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ЛОКАЛЬНОЕ В ГЛОБАЛЬНОМ: ФОРМУЛАТУРИЗМА
LOCAL IN GLOBAL: FORMULA FOR TOURISM
UDC 338.48 EDN: FSGSLS
DOI: 10.24412/1995-0411-2022-2-11-26
Jane Petry da ROSA
Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Santa Catarina / IFSC (Florianopolis, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil) PhD and Master in Education, Full-time Professor e-mail: jpetryrosa@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0001-5059-6162
Marines da Conceifao WALKOWSKI
Federal University of Parana (Curitiba, State of Parana, Brazil)
Director of the Secretariat of Industry, Commerce and Tourism from Urubici Municipality (State of Santa Catarina, Brazil)
PhD in Architecture and Urbanism, Part-time Professor; e-mail: marinesw@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0001-5385-7372
THE NARRATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY TRAVEL
Abstract. The ways of narrating the journey have become a great way in the early 21st century. They left behind the chatting circles, the film productions, the books and gained space on the Internet. This research aims to know how social networks are used by content creators (bloggers and influencers in the tourism industry) to record the trip and reflect on how the pedagogies in these spaces teach different ways of traveling. For the treatment and data analysis, content analysis was performed. The way of carrying out the research was inspired by the studies developed in Cultural Studies and based on various sources whose composition or content related to traveling, such as books, magazines, websites, and, mainly, blogs and social networks. Among the several authors studied, we highlight the research conducted on the different manifestations of the "self" in contemporary times, among them, texts by Zygmunt Bauman (2008), Gilles Lipovetsky (2016) and especially Byung-Chul Han (2015, 2016). The main results highlight that, in contemporaneity, the consumption of travel reports once made through books, technical magazine articles, documentaries, and even blogs were gradually being replaced by practical tips - which fit in spaces standardized by the creators of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. In these spaces, users are educated to look at places in fragments. Ready-made lists and itineraries reduce cities to some landmarks. In addition, in these same "spaces," the travel becomes a stage and the landscapes into scenarios for the most diverse representations, reinforcing the ideas of an ephemeral, transparent, volatile, individualistic, and accelerated life that mark them and teach recipes for traveling that ends up repeating itself on the screens.
Keywords: travel, social media, contemporary, cultural studies
Citation: da Rosa, J. P., & Walkowski, M. da C. (2022). The narrative of contemporary travel. Sovremennye problemy servisa i turizma [Service and Tourism: Current Challenges], 16(2), 1126. doi: 10.24412/1995-0411-2022-2-11-26.
Article History
Received 21 April 2022 Accepted 1 June 2022
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
© 2022 the Author(s)
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
УДК 338.48 EDN: FSGSLS
DOI: 10.24412/1995-0411-2022-2-11-26
Джейн Петри да РОСА
Федеральный институт образования, науки и технологий Санта-Катарины (Флорианополис, шт. Санта-Катарина, Бразилия) кандидат педагогических наук, профессор e-mail: jpetryrosa@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0001-5059-6162
Маринеш да Консейсан ВАЛКОВСКИ
Федеральный университет Параны (Куритиба, шт. Парана, Бразилия)
Директор Секретариата промышленности, торговли и туризма муниципалитета
Урубичи (шт. Санта-Катарина, Бразилия)
кандидат архитектуры и градостроительства, профессор;
e-mail: marinesw@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0001-5385-7372
НАРРАТИВЫ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ПУТЕШЕСТВИЯ
Формы повествований о путешествиях стали информационным нарративом в начале XXI века. Они потеснили традиционные формы общения, кинопроизводство, книги, и получили широкое распространение в сети Интернет. Целью статьи является исследование механизмов использования социальных сетей для фиксации впечатлений от поездки создателями контента (блогерами и лидерами мнений / инфлюенсерами в индустрии туризма), а также анализ их роли в мотивации к совершению тех или иных путешествий. Обработка и анализ данных проведены посредством контент-анализа. Способ проведения исследования базируется на результатах предшественников в сфере культурологии и основан на различных источниках, связанных с путешествиями, таких как книги, журналы, веб-сайты и, в основном, блоги и социальные сети. Среди нескольких изученных авторов мы выделяем исследования различных форм проявлений собственного «Я» в наше время, среди них работы Z. Bauman (2008), G. Lipovetsky (2016) и особенно B.-Ch. Han (2015, 2016). Основные результаты показывают, что популярные в прошлом формы получения и изучения информации о путешествиях из отчетов о них, представленных в книгах, статьях научных журналов, документальных фильмах и даже блогах, постепенно заменялись практическими советами, которые размещаются в виртуальных пространствах, а также в социальных сетях, таких как как Facebook и Instagram. В этих пространствах пользователей приучают смотреть на локации и достопримечательности фрагментарно. Заранее подготовленные инфлюенсерами списки и маршруты сводят многообразие туристских пространств и локаций к некоторым ограниченным, «наиболее популярным» («топовым»), достопримечательностям. Кроме того, в этих же «пространствах» путешествие становится сценой, а пейзажи - сценарием для самых разных представлений, закрепляя (маркируя) их восприятие, выступая своеобразными «учебниками и рецептами» для путешествий через их воспроизводство на экранах гаджетов пользователей.
Ключевые слова: путешествия, социальные сети, современность, культурология
Для цитирования: Роса Д.П., Валковски М.К. Нарративы современного путешествия // Современные проблемы сервиса и туризма. 2022. Т.16. №2. С. 11-26. DOI: 10.24412/1995-0411-2022-2-11-26.
Дата поступления в редакцию: 21 апреля 2022 г. Дата утверждения в печать: 1 июня 2022 г.
1. Introduction
If we stop to observe, we may notice that few activities follow a ritual as precise as that performed by the traveler. The simplest is down to departure, stay, and arrival; but other elements can be perfectly embedded in this plot before, during, or after each trip: the choice of location, planning an itinerary, the expectation of departure, the suspense (during travel), the packing, the passage through transitory places, the disruption with daily life, crossings, choices, absence or presence of references, strangeness, singularities, memory, and records. These elements allow us to weave a series of thoughts about the meanings attributed by the traveling subjects to each stage and the act of traveling, described by some authors (Botton, 2012; Theroux, 2012) as an "art."
When talking about traveling in contemporaneity, it is essential to think about how this movement constitutes itself, as a cultural practice, through the media, especially the Internet, and how the propagation of media content and cultural values exposed in these "places" takes place.
Much of the choice of a destination, the planning of an itinerary, and the trade of travel, is mediated by digital technologies, and the amount and increase of websites and social networks that display content related to this subject make us believe that much of its protagonism, nowadays, is linked to the possibility of narrating the travel and presenting it, using orality, writing or images, to an audience that consumes this material on the other side of the screen, as Walter Benjamin (1987 : 198) state, "those who travel have much to tell". For the author, "among the written narratives, the best are the ones that are least distinguished from oral stories, told by countless anonymous narrators." Currently, Benjamin's concern with the fidelity of the stories we are told does not seem to have the same weight as before since, in electronic media, the same person almost always plays the roles of witness and storyteller.
In these spaces, the construction of travel stories mainly involves blogs and other
media such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, in which the distinction between who lives and those who tell the story is diluted. The importance is given to distance and time, about which Benjamin also speaks in "The Storyteller," which seems to be absent in these networks of fast communication. In addition to the fusion of testimony with the narrative, there is an instantaneous projection of the narration object to the reader or spectator, which means there is little or no space for the settlement of the experience and more careful and detailed preparation of the story. Immediacy and brevity prevail. Studying the trip with and through weblogs and social media made us see how significant a debate can be for tourism about this contemporary way of recording since it transforms the way of consuming travel, telling stories, and saving memories. Travelers are increasingly using online communities to obtain information that will be used to plan their itinerary and base their travel decisions (Silva et al., 2021; Perinotto et al., 2021).
This research aims to know how social media are used by content creators (bloggers and influencers in the tourism industry) to record the trip and reflect on how the pedagogies that are in operation in these spaces teach different ways of traveling. This paper is interested in the movement of the trip and the possible learning that may be manifested or silenced in this back-and-forth, currently so connected to the use of electronic media.
This possibility of participation of the reader is pointed out by Avelino, Silva, and Leal (2020), as a determining factor for the success of the relationship of the content creator with their audience on social media. According to them, the content creator is the one who starts the process by posting a photograph, text, or video, but who gives notoriety or authority to what was posted is their audience, through comments, likes, shares, and interactions. The opinion of other users shared on social media is often very important for the decision-making of the tourism consumer (Latorre-Martinez et al., 2014).
The content about travel, once restricted
to newspapers, magazines, and guides, is currently produced and shared by experienced travelers and novices, people specializing in a specific type of travel, destination, or adventure, and people who transformed travel into a way of life and livelihood. As a result, the photo albums and those old scripts that organized the day-to-day life of tourists lost their place. Currently, it is possible to plan a trip while it happens (book hotels, buy flight tickets, and tickets to attractions). This instanta-neity also permeates, increasingly, the records of the achievements on social networks. Through apps that allow immediate sharing, photos and videos can instantly be viewed on social networks.
It was thinking about the path of the travel-witness-narrate idea and the fact that we understand both the social media dedicated to the theme of travel and the travel itself as creators of subjectivities in the present time that we formulate the issues that follow this work. What is taught to the tourist in these spaces? How do readers / viewers / followers use this content? What types of changes in the tourist's consumption behavior can be verified from this massification of traveling on the media?
2 Literature Review
Although the means and way of narrating the trips have changed over time, we believe we can speak in a cyclical variation, with a prevalence of verbal language, imagery, or writing. First, travel stories were told through orality. An example of this is Homer's Odyssey, considered by many to be the greatest epic poem in history. He tells the adventure of Ulysses1, who, after participation and triumphing in the Trojan War, begins the journey back to Ithaca, his kingdom, in a long journey that lasts ten years. According to Castro (2013 : 24), this "history was already circulating through orality before getting the Greeks' written version" and becoming a great literary
classic.
Paul Theroux (2012) reveals that from the union between experience and fiction, which according to him, gives structure to travel stories, the narrative fiction originated. According to the author, the first modern novel2. Written in English, "Robinson Crusoe" was based on the experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent four and a half years on a distant Pacific Island. The book's author, Daniel Defoe, transferred the story to the Caribbean Islands, added cannibals and a tropical setting, and extended the time of the adventure, which in his work lasted twenty-eight years.
After orality and writing, the travel stories materialized through the screens, starting with cinema images, going through television, and reaching computers via YouTube. These means (oral, written, imagery) are currently confused in the narratives that circulate in the media. Travel blogs were the precursors of this manifestation on the Internet and used texts and images to tell stories. Soon after, Fa-cebook and Instagram brought the prevalence of the image over the text. More recently, the stories, a feature created by the Snapchat app and soon incorporated by Facebook and Instagram, bring the images allied to orality again to the contemporary scene. From a cognitive point of view, the image of a tourist destination, a resource so used in the most diverse media, can be defined as the mental structure formed by conceptions, impressions, knowledge, imagination, and emotional thoughts developed through a process of perception by people concerning a given location (Gallarza, Gill and Calderón, 2002; Juskelyt, 2016; Hunter, 2016). Based on this assumption, we can understand why social media users are interested in the story narrated through the images. They help materialize the travel product, an activity with a high degree of intangibility.
1 Ulysses is the Latin name of the Greek Odysseus.
2 The book was initially published in serial form in The Daily Post. Although there are several candidates for the title of "first modern English novel," Paul Theroux (2017), in addition to granting the title to Robinson Crusoe, reveals that he is also the first fiction book intentionally written and sold as a product.
We understand that to perform the exercise of telling and fictionalizing travel stories, much done by those who narrate their adventures - in books, in chatting circles, on blogs, on social media, and in short videos - it is necessary, in addition to living, recording, and writing, to be attentive to the stories they tell us and how they affect us. Michel Onfray (2009) refers to the act of writing as a way of organizing thought and memories. According to him, writing is the most simple and reliable means of expressing the senses.
Only the experience of writing allows us to account for the totality of the senses [...] the poem, as the quintessence of the text, and the prose can capture and restore a jasmine scent from an oriental garden, a light above a city reflected in the waters of a river, a warm temperature in a tropical forest saturated with the scents of earth, humus, and decaying leaves, the murmur of a hidden stream in the moist air and the humidity of this place. Only the verb circumscribes the five senses and more. The path leads from things to words, from life to text, from the journey to the verb, and from oneself to oneself (Onfray, 2009:100).
Since we began to look at the travel subject, we have noticed an intertwining between displacement and communication. For a long time, witnessing and narrating have been part of the rite of travel. A relationship has been established since exploration trips. Geographers, writers, astronomers, botanists, and artists recorded, through detailed descriptions, maps, drawings, and paintings, whatever they found along the way. Over time, these records found in the literature support dissemination, and, years later, practical information was being systematized through travel guides.
This intrinsic relationship between travel and writing led us to think about travel narratives in contemporary times that use the Internet to disseminate. They seem to have changed the ways of traveling, the travelers' desires, and how the trip is marketed. In
contemporary times, the spectacle of traveling is linked to transforming travel into a product that needs to circulate and be renewed quickly. Therefore, the show of travel takes place by disseminating destinations, in the promises attributed to travel, in the display of trips on blogs and social media, and by creating a series of products and services linked to travel.
As Guy Debord (2003 : 14) states, "the show is not the set of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images." Sibília (2016, p.74) reinforces Debord's idea by perceiving a contemporary dominated by these "spectacularized" images. To her, "the show has become our way of life, our worldview, how we relate to each other, and how the world is organized." Everything seems permeated by this logic that ends the dialogue, the time necessary for assimilation, decantation, and sedimentation.
It is not necessary to resort to the figures of transport companies or tourism management agencies to realize that travel culture has been widely disseminated. Just note the generous offer of products and services for travelers and the presence of travel in the most diverse media. This popularization occurred due to the union of efforts of various sectors of the economy related to tourism - in particular, transportation, lodging, gastronomy, and entertainment - which perceived, in the changes experienced by the world at the end of the 20th century, favorable conditions for the propagation of the travel product.
If we analyze the strategies adopted by these industries, based on the key factors that support the marketing actions - the "Four Ps," product, price, place, and promotion - we will realize that its implementation took place in order to make the trip a consumable product, a commodity-spectacle.
However, what were those strategies? One of them was the decentralization of purchases, which arose due to a more significant development of technology and the facilitation of access to it. First, the physical agencies received companies in the virtual world. Then the "autonomy" of the consumer was
proclaimed, allowing the acquisition of the services necessary to achieve a trip without intermediaries - through the possibility of direct connection with the websites of transport companies, lodging, and entertainment, among others.
Pricing strategies have also contributed to the dissemination of the product, which seems stratified, such as the sale of seats on airplanes. Every day some initiatives aim to make travel more accessible: low-cost airlines, alternative lodgings (hostels, shared houses), and even the exchange of accommodation for services (work exchange).
The payment term was also facilitated -a characteristic of the Brazilian market. Travel agencies and airlines offer installments, and banks have sought to include more and more people in the travel economy by offering special credit. The "Favela Vai Voando" agency gained notoriety and clients by focusing on the public belonging to the lower classes, adopting the booklet as a means of payment, and waiving the income proof and consultation with the Credit Protection Service. This transformation of travel into merchandise and its dissemination is part of the spectacle of contemporary travel. It is in the interest of the industries that support this activity to include more and more people in their shows.
Investments in travel products and their promotion are everywhere. The dissemination takes place through several means of communication (magazines, newspapers, TV shows, radio, blogs, and social media). It is complemented by initiatives that seek to cover travel with a more incredible tangibility, bringing it even closer to consumers. Technologies play an essential role in this process because they allow connections between people (their places, institutions, or organizations) to continue even after the trip and the dialogues to continue (Zucco et al., 2019). In addition, digital change, through the digitization of information, the generalization of the Internet protocol, and the quick adoption of these technologies, has transformed the way of producing, storing, distributing, and consuming goods and services (Simón, 2016; Hofacker,
and Belanche, 2016).
In the world of events, the theme of travel is already quite familiar. For example, fairs are a tool used to advertise and sell tourist destinations. There are also congresses, lectures, and meetings that bring together travelers and blogs and course writers - which teach you how to plan trips, acquire miles and even tell travel stories.
Large corporations seem to have found in the promotion of "travel fashion" a way to supply the market with a product that meets the characteristics that, according to Lipovetsky (2016), Han (2015, 2016), and Bau-man (2007, 2008), symbolize the contemporary. Movement, speed, lightness, ephemeral-ity, liquidity, and instantaneity are among them. The presentation and commercialization model of travel leads to the perception that it is an activity whose consumption is capable of healing, suspending, softening, and distancing, which allows, even momentarily, a distancing from everything that oppresses. Nevertheless, as Professor Philip Kotler (1998) teaches us - a renowned author in marketing -products carry ideas, promises, and concepts.
3 Methodology
To think of travel narratives as potential producers of subjectivities in the present time, we were inspired by Cultural Studies. For the data treatment and analysis, a content analysis was performed. This research was inspired by the studies developed in Cultural Studies and based on various sources whose composition or content related to travel, such as books, magazines, websites, exhibitions, brochures, posters, postcards, and mainly blogs and social media. According to Costa, Sil-veira, and Sommer (2003, p.39), in Cultural Studies, "there are so many research itineraries and so different theoretical positions that they could be described as a theoretical turmoil."
Moreover, in this confusion, formed by the various theoretical contributions, the interviews, trips, music, travelers, poems, artists, blogs, and social media joined the books and journal articles. In choosing the research object, contemporary travel came into play, its actors and crossings seen by an attentive
eye that sought, in the course of this cultural practice, the intersections, displacements, escapes, and tensions that are part of the research guided by cultural studies.
Maria Lucia Wortmann (2007 : 87) reveals that her works are motivated by "other" and new stories that can be told about a subject and by searching for the political dimension of her objects of study. She also reports that in the projects developed by her research group, "we have not hidden or denounced anything that is hidden in the stories that we have analyzed; we do have attention to the points that we usually do not question."
Regarding research in Cultural Studies carried out on the Internet, we found arguments in the content of a lecture held in 1997 by professor and researcher Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda that made us think about the political and aesthetic dimensions present in the construction of the ways of research that we present here. When commenting on the possible threats and opportunities of what she called the globalizing nature of local research in the internet universe, Hollanda (1997, online) seemed to predict that research conducted in the area of Cultural Studies - which according to her, brings "the genes of "trans-nationalization" - could represent a politically strategic area, with good prospects of fertilizing the space [until then] structurally decentralized of the info ways."
More than twenty years later, Hollanda's text, which refers to Cultural Studies as a Traveling Theory - due to its capacity for hybridization and its vocation to move through various symbolic and cultural universes - is still current and stimulated a latent desire: to make connections, to seek other paths, to provoke unconventional encounters, untie knots, and make room to look at a research artifact diffusely, in order to allow us to see its different guises and create an itinerary for the research.
Many of the readings in this research are based on issues involving the relationship between education and information and communication technologies. Among the various authors studied, we highlight the research
conducted on the different manifestations of the self in contemporary times, among them texts by Zygmunt Bauman (2008), Gilles Lipovetsky (2016), and especially Byung-Chul Han (2015, 2016).
The research sample, composed of blogs, their branches on Facebook and Insta-gram, and their writers, was defined according to a few criteria.
1) Be part of the Brazilian Network of Travel Bloggers (RBBV) or the Brazilian Association of Travel Bloggers (ABBV). Both institutions bring together the so-called "travel bloggers" and set some parameters for the association. The norms are the time of existence (minimum of 6 months), the number of published articles (minimum 12), and the content the evaluators should consider consistent, original, and appropriate.
2) Have frequently updated and up-to-date travel blogs and profiles with travel-related content on Facebook and Instagram. The frequency of postings should be periodic to carry out the research.
3) The number of followers on Facebook and Instagram. Although it did not guarantee interactivity, this was an indication that there could be more significant exchanges between the writer and their audience. As a result, we opted for pages with at least ten thousand followers.
4) Representativeness. ABBV divides content creators into two groups: digital nomads - those who write on the move about the places in which they are residing and working at a given time; and the writers who narrate their travels in Brazil or abroad from a fixed point. Therefore, we chose to have representatives from both groups of travelers.
5) Interest in writing about traveling. The desire to conduct the interviews during a trip to Europe made us look for blogs written by Brazilians who fulfilled the above requirements and were references for tourists in some European capitals.
6) Access and permissions. After several contacts, searches for monitoring permissions (both from blogs and social media), and requests for interviews, we selected the blogs and
profiles on Facebook and Instagram that agreed to be monitored and granted interviews.
Thus, the following profiles were part of the research "Aprendiz de Viajante," "Londres para Principiantes" in London, England, "Cul-tuga" in Lisbon, Portugal, "Conexao Paris" in Paris, France, "Agenda Berlim" in Berlin, Germany, and "Ducs Amsterdam," in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In addition to these blogs and social
media that were monitored between September 2015 and October 2018, the Facebook and Instagram profiles of "Viajo Logo Existo" and "Viajando com Gabi" were also selected to participate (both fall into the category of Digital Nomads), as well as "Viaggiando," a profile that mixes travel and literature, and two more well-known pages accessed by Brazilian tourists: "Viaje na Viagem" and "360 Meridianos", as shown in Figure 1.
Evaluation process in social media
±
Selection of social media
O
Semi-structured interviews
Bibliographic research
Content analysis
Result analysis
*
Aprendiz de Viajante
Londres para Principlantes 0 Mundo que eu Vi
Cultuga
Conexlo París
Agenda Berilm
Ducs Amsterdam
Viajo Logo Eximo
Viajando com Gabi
360 Meridianos
Viaje na viagem
Creators of digital content
Zygmunt Bauman [2007}, Gilles Lipovetsky (2016), and Byung-Chul Han (2015,2016)
Blogs
Fig. 1 - Diagram of the evaluation process in social media
Source: own elaboration.
In addition to monitoring the posts and interactions of readers/followers of these eleven pages, the content creator responsible for the blog "Viaggiando" was interviewed in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The other content creators who live abroad and whose audience is Brazilian tourists were interviewed personally in their cities, except for Lina, from Blog Conexao Paris, who granted an interview via Skype platform. The semi-structured interviews with the content creators took place between May and June 2018, and the questions were related to the monitoring carried out in the previous months.
4 Results and Discussion The bloggers interviewed in the survey were unanimous in stating that people are increasingly looking for content organized in a practical way and quick information, such as "What to do in London in three days," "Best Museums to visit in Paris," "Where to eat cod in Lisbon." For them, it is clear that the
consumption of images and captions with precise tips prevails over the consumption of complete information, which according to them, helps to explain the migration of readers from blogs to social media.
They also revealed an increasing desire from followers to post content related to private life. The person in charge of the London posts on the "Aprendiz de Viajante" reported that she is impressed by a "behind-the-scenes hunger ."According to her, her followers ask to see details of her personal life, "they want to know what I eat, where I work, the books I read, and the places I attend to (...) even the cookie recipe I posted they asked for." The head of "Conexao Paris" revealed that she was "forced" to promote a change in her social media due to this interest in her intimacy expressed by followers: "My coworkers and I rarely appeared in the images and tried to make the records that we considered interesting for a tourist visiting France. However, as
time went by, I realized that our followers wanted to see us; they were hungry for things to which we did not give much importance, such as the places where we buy bread or celebrate our birthdays. The short videos have also become part of our posting schedule, as they help to meet this desire."
The writers of "Cultuga" gave another example of the consumption of intimacy and the desire for identification with content creators. According to them, it is not uncommon to receive requests to talk about their daily habits, favorite songs, hobbies, and lives before moving to Portugal: "There is a permanent curiosity, and often it ends up serving as the agenda for our work."
While monitoring the blogs and social media, we noticed significant changes in how the content was produced. Particularities of the writer's private life were taking up a space that was previously intended only for content related to their travel experiences, especially on the pages of so-called digital nomads. For example, in the profile "Viajando com Gabi" on Instagram, which has 281,000 followers, several posts seem to have been produced to satisfy the followers' desires for personal information. She shares, for example, the backstage of her photos, her love adventures, obstacles arising from the lack of resources to
continue the trip, places where she shops, health problems, and eating habits.
This made us reflect on the obsession with transparency that permeates our daily lives, especially those portrayed and shared through blogs and social media. These places where everything is said and where there seem to be no secrets can lead the tourist to lose authenticity, freedom, and spontaneity, which define traveling, transforming traveling into a standardized product. In these media spaces, scenarios and characters are created similarly by sharing images and little narratives.
Breathtaking landscapes, a beautiful sunset, an appetizing dish, feet in crystal clear water, the suspended body swinging in a hammock, the photo framed by the window of an airplane, and a selfie in front of a well-known monument, are images that are repeated, like a mantra, on the travelers' social media. On "Viajando com Gabi" Instagram, we found some of these images that can be easily compared to those on "Viajo Logo Existo" Instagram. More than selling a lifestyle and travel as a product capable of providing moments similar to those enjoyed and shared by these travelers, these photographs and the short texts that accompany them teach us different ways to optimize time and travel the world: where to go, what to see, and what to do.
Fig. 2 - Comparison between images taken from Instagram pages of "Viajando com Gabi" (left) and "Viajo Logo Existo" (right)
Source: Instagram profile of "Viajando com Gabi" and "Viajo Logo Existo"
When commenting on the influence of social media on destination choice and the promotion of travel trends, Luíza Antunes (2018), from the "360 Meridianos" blog, shared a personal experience.
I, for example, was digitally influenced two years ago to go to Albania, all because I saw Liliana's photos from "Catálogos de Viagem." When I was in Ksamil, now in August, I saw people in the comments say they would like to go there because of my photos. (...) The In-stagram photos show a perfect environment with perfect lighting and capture a magical moment that I once believed in a photo of a beach in Pernam-buco. Then I got there and wanted to cry in anger at the dirt of the sand and the noise pollution of the kiosks competing for the loudest music. As much as an image speaks more than a thousand words, the image does not show the smell or a crowd of people around or anything negative.
These places on the Internet, where even difficulties are transformed into motivation, light up a warning about a trip full of optimistic promises, which, when not fulfilled, turn into frustration. The warning about the dangers that can cause this absence of negativity, which permeates the contemporary world, is given by Byung-Chul Han in several of his works, among them "The Transparency Society" (2014), "The Burnout Society" (2015a), and "Saving Beauty" (2016). In "The Burnout Society," the author begins his analysis by saying that we have left behind a time of bacteriological diseases and started to live in a society in which neural diseases prevail, such as depression, attention deficit disorder with hy-peractivity syndrome, and burnout syndrome, which, according to him, are caused, among other factors, by the excess of positivity.
The last century was an immunological age. In this immunological device that went beyond the biological field, entering the entire social sphere, there was inscribed blindness: reject everything strange in the name of defense. The
object of immune defense is strangeness as such. Even if the stranger has no hostile intention, even if it poses no danger, it is eliminated because of its otherness (Han, 2014, p.8-9). (...) However, the difference comes into play nowadays instead of otherness, which does not provoke any immunological reaction. The postmodern post-immu-nological difference no longer makes you sick. On an immunological level, it is the same. The difference is lacking, in a way, the sting of strangeness, which would provoke a violent immunological reaction. Also, the strangeness is neutralized in a consumption recipe. The strange gives way to the exotic. The tourist travels to visit it. The tourist or the consumer is no longer an immuno-logical subject (Han, 2016: 10-11).
Han (2015a, p.15) continues his reflection and refers to uniformity and consensus, which take over social media and the virtual universe, as some kind of soft annihilation violence, often imperceptible, as it becomes systemic. An aggression that leads to saturation.
In fact, from 2015, when we started accessing travel blogs, until the end of 2018, when we finished monitoring, we saw significant changes in the means used and in the form of communication adopted by bloggers. The success of sharing images via Instagram, which accompanied the popularization of smartphones, caused many to favor using this media instead of blogs. They put aside the long and detailed written narratives and the "slowness" that characterizes the blog-osphere to share content and narrate their stories more quickly and intensely through images, short texts, and videos published through the stories function.
We wonder how Walter Benjamin (1987, p.205) would react to this scenario. When he wrote "The Storyteller" almost a hundred years ago, he expressed concern about the extinction of the gift of storytelling and the gift of listening. According to him, storytelling has always been the art of telling them again. However, this art disappears when the stories
are no longer conserved when the communities of listeners are over. "It gets lost because no one else spins or weaves while listening to the story. The more the listener forgets of himself, the more deeply what is heard is recorded in him."
Instagram, a media developed to be used by the mobile and multitasking man, is not a favorable environment for the "conservation" of stories. They are produced to reproduce instants. The flashes of everyday life appear in a single line, passing by, quickly seen,
and automatically discarded in a process dominated by ephemerality and superficiality. In this digital world, there is also not much room to "spin or weave," and although boredom can be established due to sameness, it does not provide us the attention Benjamin requested from the good listener. Speed and the same often lead us to a state of torpor that does not allow memorization. Stories are also not a place where human beings can forget about themselves because that is where they build the self.
Fig. 3 - The portrait of traveling that is repeated on Instagram
Source: Instagram profiles monitored during the study.
These brief narratives in the form of photographs, written messages, polls, or videos that provoke subjectively and follow one another without stopping on smartphone screens are examples of this excess that can lead to burnout, exhaustion, and suffocation in the face of too much. The content transmitted through the stories comprises a series of information, sales messages, and stimuli presented to consumers in a way - called by Han (2016) in "Saving Beauty" - smooth and polished. According to him, what is polished, clean, and impeccable does not offer any resistance. It asks us only for a "Like (î I)".
The polished object nullifies anything that might confront it. All negativity is
thus eliminated. (...) Sharing and liking it is a polite way of communication. The negative aspects are eliminated because they represent obstacles to accelerated communication (Han, 2016, p.11-12).
It is interesting to note that when we compared the ways of recording the trip throughout history, we realized that at no time has traveling been so dammed up or standardized. Just think of the three volumes of chronicles written by Cecilia Meireles about her travels, the voluminous diaries full of details by James Cook, or even the countless letters that Vincent Van Gogh sent to his brother Théo with information about the places he
visited and drawings of landscapes that would give rise to his works. What does this summary of traveling present in these media produce? Homogeneous trips, whose selfie in front of that monument visited by everyone is worth more than the history of the monument itself? Do they turn traveling into an unsurprising activity, without interest in what is not said, take away the interest in wandering described by Onfray (2009) as an essential "activity" for a traveler.
When we asked the blog writers about the most considerable doubts and the anxieties present in the questions made by travelers, many of them referred to issues related to the length of stay in the city versus the possibility of visiting all attractions. This urge to "have to do everything" or the concern with "taking care of everything" that the destination offers is quite common since content creators have shared several examples. Lina, from "Conexao Paris," said she had already received complaints from followers who could not complete the script suggested by her. She also reported cases where readers requested information about what could be done during the early hours to "buy time." From "Ducs Amsterdam," Daniel revealed that he had received questions about the possibility of visiting three museums in a single day, and readers of "Londres para Principiantes" have asked Eneida for a script of everything they could see in twenty-four hours.
This urge to encompass everything imprisons and enslaves individuals to time and schemes or patterns to travel. Perhaps this can explain a fact observed during the social media monitoring and confirmed during interviews with the bloggers: the most accessed posts by readers are those that contain tips, lists, and ready-made scripts. The traveler wants to catalog everything beforehand and organize, above all, the time - so that everything fits so they do not feel they are wasting time. As a result, the traveling sees the dimensions of surprise and the unexpected (the useless, the uncreated, the wandering) suppressed. There is a capitalistic subjectivity consuming individuals even when they are on
vacation. Moreover, most interestingly, selling a sense of freedom.
The speed-up of life and also of the historical process, together with the multiplication of sounds and messages and the exaggeration of stimuli, especially the "smooth and polished" ones (which do not present gaps, grooves, seams, that is, which are given, without delay, interpretation, and reflection) has a crippling effect, they tire, exhaust, leading to the formation of a permissive and passive society. One of the forms of expression of posi-tivity is transparency. It manifests itself in blogs and, mainly, in social media, through the narrative of everyday life - through which the idea of a "well spent" and intense time is sold. These narratives are filled with images selected to become public, in which, generally, the self is the central character.
This concern with the "use" of time and the desire for an exhaustive trip may be related to a need for the avant-garde to stand out from the rest. When talking about fashion trends and emblems that are created by major brands to be exhibited by consumers, Bauman (2008, p.107) says that the use of these symbols reveals the concern of "being and staying ahead (ahead of the style trend - that is, of the reference group, the 'peers,' the 'others who count,' and whose approval or rejection draws the line between success and failure)." These stimuli are fed by the consumer society and can easily be applied to the needs of owning the trip or attempts to materialize it in order to show it, which are manifested mainly through images, like selfies.
Social media are the perfect space for those who wish to promote their travel experiences. It is in this space that intimacy is externalized. They were invented for the public display of the self; they exemplify the social relations mediated by the images. According to Sibilia (2017), much of our sociability goes through there. In contrast to the "decorum" and the "modesty of the exposition" - values of the 19th and 20th centuries - ''today, showing oneself loses much of its pejorative burden and gains moral legitimacy. This situation is evident with the success of selfies,
which do not count so much for the moment of their products but the value of their circulation. The selfie is created to be shown."
This production of oneself through social media can be considered the apex of Bau-man's consumer society (2008), in which everything becomes a commodity, including the consumer. In this context, traveling also becomes an instrument for valuing and selling the "self" product. Bauman (2008) understands that in order to adapt to this configuration,
people are enticed, encouraged, or forced to promote an attractive and desirable commodity. To do so, they do the best they can and use the best resources they have at their disposal to increase the market value of their products. Moreover, the products they are encouraged to market, promote, and sell are themselves (Bauman, 2008:13).
Han (2015 : 23) finds a place for this consumer-commodity in the performance society, a place inhabited "no longer by the subjects of obedience, but by the subjects of performance and production, entrepreneurs of themselves." According to him, the main change from a disciplinary society to a performance society was the detachment from negativity and the maximization of production.
The discipline paradigm is replaced by the positive scheme of power to increase productivity. From a certain level of productivity, the negativity of prohibition has a blocking effect, preventing further growth. The positivity of power is way more efficient than the negativity of duty. [...] The performance subject is faster and more productive than the obedience subject. However, power does not cancel duty. The performance subject remains disciplined (Han, 2015: 13-14).
Travel images posted on social media are a way of self-promotion. An effort to sell the "self" merchandise that needs the manifestation of the "others" to validate this construction. The effort of this performance aims at the look of others. For Sibilia (2016, p.359),
the goal is to win the attention of those who observe. "Here is a possible explanation of the insistence on the 'interactivity' of the most current formats, particularly performance. Because it only exists if someone is looking -or, better yet, admiring and clapping." As a result, this exposure of images of the "self" can also be seen as a form of control and pressure that the individual exerts on himself. Discipline continues, but it is exercised from the inside out. The consumer-commodity is solely responsible for its successes and failures. This internal violence can lead to neural diseases, which dominate the contemporary world, according to Han (2015).
5 Conclusion
In the present paper, we sought to demonstrate the prominent place that the travel narrative occupies among the various cultural practices of the contemporary. In addition, we sought to present some reasons that may have contributed to the transformation of the trip into a product that can be consumed by more and more people or desired by many others. As we have seen, travel is an almost inexhaustible source of possibilities. Onfray (2009 : 110) said, "the world is full of volcanoes to climb, beaches to meditate on, rivers to go down, roads to follow, trains and airplanes to take [...]". Following the logic of the current economic system, when some landscapes or places show signs of "exhaustion," they are replaced, renewed, or their possibility of exploration is amplified with the construction of novelties and the creation of events.
Thus, the many sectors of the economy that profit from the travel product put products loaded with ideas on the market, which promise to supply what the capitalist game that permeates the contemporary asks from its members: to seek the extraordinarily new, be ahead, be part. Tourist attractions are created, monuments, shopping malls, and museums are built - with architectures that also make them symbols of a place - landscapes are "discovered," and natural phenomena are explored. Destinations go in and out of fashion.
Some Middle Eastern countries, such as
the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, are perhaps the most obvious example of this search for novelties' incessant presentation and promotion. Some of their attractions are built and sold to travelers based on superlatives (the highest, the most expensive, the biggest, the best). Its buildings and monuments are the expressions of what Han (2016a) calls smooth and polished, that is, objects that do not ask for any effort of interpretation and eliminate aesthetic distance, inviting the consumer-traveler to enjoy its promises.
These promises attributed to traveling and the use that travelers make of their symbols were built on culture by circulating general ideas and concepts through different media. Currently, blogs and social media are the most common means of disseminating these manifestations. In addition to being used by bloggers to highlight places, they also constituted a space for constructing the ''self'' merchandise, which is accomplished through the exhaustive display of selfies and images of scenarios that represent each of the many travel destinations. Although these are the most notorious demonstrations of traveling in the media, we found other examples that allow the development of new concepts of travel and allow presenting traveling as a practice that can provide meetings, dialogues, and articulations.
Regarding the research objective, it was observed that the spectacle of the trips in the media seems to portray all the excess that permeates the consumer society. Amidst so many possibilities, information, and ways to undertake a trip that circulate on blogs, Face-book, Instagram, and YouTube, the traveler gets lost and starts to seek references or models to travel. When this model is offered by someone with whom they identify - which often occurs through the display of intimacy -they will likely follow them. Thus, repetition takes over when they make their trips and are also exposed to them through these media. Traveling becomes a symbol of the homogeni-zation of the world and reproduction, one of the contemporary ills.
The way travel is presented, and the
ways of traveling taught to us through these media, both by bloggers and travelers on vacation, reinforce the ideas of an accelerated, ephemeral, and superficial life. The images pass quickly through the fingertips, complete reports are replaced by practical tips - which fit in the standardized spaces by the creators of these media - and we are educated to look at places through fragments. The lists and ready-made itineraries reduce cities to a series of landmarks (monuments, parks, squares, restaurants, palaces, museums, shows, giant wheels, zoos, and aquariums), whose visit or enjoyment is essential to promote the individual to the status of "connoisseur" of a given destination.
We are educated to value the completed script and checklist through these models that teach us to travel around the city. Time is segmented. It needs to be optimized to handle "everything" that needs to be seen. What matters most is having been in places, having enjoyed the sensations or images that were sold to us, and, of course, having recorded these events to share them quickly through social media. This type of trip runs out when the traveler receives approval from those on the other side of the screen. After that, little or nothing likely remains, just the desire to continue dotting the journey, recording it, and sharing it.
We realized that social media are a space for building the travelers' subjectivities during the research. Currently, they focus their reports and display their travel images mainly on Facebook and Instagram. In these spaces, they make their consumer choices and define themselves as participants in certain groups, such as those who use travel to promote the ''self'' product. This behavior helps strengthen the ideals of the current economic system, strengthening the individualistic logic and transforming the subjectivities of contemporary travelers into commodities. For Sibilia (2016),
the world wide web has become a great laboratory, a suitable ground for experimenting and developing new subjectivities and other ways of
relating to others. Innovative ways of being in the world are born in its various channels, which sometimes seem healthily eccentric and megalomania-cal. However, at other times - or simultaneously - sink into the shallowest smallness you can imagine (Sibilia, 2016: 52-53).
Bauman (2008, p. 108) understands that the transformation of people into goods -which leads individuals to seek a place to promote themselves - "begins with the acquisition of emblems and the announcement of their possession and only becomes complete when possession becomes public knowledge, which in turn translates into a sense of belonging." In the contemporary world, social media seem to have been created precisely to serve as a showcase for the "self" and facilitate the quick exchange of information, two essential elements for establishing the conditions for the accelerated movement of goods and, consequently, consumption. Lian Tai (2016 : 188) complements Bauman's (2008) thinking by stating that this "commodify-
cation" of the self ends up eliminating the boundaries between the work and the personal scope, considering the current tendency to flex boundaries between public and private or subjective interiority and 'spectaculariza-tion' of subjectivity."
The transformation of travel into an object of consumption necessary for social "approval" and its 'spectacularization' through networks contributes to the dissemination of positivity, which according to Han (2015), is a form of violence that produces feelings of inadequacy, dissatisfaction, and impotence. These are motivated by the eternal search for a way of life based on the idea that the present is the available time and that everything needs to be lived in this space. According to the author3 these unattainable models lead to saturation and burnout, causing neural diseases that plague the burnout society.
Based on these findings, it is expected that this research can be expanded on the dynamics of social networks, the advancement of technology, and the constant change in the profile of travelers.
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