The tourist gaze goes on-line

Writing from within the analytic horizons of media reception studies, the article argues that the structuring moments of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 1995) are exemplified in client ludic looking on-line at the tourism information, marketing and purchasing screens authored by industry and state. Hermeneutic philosophers foreground the processes of understanding, of arriving at a text’s interpretation. In cognitive play, they assert, significance is created on screen or read elsewhere. Using the Internet instantiates processes of comprehension resulting in cultural varieties of understanding content. Articulating (ten) moments or aspects of ‘play’, the article explores the multiple ways in which tourists constitute themselves as viewers, their cognitive, pleasurable, political and even physical behaviour in response to the screen’s mediated meaning. Ludic, they go on-line.