed “extraordinary, even though it does not seem to be so” (13). Cuba was my “moon rock” (13). The “attraction” was not in the ministry building with Guevara’s stylised portrait, but a “sign referring to it that mark[ed] it out as distinctive[:] a similar seeing in art galleries when part of what is being gazed at is the name of the artist” (13). It is the “character of the gaze” which converts “day-dreaming and anticipation” into the pleasure-seeking consumption of experiments ‘in reality’ that has already been “experience in their imagination” (13). Therein, the “dialect of novelty and insatiability at the heart of contemporary consumerism” (13). The essence of Urry’s claim is the practice of tourism “necessarily involves day-dreaming and anticipation of new or different experience [but] which sub daydreams are not autonomous; they involve working over advertising and other media-generated sets of signs, many of which relate very …show more content…
What one gazes at may be missing the point entirely. That is, tourists looking, scanning, or observing the environment for what it may lack in that which it may have otherwise provided:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/08/28/yellowstone-bears_n_8056088.html

Questions:

a. How do media mediums (advertising, social media, popular culture) influence or mediate our decisions to travel?

b. Have we ever day-dreamed of a vacation, and have had that dream come true?

c. The selfie-stick: Is it the ‘neo’-walking stick for travellers, or another accessory for backpacking? In other words how does it add to, or detract from, ‘authentic’ forms of tourism?

d. What are the similarities, or differences, between a sightseer and a sight-’searcher’?