The Age of Interconnection by Jonathan Sperber

Author:Jonathan Sperber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Vacation

Television viewing and tourism are diametric opposites within the world of leisure. One is interwoven with everyday life; the other is a block of time, occurring at longer intervals, designed and experienced as an alternative to the quotidian. TV happens at home; tourism, by its very nature, requires traveling. Both involve experiencing the world. With television this is done by proxy as part of an alternate reality; with tourism, via direct physical experience of a different place.

If TV’s progress through the world in the Age of Interconnection has been accompanied by a drumbeat of cultural criticism, it seems positively muted in comparison to the cacophony of denigration directed at tourists. Tourism is widely and loudly decried as an activity lacking in authenticity. Tourists go out into the world to experience different landscapes, peoples, and cultures, but their presence invariably transforms their ostensibly exotic destination—or, at least the parts of it they experience—into one whose inhabitants strive to make it like the tourists’ original home. In doing so, they subvert the whole point of the experience of something different, raising the question of whether that was what the tourists actually wanted in the first place. Some people, often self-designated as “travelers,” rather than “tourists,” feeling the authenticity of previous destination has been spoiled, “overrun” by a mass of visitors, push on to less well-known, touristically undiscovered destinations. Of course, once purportedly more sophisticated travelers begin visiting a destination in larger numbers, tourists follow in their wake, so that the authentic destination is quickly transformed into precisely the inauthentic experiences travelers were fleeing.36 An expansion of this criticism is that tourists do not even pretend to want an authentic experience of a different cultural world, but desire their own in another location: eating at British and German pubs or Norwegian restaurants in Mallorca, searching Paris for an American-style hamburger, going to Paris to visit Euro-Disney, shopping for local souvenirs, mostly made in low-wage countries in Asia, traveling in bus tours with their fellows, hermetically sealed off from the countries the bus occasionally stops to visit, demanding wealthy-country standards of accommodations and refreshment in much poorer ones.

Even more sinister is the accusation that tourists are fundamentally destructive. They tactlessly show contempt for the people, countries, and cultures they are visiting, and by their presence threaten indigenous cultures. This is globalization at its most pernicious. Exploiting poorer people’s labor for their indulgent, inauthentic enjoyment, their presence is part of a transfer of wealth from local sources—usually understood as impoverished or marginalized—to grasping multinational enterprises. Tourists and the investment they encourage to cater to them plays no small role in environmental degradation.37

Two quotes articulate this global disdain. As one Hawaiian activist put it in the 1980s, “There are no innocent tourists.” A decade earlier, the Greek Orthodox Church actually devised a prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on the cities, the islands and the villages of this Orthodox Fatherland, as well as the holy monasteries which are scourged by the worldly touristic wave.

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