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 they both play a major role in creating our map of national and international cultures.

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book explores the interactions between tourism and media practices within a contemporary culture in which the consumption of images has become increasingly significant. A number of common themes and concerns arise, and the contributions included are divided between those:

• written from media studies awareness perspective, concerned with the way the media imagines travel and tourism
• written from the point of view of the study of tourism, considering how tourism practices are affected or altered by the media
• that attempt a direct comparison between the practices of tourism and the media.

Incorporating case study material from the UK, the Caribbean, Australia, the US, France and Switzerland, this significant text - ideal for students of culture, media and tourism studies - discusses tourism and the media as separate processes through which identity is constructed in relation to space and place.