This document presents the slideshow for a PhD workshop presentation. The presentation evaluates how the availability of internet-connected devices affects the travel experience. It discusses how connectivity facilitates emotional connections and creates new imperatives during travel. It also examines how travelers use social media to transform experiences into digital content. The presenter proposes exploring these issues through an autoethnography involving critical reflection on their personal travel experiences and device usage, supported by an exegesis. Key concepts discussed include the tourist gaze, hermeneutic circle, panopticon, and performing self on social media.

1. ENTER 2016 PhD Workshop Slide Number 1
A journey across the digital frontier: How do
online platforms affect the travel experience?
Michelangelo Magasic
Curtin University, Australia
m.magasic@postgrad.curtin.edu.au

3. IDEA: Look at how the use of
internet devices changes the
travel experience.

4. 2005 (First trip) 2016
Electronic/Internet Devices: Torch At least 3 devices: laptop,
smartphone, digital camera….
Instant communication: Phone cards/ Phone booths Skype or FB Messenger
voice/video calls
Ambient awareness: Internet banking Daily participation in 4+ SNS
Digital epistolary
communication:
Weekly emails to parents and
travel partners (one account)
Daily participation in 3 email
accounts
Paper Communication: Postcards to my relatives and
Grandma
Postcards to my Grandma
Needs: Bed Bed, wi-fi, electricity

5. Literature Review
• Travel Blogs
An autodiegetic, reverse chronological record of travel published online
(Azariah, 2012; Pudliner, 2007; Banyai & Havitz, 2013).
• Tourism Social Media
An emergent mode of travel in which the journeyer uses a suite of different
social media applications that intersect with, support, or augment the
process of journeying (Munar, Gyimóthy & Cai, 2013).
• Studies of Tourist Experience
(Lo & McKercher, 2015; Wang, Park & Fesenmaier, 2012; Wang &
Fesenmaier, 2013)

6. Two problematics:
• 1) A lack of understanding about how Internet connectivity facilitates
emotional connections and creates new imperatives within the
journey.
• 2) A lack of understanding about how travellers use social media
during travel i.e. the personal processes through which travel
experiences are transformed into digital travel content.

7. Multisited Ethnography
Hermeneutic circle
“Look at the relatedness of offline and online travel texts”
Autoethnography
Phenomenology
“Travelogue of device usage”
MYPROJECT

8. How?
• Autoethnography : Critical reflection on personal experience
• “A travelogue of device usage” A travel narrative with an explicit focus
on how I use devices
• Performative thesis with supporting exegesis

9. What?
RQ: Evaluate how the availability of Internet-connected devices affects
the practice of travel.
RO 1) Investigate how Internet connectivity affects the traveller’s
emotional state.
RO 2) Describe the processes through which travel experiences are
shared online and the factors which influence this.

10. Emotional state - Theoretical perspectives
61% of global travellers use social media while on vacation (Trip Advisor, 2013).
“As new technologies reconfigure the spatial and temporal parameters of
social life, we can no longer say that being together is the opposite of being
apart, or that being away necessarily means that one is absent” (Molz & Paris
2015, p. 180).
“….the liminal experience is transformed into a continuing engagement with
established relationships and an ongoing connection to people back home”
(White & White 2007, p. 100).
“The voice of the tourist consumer as the new centrality of the touristic
cyberworld” (Munar 2013, p. 53).

11. Key Concepts
• Tourist Gaze (Urry, 1992)
• Hermeneutic circle (Urry, 2002)
• Panopticon (Focault, 1975)
• “Selfie Gaze”
Travel with an audience

12. Experiential - Theoretical perspectives
“virtual, emotional, and imaginative mode of travel, preceding as well as
running parallel with the actual physical journey” (Munar & Gyimothy 2013, p.
2).
The possibility of becoming a professional or well-recognised blogger is a
motivating factor in recording travel (Azariah, 2014).
Contemporary travel is experienced through the frame of immediate pleasure
(Jansson, 2002).
The traveller’s social media usage can be seen to exert a significant influence
upon the itinerary of the journeyer, motivating them to visit or forego certain
places as is the perceived effect a destination will have on their social media
profile (Magasic, 2014).

13. Key concepts
• The “Existential” frame posits the tourist as a “seeker” who is “fully
committed to finding an ‘elective’ spiritual centre” (Cohen, 1979).
• The “Performance of Self” (Goffman, 1959; Papacharissi, 2012)
• “Social media use as Pilgrimage”
The traveller’s social media performance is quantified on social
networking platforms through ‘likes’, ‘followers’ and ‘shares’ (Marwick &
boyd, 2011). The “spiritual centre” (Cohen, 1979) of the users’ pilgrimage
is social media success.

14. Why?
• A managerial bias toward quantitative studies (Munar, 2013).
• We lack an understanding of how tourists “create meanings based on
both objective and subjective components of their realities” (Banyai &
Havitz 2013, p. 234).
• A framework to “explain the collective behaviour of bloggers, tweeters,
and tripadvisors” (Gyimóthy, 2013, p. 61).

15. When?
April – July 2016: Van travel in Mexico with my wife
Experience – “Social media use as pilgrimage”
January – February 2017: Travel in Indonesia with my cousin
Emotion – “The selfie gaze”
April 2018: Green + Yellow = …………. ?

16. A better understanding of how the availability of
internet devices affects the behaviour of tourists
? ? ? ?

17. Help!
• How can I integrate the conceptual frames I am developing into my
autoethnography?
i.e. how to produce rigorous critical reflection while writing a
personal travel narrative?

18. Thanks!! This presentation is available
by request

19. More to see:
• ENTER 2016 – Friday morning
"The 'selfie gaze' and ‘social media pilgrimage’: Two frames for
conceptualising the experience of social media using tourists”
• A summary of my Masters Thesis which lead into this project
Magasic (2014) Travel Blogging : An autoethnographic study of how online
interactions influence the journey. First Monday.

20. References
Azariah, D. (2012). When travel meets tourism: Tracing discourse in Tony Wheeler’s blog. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 29 (4), 275–291. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2011.574640
Azariah, D. (2014). From blogger to book author: Examining self-publishing, self-presentation and discourse in travel blogs. Paper presented at Australia and New Zealand Communication Association Annual
Conference, Swinburne University, Australia, July 9-11, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.anzca.net/documents/2014-conf-papers/737-anzca14-azariah/file.html
Banyai, M. & Havitz, M. E. (2013). Analyzing travel blogs using a realist evaluation approach. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 22(2), 229-241. doi: 10.1080/19368623.2012.680239
Cohen, E. (1979). A phenomenology of tourist experiences. Sociology, 13(2), 179-201. doi:10.1177/003803857901300203
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York, N.Y.: Random House.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, N.Y.: Anchor.
Gyimóthy, S. (2013). Symbolic convergence and tourism social media. In Munar, A.M., Gyimóthy, S. & Cai, L. (Eds.), Tourism social media: Transformations in identity, community and culture, 55-71.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1571-5043(2013)0000018006
Jansson, A. (2002). Spatial phantasmagoria: The mediatisation of tourism experience. European Journal of Communication. 17(4), 429–443. doi:10.1177/02673231020170040201
Magasic, M. (2014). Travel blogging: An auto-ethnographic study of how online interactions influence a journey. First Monday, 19 (7). Retrieved from
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4887/4098
Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users,context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, (13)1, 114–133.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313
Molz, J & Paris, C. (2015) The social affordances of flashpacking: Exploring the mobility nexus of travel and communication. Mobilities, 10 (2), 173-192. doi: 10.1080/17450101.2013.848605
Munar, A.M. (2013). Paradoxical Digital Worlds. In Munar, A.M., Gyimothy, S. & Cai, L. (Eds.), Tourism social media: Transformations in identity, community and culture, 35-53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1571
5043(2013)0000018005
Munar, A.M. & Gyimóthy, S. (2013). Critical Digital Tourism Studies. In In Munar, A.M., Gyimóthy, S. & Cai, L. (Eds.), Tourism social media: Transformations in identity, community and culture, 245-261.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1571-5043(2013)0000018016
Munar, A. M., Gyimóthy, S., & Cai, L. (Eds.). (2013). Tourism Social Media: Transformations in Identity, Community and Culture, Tourism Social Science Series, Vol. 19. Bingley: Emerald.
Papacharissi, Z. (2012). Without you, I'm nothing: Performances of the self on Twitter. International Journal of Communication, (6), 1989-2006. Retrieved from:
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1484/775
Pudliner, B. A. (2007). Alternative literature and tourist experience: Travel and tourist weblogs. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 5(1), 46-59. doi:10.2167/jtcc051.0
Trip Advisor. (2013, Oct. 22). TripBarometer mobile & social survey finds 85% of US travellers bring their smartphones on vacation & 61% report using social media while travelling. Retrieved from
http://tinyurl.com/o8ezk8l
Urry, J. (1992). The tourist gaze: Travel and leisure in contemporary societies. London, UK: Sage Publications
Urry, J. (2002). The tourist gaze: Travel and leisure in contemporary societies (2nd Ed.). London, UK: Sage Publications
Wang, D. & Fesenmaier, D.R. (2013). Transforming the travel experience: The use of smartphones for travel. In L. Cantoni, & Z. Xiang (Eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2013:
Proceedings of the International Conference held in Innsbruck, Austria, January 22-25 2013 (pp 58-69). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-36309-2
Wang, D, Park, S, & Fesenmaier, D.R. (2012). The role of smartphones in mediating the touristic experience. Journal of Travel Research, 51(4), 371-387. doi: 10.1177/0047287511426341
All photos used are the presenter’s own.