Research Paper: "Tourism and online photography"

Nora

I chose an article about tourismn and online photography because we decided to combine the visual aspects from Photography inspired by the Page about Pori with the tracker theme.

Tourism and online photography

written by Iris Sheunting Lo, Bob McKercher, Ada Lo, Catherine Cheung, Rob Law

Travelling and photography is really connected with each other. Photos give the opportunity to preserve travelling experiences and share them with others. The internet has not only changed our sharing behaviour it also changed our research ones. Before we go abroad we often use the internet to get informations about our destination and we are also influenced by the informations and photos we can find on social media sites. Photography and and mass tourism emerged around the same time and both factors are influencing our everyday life. Tourism is important concerning our experiences and photography helps us to shape this experiences into something tangible. They refer a nice quote from Kodak in their article "a holiday without Koday is a holiday wasted" which illustrates the change of the travel behaviour quite well. We stopped being travelers and started to being tourists. Through travel photography a person can verify that the person have physically visted a place and had a individual authentic, maybe exotic experience. If you own a photograph you also own an experience and can share it and use it to maintain social relationships. In previous time this sharing happend in the livingroom with an photograph album and the presenation of the picuters was accompanied by verbal narrative telling the unvisible story behind the photo. Today photosharing often happens through web 2.0 and social media of different kinds. In social networks photos are often used to create a desired selfportrait. We rely and trust more on informations and photos posted and shared by friends than on on those uploaded by companies. The use of one media tool or more and the quantity of sharing and collecting photos varies from age and education level. The decisions of the tourists are also influenced by this informations and visual material of the social media. This can have positive and negative effects for a destination. On the one hand its free advertising and personal suggestions are really important to people, on the other hand photos can also show the unwanted dark sides of an destination all the journey catalogues want to hide.

I think statistics are not that relevant for us and also the research they did was located in Hong Kong and so the behaviour of the travelling people might be a bit different too. What might be important for our group project is the influence of photos on our everyday life and their major role in social media. They are often shared through these platforms and people use them to create a certain image of themselves and to prove that they have been on a place.

Concerning our tracker idea it would be good when people can create their own route and track the stations on their way and also illustrate them with their own photos.

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