Abstract
Tourism’s embracing by theory positioned phenomenology as eligible equipment (tool) for conceptualising interpretive processes disclosed in consumers reflecting on themselves as readers. With authoring audiences now emerging in participatory (or social) media, this paper considers if Heideggerian phenomenology – fore-grounding our ‘fore-structuring’ of generic understanding as a process and practicable achievement – can recover the immanent structures of travel writing online. Here this research question is directed at a single species of tourist weblogging, TripAdvisor. Phenomenology explores reflexive understanding, advisors’ views of authoring and accommodation as affordance or tools for tourism. Do writers implicitly, for instance, aim at narratives equipped to resolve audience uncertainty, at evaluating accommodation as (to a greater or lesser degree) ‘ready-to-hand’ generic ‘equipment’ enabling occupants’ ‘potentiality-for-being’ (Heidegger)? Phenomenology in its Heideggerian shaping holds we engage with ‘entities’ not only as (un)predictable, but primarily in terms of practices. Gazing inspects for use.
Introduction
Consumption, argues Silverstone in his discussion of shopping, involves a ‘constant play of products and meanings’ (1999: 79). ‘We consume information. We consume images. But in that consumption, in its daily taken-for-grantedness, we make our own meanings, negotiate our own values, and in so doing we make our world meaningful’ (1999: 80). As consumers, our embodied perception of products is play-like in negotiating its own flexible manufacturing of their meaning.
The experience of consuming screen media can be considered particularly play-like, with its multiple aspects or moments of audience engagement regarded as absorbed attention, as more or less aimed at making content meaningful. The ‘core’ concept of ‘play’ is a ‘tool for the analysis of the media experience. ... Play is part of everyday life, just as it is separate from it. To step into a space and a time to play is to move across a threshold, to leave something behind – one kind of order – and to grasp a different reality and a rationality defined by its own rules’ (1999: 59–60). Such ludic looking at the screen is rule-guided (often generic), both absorbing and articulating meaning.
If consuming media is ludic, our immersion in using tourist media is play-like a fortiori. When we go online to explore a holiday heaven, we doubly escape, on screen and in our speculative vacation. ‘Play’ writes Silverstone, is spatio-temporal in its goal-directed actualising or constructing of meaning, as success in a ‘structured place’ of ‘modest security’: his phenomenology of playing’s core experiential structure is suited to characterising television viewing and tourist voyager as ludic.
Watching or wayfaring, we absorb ourselves/are absorbed in ‘a space in which meanings are constructed through participation within a shared and structured place, a place ritually demarcated as being distinct from, and other than, the ordinariness of everyday life, a place of modest security and trust, in which players can safely leave real life and engage in an activity that is meaningful in its ‘rule-governed excess.’ (1999: 60)
The concept of ‘play’ may be widely used to metaphorically model much of our experience. Not only is it clearly applicable to tourism, but as Silverstone has argued (1999), reference to the multiple dimensions of the ludic can serve to analytically interpret watching television. The purpose of this paper on TripAdvisor is to explore dimensions in which our participatory media authoring on travel accommodation likewise represents both its experience and narrative recognition as play-like.
A game’s ability to support its participants in disconnecting from mundane events can signal its status as ‘equipment’ enabling people to achieve ‘potentiality-for-being’ (Heidegger, 1962). Play thereby functions as ‘ready-to-hand’ (Heidegger, 1962), enabling our varying severance from tedium.
Tourism can be understood as just such a ludic practice or ‘emancipation’ (Munar, 2011: 298, citing Jafari, 1987), with its multiple genres equipped to refashion the reflexive self. ‘Tourism is not just about travel; it is an opportunity to explore one’s own self’ (Pudliner, 2007: 49). ‘Backpacking’, for instance, denotes practicable potential activity, ‘commonly shared dispositions, pertaining to the development of a specific kind of self’ (Adkins and Grant, 2007: 190).
In so arguing, while fundamentally in debt to Silverstone as shaping our intellectual genesis and present starting point for our inquiry, we are none the less critical of his opposition between ‘the ordinariness of everyday life’ and a ‘distinct’ ‘place (for players) of modest security and trust’. As is evident in weblogs below, tourist trust is frequently challenged: for hosts, security may be absent. Perceptions of high risk can characterise travellers’ decisions about (if not within) places as well as times for their holidays (Blichfeldt, 2007: 250). Reflective reading and writing about tourist ‘reality’ does not incorporate ‘a rationality defined by its own rules’. As I shall argue, such cultural practice is informed by generic awareness absorbed from everyday life. Experiential narrative is everywhere inscribed by bodily reference and can be – even for tourists – dutifully instrumental.
Going within the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990): Regarding hotels from a hermeneutic horizon of understanding
Significantly, not only audience but also consumer research has drawn on a phenomenology of play with its associated reception studies paradigm as a theoretical model when closely discussing perceptual processes as audiences represent them in their accounts of responding to advertising (Thompson, 1997). Tourism studies have employed this narrative of the consumer in coming to terms with Internet use by Asian industry practitioners and purchasers alike (Law et al., 2009; Wilson, 2009; Wilson and Suraya, 2004). Responding to TripAdvisor’s audiences authoring on accommodation, we now consider below whether the Heideggerian phenomenology of play as actualising potentiality-for-being can also be a source for analytical accounts of digital productivity able to incorporate writers’ understanding of hotel accommodation offline and its subsequent narrative in their accounts online.
Drawing on the structure of playful experience (the goal-directed or teleological logic of the ludic), the paper reminds us, offers researchers insight into user (Internet reader) understanding of screen narrative. We then engage with an equally significant and thoroughly conceptual question. Negotiating between discourses of phenomenology on play and people on holiday, can we also devise a philosophically generated interpretive model of writing online? Is such an abstract theory’s wide horizon of understanding authorship discoverable, to be conceptually discerned as operating within traveller discourse contributing to TripAdvisor’s social media website on the Internet? After all, tourism is a ‘form of temporary getaway from one’s centre’ (Cohen, 1979a: 181; Cohen, 1979b).
Reading tourist sites online has been presented in theory to be perceptually analogous to play. Motivated by an intrinsic interest in comprehending the media narrative discourse specific to screen content, the player-tourist ‘gives him or herself over to the game, participates in the playing of the game’ (Risser, 1997: 140), the ‘serious fun’ (Huizinga, 1970) of reading (and writing in) cyber-space.
Games are ‘a brief escape from reality’ (Taylor, 2003: 36). Likewise, accessing the Internet is to absent oneself from the materially mundane, to engage in prima facie refreshing play. The World Wide Web is a ‘space of immersive operation’ (Lonsway, 2002: 62), the separating space and time of the ludic journeying online. On other occasions, tourists use web pages instrumentally to search for travel solutions. While still identifiable as a game-like construction of meaning, of immersive narrative consistency building, this is planning on the edge of play, at the limits of the ludic, work.
Aspects (moments) of an audience’s immersive absorption in narrative are declared in their discourse. The ludic reader is lively. Online travel pages will fail to promote a playfully distracting response if they provoke only tedium because their information is not changed frequently. So a Malaysian government Tourism Board site is ‘quite boring in a way ... they only change their information yearly’: other site changes are ‘more to daily’. (Female, Chinese, in Wilson and Suraya, 2004)
The travel site offers a type of web page, supporting generic possibilities of perceptual play. Tourism boards and travel agencies engage in narrowcasting to their consumers, characteristically addressing cultural or budget issues, respectively. Aware of the genre in which they are immersed, users anticipate (infer or project) likely content. The latter is ‘checked out’ with narrative details further ascertained in the process of reading through the ‘projective space of online life’ (Slater, 2002: 539). Tourists articulate text in reading, appropriating or asserting alienation from content.
How then do writers shape aesthetic practice online, conforming to generic propriety while generating accommodation narrative in TripAdvisor’s discourse of ubiquitous enlightenment? Is hermeneutic phenomenology (emphasising the act of understanding as, like play, always already anticipating a future) able to represent the process of authorship not only philosophically but as writers themselves conceptualise their activity online – whether explicitly in their stated beliefs or implicitly in their practice? From an ethnographic and phenomenological perspective, the ‘term “representation” refers to how the researcher constructs a meaningful account of the phenomena observed’ (Catterall and Maclaran, 2002: 234). Our focus is on assumptions advising audiences bring (a priori) to experience, rather than the experience (a posteriori) itself (Hawes, 1977).
We do not, that is, seek to generate and empirically test hypotheses concerned with inductive measurement of relationships between events, to be scrutinised through quantitative or statistical assessment of accommodation or screen stimuli and their consequences for authors and audiences (for example, ‘Favorable information will lead to more positive evaluations of a target when the information is conveyed in a narrative than when it is conveyed in a list’ (Adaval and Wyer, 1998: 211)). Thus our writing does not follow the path of recording data collection and subsequent discussion.
As in ethnography, so with the phenomenology of tourist reading and writing, representation should sequence and separate the ‘layered meanings’ (Goulding, 2005: 299) that narrative discourse has for theorist and tourist alike. Does conceptual analysis show tourists (themselves evoking their world from an inelimineable perspective) consider their accommodation and its authored accounts to be ludic, as shaped by the multiple moments we discuss below of being playfully absorbed?
Specifically, does TripAdvisor disclose a play of perception over web text by goal-oriented teleological travellers absorbed in revealing the potentiality-for-being in a particular hotel stay? What is it appropriate to say in this genre of enjoying ‘equipment’? Should tourists, for instance, deem metaphors of immersion appropriate in their writing about a trip (cf. Joy et al., 2009)?
Authors actualise anticipated meaning, sense produced by a capacity for interpreting the novel in terms of the known: enigma is illuminated by referring to the experienced. Thus, writing unpacks perceptions, delivering their meaning as narrative articulated to readers over time. Tourists as well as theorists are located on ‘horizons of understanding’ (Gadamer, 1975), considering from history informed perspectives. These are conceptual ‘packages of potentials and constraints’ (Baym, 2010: 17) or tools for thought, enabling the initially enigmatic to be recognised as instantiating the known. Phenomena ‘beyond their normal sphere’ can thereby constitute a fresh formation of familiarity, allowing their story to be written (Pudliner, 2007: 49). Tourist memory engages with marvellous or mundane, enabling meaning (Thomsen and Hansen, 2009) in a present account of accommodation.
Among tourists, there is always the moment of recognising the familiar in the midst of the strange, a moment equally of anticipated narrative. For otherwise travellers could not commence the process of coming to comprehend their experience, of articulating an account of their ‘adventure’.
Tourists bear prejudging perceptions, exercise perspectives in anticipation, are edgy in their expectation. Just like the more mundane living out everyday lives, their horizons of understanding are framing or fundamental categories, enabling, (in)forming and so shaping their time-structured anticipating and actualising meaning to generate familiarity from the ‘foreign’. As a TripAdvisor, if ‘apprehensive’, tourist venturing from Singapore to Sarawak writes online (see below), I ‘was a little apprehensive about traveling alone but as soon as I arrived at the hotel all of my fears were allayed’. Her narrative follows and fleshes out her prejudging, her fore(ward) or future-oriented perception of the initially unknown as ‘traveling alone’, here replaced by a story of fears ‘allayed’.
Discussing the identity of tourists, McCabe argues that there has been a ‘lack of attention to the language used by tourists to describe their activities and those of others’ (2005: 86). These activities are focussed around travellers’ immersive interacting, familiarising (themselves with) the strange, in narratives of knowing which many go on holiday in a ‘temporary escape’ (2005: 88) to construct and consolidate. Such elongated accounts constitute the ‘meaning producing nature of tourist experiences’ (2005: 103). Stories of ludic experience may well then be appropriated to form subsequent accounts of the self (2005: 100). In searching for data of authenticity on such authoring, McCabe turns emphatically to constructions of tourism ‘outside of interview data’ (2005: 96).
Research question: Is Heidegger’s phenomenology a suitable tool for tourist studies?
TripAdvisor’s hotel heaven/hell: Patterns in disclosing potentiality-for-being
Referring to TripAdvisor stories as exemplifying a genre of non-interview travel weblogging, we seek to gain insight into authoring online for tourists by those earlier absorbed in traveling, or ‘intratourist’ (Holloway et al., 2011) narrative: thus ‘the physical crossing of borders also marks a mental crossing of borders’ (Therkelsen and Gram, 2008: 269). These tourist prescriptions are a ‘place-making tool’ (Rickly-Boyd, 2010: 259), contributing in articulating advice to ‘destination brand personality’ (Murphy et al., 2007). They provide an easily accessed, publicity-challenging account of accommodation, appropriated in stories constructing travelling/static selves. Do they share a similarly pre-understood presenting of coherent narrative countering indeterminacy, being always already future-focussed on the goal of making sense? Is such online authoring play-like in evaluating hotels visited as constructively generic equipment enabling potentiality-for-being?
A phenomenology of reading and writing here enables a structured study of absorbed tourist narratives from Sarawak to Scotland as ‘tourists’ meaning making’ (Frohlick and Harrison, 2008: 6), despite clearly being a differentiated ‘amorphous group’ (2008: 5). These travellers thus represent embodied subjectivity (ad)venturing across space and time, creating identities of person and place. Tourist discourse digitalised here refers to sights or sounds in accommodation, to ‘active embodied use of space’ (Haldrup and Larsen, 2003: 25) – while metaphorically immersed in authoring online.
We cannot but attribute meaning to the unknown in terms of the already known, frame it in familiarity. Where is our starting point in writing, what do we define as ‘already known’? To see is to recognise, to classify perceptual content as instantiating a genre, underwriting our anticipation. Engaging with and expanding initial moments of recognising text, checking our expectation against subsequently seeing content, enables us to make narrative sense in reading. Perception thus builds progressively on people’s horizons of understanding. Is this also true of authoring?
To be on the edge – horizon – of understanding is to begin recognising familiarity, frequently invoking the known to identify the unknown. Thus establishing (reading, writing) sense is generally genre-guided. Constructing meaning from a tourist horizon of understanding rests upon identifying sights as similar to the known, exercising assumptions about emerging content: in my looking lie likely events whose narrative I anticipate as practicable, discoverable as a genre-shaped story.
Such perceptual play between present and future is absorbing, projecting a meaning, engaging in articulating narrative sense for a situation, seeking ‘solidarity with strangers’ in agreement, and ascribing of identity for the self (Adkins and Grant, 2007: 188). We appropriate the significance of such play or can be analytically alienated by its performance. The meaning generated in this game of constructing meaning depends on the generic ‘to and fro’ activity in which we are immersed. Such absorbing play is spatio-temporally distracting, recreation purposefully purchased in tourism.
Phenomenology’s focus reveals TripAdvisors’ authors reflecting upon their earlier actualising of typical tourist accommodation familiar ready-to-hand ‘equipment’ (from air-conditioning to beds and wifi). Their present narratives are prescriptive, issuing in appropriately generic terms, advice for audiences on achieving potentiality-of-being in host locations where they have been but briefly.
Advising audiences analysed: Phenomenology as equipment for engaging with narrative
Phenomenology aims to ‘yield taxonomically relevant descriptions of the universal invariant features and categories of human experience’ (Jopling, 1996: 169). Hermeneutic phenomenology thus foregrounds perceptual experience as a structured process. Our seeing is essentially engaged or focussed, absorbed in our interactive projecting (Gadamer, 1975: 224) and (de)positing of meaning as a flexible, play-like interpreting of our surroundings. Perception is ‘taken up’ with understanding, in a time-taking ascertaining that our projections of meaning are accurate. Heidegger’s account in Being and Time (1962) of understanding as a temporal process (pp. 188–195) leads him to a narrative of propositional ‘interpretation’ as the ‘working-out of possibilities projected in understanding’ (p. 189).
In perceiving, we come to an understanding of the subject on which we bestow our attention. From the first moment of looking, we interpret that which we see as instantiating or representing a known type of phenomenon. The entirely novel would bear no meaning. In subsequent moments of articulating the meaning of our observations, we explore possible accounts of their intelligibility.
Heidegger writes that ‘anything interpreted, as something interpreted, has the “as”-structure as its own’ (p. 189). ‘In the projecting of the understanding, entities are disclosed in their possibility’ (p. 192).
Prior to interpretative understanding or (be)’fore-having’ (p. 191) the perceptually identified as the subject of our attention, we are said to be in a pre- predicative or pre-conceptual phase. But once we engage in establishing the narrative of their identity, we conceptualise phenomena perceived from our varying horizons of cultural understanding, interpreting our sighted subject differently.
Like play, perception is continually future orientated, moving from expectation to eventuality, structured in its informed focus by a ‘definite’ goal – ‘with a view to’ – establishing meaning. Seeing has a temporal ‘fore- structure’ (p. 192), never instantaneous but being rather a process of reconciling immediate anticipation with actual instance, or hypothetical with established identity. Projection (‘fore-sight’) of narratives outlining our perceptual experience is fleshed out through our measuring ‘fore-conceptions’ against content (p. 191). Anticipation is directed towards actualisation. ‘This fore-sight “takes the first cut” out of what has been taken into our fore-having, and it does so with a view to a definite way in which this can be interpreted’ (p. 191) – to establishing an identity for projections.
Following the lead of hermeneutic phenomenology (Gadamer, Heidegger), literary reception theory echoed the refrain of perception as play (or that looking is ludic) as a model of the reading process. We shall see that accounts of the authoring audience can also draw upon phenomenology to posit that in their cyber-shaping, web users are equally at play: always positioned on horizons of understanding enabling their recognition of particular text as instantiating genre, they write meaning into place. We discuss below how TripAdvisors remark upon the contradictions and uncertainties of accommodation in a prevailing generic narrative of anticipated self-sustaining consistent comfort.
Iser brings a phenomenology of our reading activity to fruition. For he argues that in book use we become co-creators of content along with the writer(s): thereby to be considered fully authoring audiences, we supplement stories, adding events and environments that are only implied (for example, the murky details of a murder). Literary hints prompt hermeneutic activity establishing narrative. A text presents imperfectly at the point of consumption: people thus engage in the process of ‘consistency-building’ (Iser, 1978: 16) or providing it with coherent meaning through adding determinate content.
We fill out elliptical narratives, projecting and positioning a chain of presumed connecting events between cause and distant effect. A reader produces a rounded narrative from a repertoire or knowledge of textual convention (for example, her or his awareness that shadows crossing a face can signal turmoil within the person). Media texts characterised by indeterminacy of information provision or ‘blanks’ (Iser, 1974: 113) depend on their users to provide closure. Audiences (quasi authors) can ensure that stories are completed in ways appropriate to the latter’s generic status. Always reading or writing types of narrative, we draw on our accumulated knowledge to project/provide content.
Active within reading’s perceptual ‘field of play’ we establish a ‘work’ from an indeterminate text (Iser, 1974: 274–275). We ‘bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections – for filling in the gaps left by the text itself’ (1974: 280). ‘What is missing ... stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections’ (Iser, 1978: 168). That is to say, ‘whenever the reader bridges a gap, communication begins. ... Blanks indicate that the different segments and patterns of the text are to be connected even though the text itself does not say so’ (Iser, 2006: 64, 65).
Iser’s phenomenology of reading as a temporal process focusses on expectation generated by our perception of text as narrative type and subsequently pursued to the point of establishing a specific story. In doing so, where we are confronted by events not anticipated (‘negations’ (Iser, 1978: 131)), we revise our projection of content to attain a consistent story – an ambition thwarted only by a book’s contradictions. There is a ‘retrospective effect on what has already been read’ (Iser, 1974: 278). This process of ‘continual modification’ (1974: 281) extends to narrating our own lives.
Iser argues then that a ‘reader’s mind’ plays upon the ‘raw material of the text’ (that is, ‘sentences, statements, information’) producing narrative ‘connections’ (1974: 279). In the play of remembering and projecting generically appropriate content on ‘blanks’ (1974: 113), ‘consistency building’ (Iser, 1978: 16) despite ‘negation’ (1978: 131), we assemble a story – integrating future with past.
Our perceptual processing of ‘anticipation and retrospection’ does not ‘develop in a smooth flow’: rather it can be considered to involve a ‘sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives, pre-intentions, recollections’ (Iser, 1974: 279). Where the ‘flow is interrupted’ by the unexpected event we have a particular opportunity to synthesise a story. ‘While expectations may be continually modified’ and ‘images continually expanded’ the authorially active ‘reader will still strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern’ (1974: 283). Writing thus in a mode much reminding us of Heidegger (above), Iser’s phenomenology of reading text is provided with flesh:
for authoring audiences located on cultural horizons of understanding from which stories are recognised as instantiating familiar genres, a ‘text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project onto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning.’ (Iser, 1974: 285)
Discerning the ludic literacy of writing on TripAdvisor
From Sarawak to Scotland: A serendipitous selection of advisory authoring
New technology supports tourism marketing finding fresh interactive channels (Litvin et al., 2008: Pearce, 2009) to communicate with consumers. Changing screen media (as from television to the Internet) means altering the message mode. In response, authorial audiences read and write on social media from web logs (blogs) to websites – presenting their ‘electronic word-of-mouth’ (Law et al., 2009: 604) accounts. We focus on traveller narratives located at www.tripadvisor.com. Such advisor-bloggers are likely to have ‘other-directed help motivation’ (Bronner and de Hoog, 2011: 15).
‘Much of the social information we acquire in daily life is transmitted to us in the form of a narrative’ (Adaval and Wyer, 1998: 207). If counted as credible (Mack et al., 2008), these diverse stories shape our horizons of understanding, familiar if not continually focussed upon frameworks within which we interpret fresh experience. Thereby guided, especially if one is going on holiday and encountering the novel, ‘people generally interpret the meaning of their experiences by fitting them into a story’ (Escalas, 2004: 168). Thus, hermeneutics can ‘explore the aspects that shape one’s understanding’ (Pernecky and Jamal, 2010: 1063), the horizons of expectation from whence one sets out to reconnoitre and perhaps record a hotel stay as enigma, enjoyable or enervating.
Amateur TripAdvisors (and their occasionally responding hosts) author past and present hotel narratives of ‘embodied performance’ (Walsh and Tucker, 2009: 225) in their social roles as tourist, traveller, interacting visitor and visited. Contributors are characteristically youthful (Ip et al., 2010). In these stories, their authors’ multiple expectations are satisfied or sullied by the ‘process of immersion’ (Caru and Cova, 2006: 5) through which, having transcended distance, they appropriate or gain a purchase of/on accommodation. They make the latter their own, ‘nesting’, ‘investigating’, and ‘stamping’ ‘their own personal meaning’ (2006: 6) in narratives invoking potentiality-for-being.
Hotel perceptions focus on a mode of immersive recreational play, elicited in stories which we shall refer to as narratives1. Often they are records in the past tense. A TripAdvisor author’s presently pre-occupied perceptions in immersive writing are reflective play, producing narratives2.
Narrative1 and narrative2 involve authorial absorption, generically shaped memory generating in turn anticipation, goal-governed articulations of a coherent account, alignment with/alienation from ‘others’, appropriation in defining moments of the self, and analysis in situ or subsequently. Both accounts can be intrinsic or instrumental in focus, with either opening self-defining possibility for selves. Here we discuss analytically, illustrating these remarks, a set of TripAdvisor contributions.
Visitors to TripAdvisor read and write narrative accounts of short-term accommodation. These Internet authoring audiences are online, immersively engaging with a prior experience of hotel hospitality offline. While the former is virtual (albeit shaped by memory of the ‘real world’), the latter is embodied absorption, a narrative of activity within horizons of the physically possible. Tourists travel as spatio-temporally ‘situated and embodied subjects’ (Pons, 2003: 47).
To experience a hotel stay may be wholly immersive, as an intrinsically pleasurable ‘dropout’ from daily life, or instrumentally valuable as dutiful. As noted, we refer to accounts of such activity as weblog stories1. TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) reflections on such stories are subsequent weblog stories2, modes of authorial perceptual play seeking to make sense of narratives1. Often, such interpretation involves ‘trip advising’, or authorial aligning of implied audience-readers.
These hotel narratives of delight and disappointment in immersive difference ‘demarcate (an implied) home space that stands in opposition to a tourism space’ (Hui, 2009: 291). Reflexive, revisiting narratives2, written in that ‘home space’ and present time return to impose a hermeneutic circle of understanding, of repurposed coherency, upon narrative1 accounts of earlier ‘circular journeys’ (2009: 292) to ‘tourism spaces’. Past tense accounts articulate action in empirically and logically prior spaces. ‘We visited for a weekend break ... (the hotel) is in a good location.’
TripAdvisor’s brief autobiographies are customarily consumer-focussed extrinsically goal-directed accounts to advise readers and travellers on an immersive earlier stay. Audiences for these ‘advices’ as well as authors project possible narratives, speculating upon and synthesising stories. So how do tourist narratives of initial and subsequent immersion relate as stories about selves? Can we discern authorial advisory achievement overcoming Iser’s ‘blanks’, ‘negations’, indeterminacies or conflicts in sense-making, through projecting and positioning narrative meaning on a website?
Before addressing these questions below, we can outline, summarising what has been said, phenomenology’s hermeneutic discourse reflecting upon trip advisory accounts of ‘ready-to-hand’ accommodation. There are, that is, seven ‘moments’ in the unfolding narrative of present account as well as past accommodation, positioning both as equipment enabling our potentiality-for-being on holiday. These are aspects of an author’s implicit understanding of generic practice (in story-telling or staying at hotel) underwriting (or guiding) narrative, despite cultural variation (emerging widely in bloggers’ reported tourist experiences (Enoch and Grossman, 2010; Volo, 2010; Wenger, 2008)). Narrative structure with its articulating of anticipation and sought-for audience identification, as Tussyadiah et al. argue (2011), are at the heart of tourist blogging and branding. Phenomenology furthers a semantic disclosure of seven moments in such mediation, exemplified in advice (now) on accommodation (then) in Sarawak and Scotland, purposively selected as potentialities-for-being:
Hotel ‘entities’ to be considered as ‘equipment’ for ‘getaway’, business or leisure
BB Hotel, Sarawak, Ashreign, 14 December 2010 | Trip type: Leisure, Solo travel
BB Hotel, Sarawak, EditorRobyn, 9 January 2011 | Trip type: Business, Solo travel
GM Hotel, Sarawak, The proclaimers, 14 November 2010 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
GM Hotel, Sarawak, Davidnic, 29 November 2010 | Trip type: Couples, Friends getaway
PH Hotel, Scotland, Snowpingu, 9 January 2011 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
PH Hotel, Scotland, Summerclio, 10 January 2011 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
HI Hotel, Scotland, Sugarlemontee, 17 November 2010 | Trip type: Family, Leisure
HI Hotel, Scotland, CJDamien, 31 December 2010 | Trip type: Friends getaway, Leisure
Narratives of realising ‘potentiality-for-being’ in tourist accommodation
Structuring moments in authoring audiences’ implicit (reflexive) understanding of stories1+2
Absorption/immersion in (‘ready-to-hand’) narrative simultaneously with
Anticipation of content (informed ‘fore-understanding’ or ‘projection’)
Articulation of narrative (resolving indeterminacy, the ‘hermeneutic circle’)
Alignment/identification with narrative (‘fusion of horizons’)
Appropriation of narrative in extending self (‘potentiality-for-being’)
Alienation – perceiving narrative as ‘other’ focussed (‘distancing’)
Analysis – critically evaluating elements of narrative (deconstruction).
The patterned play of narrative prescription in reflections upon ready-to-hand re-creation of self
(i) Absorbed in articulating potentiality-for-being: ‘I loved my room’, ‘Engaged’ by ‘friendly locals’:
BB Hotel, Sarawak, EditorRobyn, 9 January 2011 | Trip type: Business, Solo travel
In EditorRobyn’s narrative1 of a business visit to the BB Hotel, Kuching, her/his Malaysian immersion ‘doubled’ harmoniously as ‘delightful’ intrinsically enjoyable stay (‘I loved my room’) and a dutiful instrumental engagement with ‘office (duties) for three weeks’. Hence, ‘special and welcomed’, EditorRobyn’s primary story is of being able to reconcile pleasure with a firm purchase on work: ‘No request was too difficult’. No conflict remains for her/his authorial resolution. Even a working holiday can be ludic, albeit not an effortless escape, but ‘immersion, to varying degrees, in the economic, social and cultural dimensions of the host locales’ (Wilson et al., 2010: 4).
Here a traveller (sometimes herself/ himself striving) authors a ludic narrative reading of a ‘delightful’ ‘crew’s’ (EditorRobyn) work in accommodation. For the hotel host engages in an often laborious and perhaps also precarious production of hospitality during a passing visitor’s paid-for ‘exchange between mobilities and hospitalities (not to forget hostilities)’ (Veijola, 2010: 84).
BB Hotel, Sarawak, Ashreign, 14 December 2010 | Trip type: Leisure, Solo travel
Accommodated (absorbed) in an ‘interestingly decorated’ BB Hotel room, Ashreign enjoyed multiple support from ready-to-hand equipment for ludic narratives1 of play (‘light and airy’, it ‘conatined [sic] all of the usual mod cons such as wifi, flatscreen TV, cable, aircon and an ipod dock’). Interactively ‘engaged’ by ‘friendly locals’, owner and staff, s/he builds a comprehensive ‘very memorable experience’.
(ii) Anticipation, audience alignment and authorial appropriation: ‘My abode of choice’:
EditorRobyn’s generic anticipation (or role-generated expectations) were fully fulfilled: ‘The location couldn’t be better. The food in the attached Japanese restaurant is fabulous.’ Indeed, in TripAdvisor narrative2 EditorRobyn expects both friends to identify with her/his absorption and achievement as visitor and a similar pleasure on making a return visit: ‘I’ve told all my friends about (BB). I can’t wait to return for a month in May.’ BB has indeed entered her/his life-world (Churchill and Wertz, 1985), appropriated as ‘my abode of choice’, without a hint of alienation.
‘Embarking from Singapore’, Ashreign’s generic narrative1 expectations of tourist trips (her/his horizon of understanding travelling) included being ‘apprehensive about traveling alone’ in Sarawak. However, subsequent immersion as a tourist ‘with the help of a little tuak (sugar cane wine)’ dissolved apprehension: ‘as soon as I arrived at the hotel all of my fears were allayed’. Potential disequilibrium or disharmony disappeared, evaporating in her/his ‘light and airy’ room.
In subsequent narrative2, Ashreign appropriates her/his ‘amazing time’ to inform her personal project of future travel (‘I will definitely revisit in the near future’). Aligning others to do likewise, she entitles her narrative2: ‘Go to Kuching and stay at the (BB).’ As convinced author of tourist narratives1+2, Ashreign needs entertain no reflection on (BB)’s ‘blanks’ or immersive indeterminacy.
(iii) Attenuated absorption, alignment and appropriation: ‘Be warned’ of potentiality-for-being:
GM Hotel, Sarawak, Davidnic, 29 November 2010 | Trip type: Couples, Friends getaway
Davidnic’s narrative1 is of negation, a ‘noisy’ disruption to immersive play (a ‘getaway’), circumscribing his inviting travellers to follow, to identify with the former’s experience (‘Be warned that this hotel is next to a building site at the river’s edge and last week drilling was in progress’: ‘loud music’ ‘vibrated the walls of our room’ ‘coming from across the river!’) Here, his practical concern for peace is ‘ruptured’ by disquiet (Jamal and Stronza, 2009: 319). Suggesting Sarawak tourists continue in the wake of Davidnic and friend’s recreational visit is thus rendered somewhat counterfactual since it would depend on tranquillity regaining a hold on this former branded hotel: ‘make sure you book a renovated room overlooking the river ... other rooms not up to standard’.
Davidnic’s anticipation of culinary satisfaction and cleanliness characterising absorption in the role of tourist was both met and missed: ‘The breakfast is very good with plenty to choose from, even if you’re a Westerner’: ‘The rooms are an average size, but not cleaned thoroughly, as plenty of dust in the corners.’ Her/his narrative2 moves from the materially focussed to constructions of self and city: ‘There’s something about this city that thinks bad music should be played at full volume.’
GM Hotel, Sarawak, The proclaimers, 14 November 2010 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
The proclaimers’ ‘plush’ playful absorption in their ‘great’ ‘river facing room’, enhanced by eating with the ‘egg man’, was disturbed only by the mosque’s ‘pre-dawn wake up call every day’ and a ‘truly awful crooner’. Here, present and past tales of type2 and type1, respectively, note that cultures of Islamic prayer or (ironically) of play itself limit the ludic experience of escape. Less experiential indeterminacy than a definite ‘downside’, these are noted moments of negation.
(iv) Narrative of ‘cosy’ ‘quiet’ absorbing in appropriated performance: ‘It’s perfect’:
PH Hotel, Scotland Summerclio 10 January 2011 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
Summerclio’s narrative2 is of a location ludic to generic perfection at PH Hotel. ‘It’s perfect for a short break in Scotland’s beautiful capital city.’ Their narrative1 immersion was brief (‘one night’) but noted in a present tense narrative2 to be ‘superb’, unruffled by noise (‘wonderfully quiet’), with much playful possibility ‘practically on the doorstep’. Summerclio’s story of theatre and tranquillity was accomplished in non-contradictory, coherent conjunction. Where tourist readers align with and appropriate these narratives as setting out possibilities for themselves, their generic anticipation would be a story of excelling in Edinburgh, a projection of ‘short break’ perfection.
PH Hotel, Scotland, Snowpingu 9 January 2011 | Trip type: Couples, Leisure
Snowpingu’s narratives1+2 of a ‘lovely quiet’ ludic leisure ‘location’ celebrate(d) a ‘cosy’ but ‘close to the centre’ retreat, absorption in a near cinematic experience: ‘it reminded me of a Poirot film!’ ‘Recommend(ed)’ to readers, they are ‘definitely’ invited to identify and like Snowpingu immerse in a ‘weekend break’, a generic trip/tourist narrative. In this spatio-temporal moment of accommodated play, albeit reached with negating effort ‘up a short steep slope’, visitors could without indeterminacy anticipate TripAdvisor goods of ‘lovely’ dinner and ‘good’ breakfast.
‘The staff are very helpful, and booked us into the restaurant for that night.’ A hotel’s scripted ‘performances take place in front of particular audiences’ (Light, 2009: 241), with ludic guests and labouring hosts often switching roles of interactive onlooker and performer. Thus ‘tourist places are hybrids of home and away’ (2009: 242) with their performances in places of accommodated play shaped by tourists’ pre-travel expectations, underwritten by reading (perhaps) TripAdvisor narrative.
(v) Alienated authoring: embodied play distant from (‘disappointing’) expectation of equipment:
HI Hotel, Scotland, CJDamien, 31 December 2010 | Trip type: Friends getaway, Leisure
CJDamien’s narrative1 of ludic immersion was a story of being a little lost: ‘we thought that we were in another’ hotel. Articulating coherent travel was thereby rendered ‘confusing’. However, despite their temporarily misplaced play, traveller anticipation was reasonably rewarded: the ‘rooms weren’t bad’. And in the interlocking but ‘bifurcated worlds’ of tourists and their service providers (Stampe, 2008: 126), ‘the lady got us the best room that she could’.
HI Hotel, Scotland, Sugarlemontee, 17 November 2010 | Trip type: Family, Leisure
Sugarlemontee’s narrative1 of alienated (would-rather-be-distant) experience plays back and forth across a less than ludic (‘bothersome’) hotel visit. While the beds were absorbing (‘nicely firm and comfy’), concern about ‘broken run-down furniture’ brought their resolve ‘not (to) choose’ this hotel again where the interactive game of tourism was with ‘disappointing’ ‘staff at the front desk’, ‘as if we were bothering them with too many requests?’ Despite negation heaping on negation here in this narrative1 of American tourist endeavour, the city of Edinburgh more than met expectation: ‘we absolutely loved our time visiting (it)’, projecting a story into place through cultural possibility.
Here, tactile interaction with ‘nicely firm and comfy’ beds but ‘broken run-down furniture’ is foregrounded as focus. TripAdvisor narratives can demonstrate ‘embodied engagement’ (Everett, 2009: 338), with business travellers or tourists sampling, not simply seeing, hotel service provision. The material memories of tourism may be presented as embodied nostalgia or extended alienation, with the body as ‘medium of developing meaning’ (2009: 347). Reflective tourist stories indicate that ‘space is intimately encountered through immersive physical engagement’ (2009: 345). Thus, we can feel the ‘significance of touch in mediating the travel relation’ (Fullagar, 2001: 181).
Concluding prognosis: Linking strangers online
Narrative structures in TripAdvisor weblogging
In this paper we have considered if TripAdvisor webloggers implicitly regard themselves as engaging in a ludic literacy (a play-like production of meaning) wherein authors, presently online and previously on holiday, articulate reports of achievement or adversity through accommodation. To empirically anchor our hermeneutic modelling of tourist involvement (Huang et al., 2010) we engaged with a serendipitous selection of site from the synthesised nations of Malaysia and the UK. In TripAdvisor, tourists and travellers, as well as hotel host, contribute would-be holistic narrative. Accommodation is evaluated as itself enabling immersive, teleological potentiality-for-being.
Perception is a process, informed by memory, in which we infer a probable future. Looking is inductive: we assume that the past is a guide to what we shall subsequently see. Reading or writing on screen is closely shaped by remembering the generically appropriate and constructing content accordingly, thereby enlisting the literacy which guides experiential expectation in authoring.
TripAdvisor authors know what is expected, acceptable forms of blame or praise, and inscribe them online, a significant intervention within a now competitive hotel industry (Tsai, 2009). Thus immersed in recollecting and writing, perceiving past travel from horizons of understanding, writers celebrate or criticise. We have followed some tourist-travellers as they construct coherent narratives of absorbed abstraction from mundane life, and through aligning in recommendation, or alienated and distanced (Moufakkir, 2011), establish identity for self and site. On these web pages, writers respond to industry. Their authorship is genre-guided generation of past and present ludic narrative with a focus on ready-to-hand, active absorption in accommodation. Participatory media bloggers are at the core of tourism and its study. Potentiality-for-being on holiday requires further research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Globalisation and Culture program in the Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, for academic support in writing this article.