Are You a #Globetrotter? Experiencing Tourism on the Web

Abstract

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a globetrotter is a person who often travels to different countries. Even though this word dates to the early 19^th century, it has only recently been adopted by social media users with reference to people who travel extensively.

New media and technologies are constantly changing socio/cultural panorama in different ways using new different tools for creating and conveying meanings to big audience. Social media communication plays a big role in de/constructing and re/constructing social practices, personal belief and needs affecting people knowledge, awareness and habits.

This paper aims at investigating to what extent tourism discourse has changed in relation to new forms of tourism and new platforms of communication like Instagram and TikTok. In the first part of this paper, tourism promotional discourse conducted on social media is examined from a multimodal and multimedial perspective to investigate how sign- and meaning-making processes have changed in the last few years abandoning the single multimodal sphere of printed brochures and maps and the monolingual dimension of written texts. The new ways of discussing and promoting tourism affects tourists’ choices and experiences.

This change of course is investigated in the second part of the paper which focuses on social value that new forms of tourism are acquiring in connection with the linguistic and terminological influence that these new forms of promotion and popularization may have on tourists.