Mediation of holidays

2. Mediation of holidays

2.1 Evolvement of the source of travelling information

Traditionally, the main informants about a holiday destination have been people, namely friends, which means interpersonal communication. As MacCannell (1999, p. 191, in Dunn, 2006, p. 37) had suggested, “We are all tour guides when we introduce some unfamiliar aspect of our own world to family friends”. Retelling the experiences in first-person features drama, non-verbal communication, promotes context and is still by far most interesting, because it stimulates the listener’s imagination, just like those childhood fairy-tales used to do. In the modern world, the media have assumed many of the traditional parental roles, including storytelling. Television, which was the most powerful medium before the advent of the Internet, still remains the most important medium in family life cohesion (Zgrablji ć, 2006), and amongst many other things, it also broadcasts travel channels. The travel program informs about distant countries, representing them as fabulous/wonderful/delightful/magical tourist destinations and often does so, as Dunn points out in his study on the BBC holiday program (2006), employing docusoap genres. Namely, television no longer makes exclusive use of the documentary-travelogue genre in its reporting; rather it increasingly draws on emotionalized messages and storytelling. Modern technologies mark a new way of mediation of holidays. Web sites are one of the most popular and most important sources of information. Their number has been constantly rising over the last several years when they have become the principal form of promotion of Croatian tourism. “It is difficult to think back to 1996 when there were only 250,000 websites and 36 million Internet users. Compare that to 2006 when we saw over a billion Internet users and approximately 105,244,649 websites” (Marfleet, 2008, p. 152). Many of the WWW sites serve to promote tourism. They offer sports, religion, health, adventure, sailing, culture, sea and sun. “Post-modern tourists start their travel with an exact vision of what form of local community life they want to participate in ...” (Uzelac & Jelincic, 2008, p. 74). Or at least that is what they would like to find out when exploring the WWW!

2.2 Post-tourism and “third space” travelling 11

Lagerkvist (2008) in her study “Travels in Thirdspace: Experiential Suspense in Mediaspace—The Case of America (Un)known”, interestingly argued the role of the media in the creation of a new type of tourism—post-tourism. Soja (2006, p. 242) investigated the notion further within the scope of Baudrillard’s simulacrum theory and thought of it as part of the epistemological stances of the so-called postmodern condition (Lagerkvist, 2008, p. 346). Post-tourists have developed a different attitude towards foreign countries and destinations by using the media, local lifestyles and products, to acquaint themselves with those places. The relationship with their own cultures grows weaker and people are adopting the global culture as a shared, collective one. They are aware of vastly distant places and cultures, and they can experience them by embarking on an imaginary media journey. New questions about the understanding and the experience of area and space, about the essence of experience and identity get to be asked. Such “virtual journeys” (Lagerkvist, 2008, p. 354)

11 Homi K. Bhabha uses the term “third space” to denote a place of cultural hybridity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirdspace). The idea of “third space” conceives the encounter of two distinct and unequal social groups as taking place in a special third space of

enunciation where culture is disseminated and displaced from the interacting groups, making way for the invention of a hybrid identity, whereby these two groups conceive themselves to partake in a common identity relating to shared space and common dialogue. (From Karin Ikas & Gerhard Wagner. Communicating the third space. Routledge, 2008).

Internet as a source of information for tourists —The case of Croatia

lead not only to cultural hybridization but to new ways of constructing the social and individual identity as well. In this sense, using the Internet to plan holidays is more than just fun and a search for information. It is a lifestyle statement denoting a certain social status, profile, interests, wishes and preferences. Citizens with such practices have urban communication habits of chat, forum, debate, critique and participation; they do not expect information to be offered from a single source but rather actively engage in seeking the information they need. They do not maintain their personal relationships by sending postcards from vacation, but do respect some similar rituals by depicting the places where they spent their holidays and evaluating them in order to send a message to all other prospective visitors, not just their friends. Therefore, all tourists in general are becoming the “friends as sources of information”, and not just those who will talk to the future clients face-to-face.