If I say you’re authentic,then you’re authentic: Power and privilege revealed in travel blogs

Abstract

A leitmotif in scholarship on travel texts has been themes of power and privilege. It is not clear, however, whether the more populist, egalitarian and non-elitist form of travel media, travel blogs, fits into this pattern. This article considers the role of power in how bloggers press authenticity into service as a marker of value in travel. It argues that they use authenticity to place themselves in a position of privilege and power over the local people they interact with. It identifies three forms of traveller authenticity – experience, existence and expectation – as a framework to study structures of power, privilege and dominance implicit in travel as revealed by its use in travel blogs. These forms of authenticity all demonstrate the traveller’s positioning of the self at the centre of the gaze on others. This has application for future theorising on the label of ‘authenticity’ as a tool of power.

Keywords

authenticity cultural studies othering power social media travel blogs

Travel texts reveal how a society views foreign cultures (Cocking, 2009; Kellner, 1995) and ‘provide insight into the power relations present in communication because they serve to locate dominant cultural and ideological meanings’ (Santos, 2006: 638). Themes of power and privilege have been consistently noted in studies of travel literature and journalism, and ‘there is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power’ (Duncan and Gregory, 1999: 3). What, then, of their modern iteration, travel blogs? While travel literature and journalism represent the voice of a media elite – journalists, guidebook writers and privileged travellers – travel blogs, like other social media, can be more egalitarian, populist voices (Loader and Mercea, 2011; Pirolli, 2014; Price, 2013).

A rich tradition of studies has looked at how dominance is revealed through travel writing (Campbell, 1988; Holland and Huggan, 2000; Pratt, 1992; Spurr, 1993). This has continued into scholarly work on how travel journalism represents foreign countries (Fürsich, 2002a; Fürsich and Kavoori, 2001; Santos, 2004), so that ‘what might appear to be an innocent form of nonfiction entertainment . . . can be analysed with regard to its discourse of the foreign and the familiar as it is inflected by the material conditions of power’ (Fürsich, 2002b: 205). This article’s contribution is to examine how themes of power and privilege previously observed by scholars in travel writing and travel journalism are replicated in the new, more egalitarian and relatively democratic social medium of travel blogs. It does so by extending thought on authenticity in travel studies as a marker of dominance. This involves considering authenticity not as inherent in an item nor in the person judging authenticity, but rather how authenticity as a concept is applied and what it is used for (Rickly-Boyd, 2012).

Authenticity signifies value in both social media and travel. Each is esteemed if and when it is ‘authentic’: social media is the voice of ordinary people; and leisure travel which connects with the ‘real’ place is esteemed. I take the approach that authenticity is used as an indicator of value socially constructed by one group and applied to another and as such is well suited to interrogate structures of power (Brida et al., 2013; Rickly-Boyd, 2012; Shaffer, 2004). To decree what is or is not authentic about another culture – and to seek it out as many travellers do – is to assume a sense of dominance over the place since ‘to describe a place is to master a place’ by imposing one’s own order on it (Simmons, 2004). This is not to say that this is done consciously; indeed, it is highly unlikely that travel bloggers imagine themselves as seeking out an authentic experience as a means to dominate a country. Rather, I argue that simply by valuing what they consider authentic, by setting the terms of engagement and placing the destination country in their own framework, they reiterate the same structures of power that have been observed in earlier travel texts.

This article advances two arguments. First, that travel bloggers have more in common with an interpretation of travel texts as authoritative and elite, as previously observed in travel literature and journalism, than as an egalitarian voice, as in social media (Peters et al., 2013). Second, their sense of dominance over a place is revealed in their use of the concept of ‘authenticity’. Paradoxically, their projected identities as authentic (non-elite) travellers can disguise the fact that they use authenticity as a means to establish their own sense of dominance over the countries they visit. This article identifies three ways in which authenticity is put to use by travel bloggers and concludes by discussing the way in which these may demonstrate both hidden structures of power and future theorising on the use of authenticity as a tool for forming a sense of dominance.

Literature review

Authenticity

While writing a seminal text on the subject, MacCannell (1973) does not make it clear what he means by authenticity in travel, beyond being distinct from the inauthenticity of contrived, planned sightseeing. Since then, over 40 years of scholarly work has yielded too many definitions to include here; instead, that authenticity is ambiguous, ill-defined and undefinable has become axiomatic (see Rickly-Boyd, 2012 and Zerva, 2016 for excellent reviews of the authenticity literature). Nevertheless, it has been a central concept in understanding the motivations of travellers since it emerged in academic discussion in the 1960s (Cohen, 1988; Daugstad and Kirchengast, 2013; van Nuenen, 2015; Wang, 1999). Specifically, ‘the idea of chumming up with the locals remains a major theme in the travel industry with “secret,” “hidden” and “insider” among the words dominating museums, tours, and other travel-related goods’ (Pirolli, 2014: 85). Wang and Alasuutari (2017), meanwhile, call authenticity ‘the core of tourism as a cultural phenomenon’ (p. 390).

Belhassen and Caton (2006) argue that since the concept of authenticity is so evident, it should not be ignored; and since it is so variable, scholars should adopt whichever meaning best suits their context. Accordingly, I use a definition from Brida et al. (2013) who say that,

Authenticity is a term that describes an individual’s perceived degree of genuineness of products and experiences . . . genuineness or authenticity is not a tangible asset, but a judgement or value placed on what is assessed. (p. 268)

This definition sees authenticity as socially negotiated and thus diverges from studies which have interpreted authenticity as being inherent in an object, place, sight, attraction or the activities of local people (Cohen, 1988; MacCannell, 1973). This positioning follows Rickly-Boyd (2012) who suggests that rather than debating what authenticity is, it is more profitable to ask what it does, citing Bendix (1997: 21): ‘the crucial questions to be answered are not “what is authenticity?” but “who needs authenticity and why?” and “how has authenticity been used?”’ The definition used in this study, therefore, shifts authenticity from the object to the individual assessing it. The rationale for using this definition is that it sees authenticity as a judgement delivered by an outsider/observer, making it suitable to a study of how travel bloggers select and report on what they consider authentic. Similarly, van Nuenen (2015) describes authenticity in travel as ‘a purely strategic construct determined by dominant individuals . . . which tourist narratives must align with in order to be recognized at all’ (p. 195). This definition is therefore valuable for a study of relations of power, giving agency as it does to the observer to decide what is authentic. This formed the basis of the research question for this article: how do bloggers use authenticity to indicate unspoken relationships of dominance and subordination between guest and host, traveller and local, observer and observed?

Rather than being guided by existing typologies (e.g. Reisinger and Steiner, 2006; Wang, 1999) and mindful that the intention is to observe the use of authenticity in situ, the three forms of authenticity analysed here emerged inductively from analysis of the blogs themselves. They take the perspective that traveller perception of authenticity in a destination country is socially constructed in conjunction with external influences such as media, tourism boards and guidebooks. The three forms of authenticity presented here offer insights into the construction of relationships of dominance and are described below. The intention is to move discussion on authenticity in travel away from the question of how the label is applied, to why it is applied and the (often unspoken) effect such application has.

Travel blogs

I have chosen travel blogs as a good locus to observe power structures because ‘in telling their stories, bloggers may consciously and unconsciously reveal what they see of the world and how they see it’ (Bosangit et al., 2009: 66). Travel blogs are reports on travel experience and advice for future travellers, posted on the Internet and written in reverse chronological order with each post usually centred around a destination country or a specific aspect of travel. Some are written by individuals, while others aggregate content from many travellers. Most are proudly amateur, although a few are associated with professional media outlets (e.g. the Guardian newspaper has a travel blog). A simple Google search for ‘travel blog’ returns 3,970,000,000 entries, which hints at their popularity rather than being a count of blogs themselves. They are significant because they help suggest what to see and do in a destination (Banyai and Glover, 2012; Bosangit et al., 2012; Santos, 2004). They give an insight into what travellers do and how they see themselves and the destination country. Travel blogs are the voice of the average person, but one with real experience of a place. As ordinary people, bloggers offer a personal connection with the reader and as a result of this and their ‘insider’ advice, ‘blogs offer credible and authentic information that helps travellers be local for a day’ (Pirolli, 2014: 92). Furthermore, as the bloggers are seen as having similar interests to the readers, blogs can be seen as more relevant to their needs (Chen et al., 2014). Their appeal lies in going beyond the elite expertise of mainstream, traditional and professional media to offer a new form of media which are ‘dynamic, interconnected, egalitarian and interactive organisms beyond the control of any organization’ (Peters et al., 2013: 281).

While the majority of travel blogs are written as a personal record of travels or for family and friends (Bosangit, 2013), the more successful and popular ones are frequently entwined in the commercial leisure travel industry. In these cases, the bloggers’ travels may be supported by businesses and destination marketing organisations. These travel bloggers must therefore perform a balancing act: their value to advertisers and sponsors is that they represent a non-commercial voice of the ordinary traveller, and as a result, they must project that identity all the while appealing to sponsors. The paradox is that what makes them commercially valuable is that they appear non-commercial. They appeal to fellow travellers by presenting themselves as ‘a person like me’ (Williams et al., 2008; Wang, 2011). This makes them trustworthy to their readers and therefore valuable to sponsors (Cox et al., 2009; Gretzel, 2006).

Method: thematic analysis

A purposive sample of 80 blog posts was sourced online, giving 130,000 words for analysis. Using a search engine has become an accepted way of selecting travel blogs for analysis (Bosangit et al., 2009). The blogs were accounts of a journey to a place rather than a guide to what to do in a place (Calzati, 2013). To give a global scope, I selected blogs to represent five continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America) reporting from five mainstream destinations (Morocco, Mexico, Malaysia, Spain and the UAE) and five less-visited destinations (Jamaica, Lebanon, Slovenia, Sri Lanka and Uganda). Countries were considered as ‘mainstream’ or ‘less-visited’ based on incoming traveller figures compared with other countries in the same region, which were taken from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2014), rather than based on the significance of the travel industry in the country’s economy. I considered destinations from both Global North and Global South to avoid the pitfall of assessing only how travel bloggers report the latter, which might be more likely to reveal assumptions of dominance over a place.

The country name and the phrase ‘travel blog’ were entered into Google, and I considered blogs about each destination country in the order they were returned. I assumed that the first 10 blogs – the first screen of results – would be very likely to be read by other travellers and thus to affect future behaviour. However, since I also wanted to analyse posts in which the traveller interacted with a local inhabitant (which was rare), I sometimes had to go to the fourth or fifth screen. The rationale for this choice was to take analysis beyond what bloggers saw and to extend it to whom they interacted with as a locus for authentic life in the destination country, following Buchmann et al. (2010) who observed that the value of a destination comes not just from the sights but also from ‘moments of embodied interaction with place and others’ (p. 229), and interactions with local people help create a sense of authenticity.

Among the 80 posts, 44 were written by women, 34 by men and 2 by couples. The bloggers came from the United States (34), the United Kingdom (14), Australia (7) and Canada (5), with one each from Portugal, Belgium, Italy, the Philippines, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, India and the Netherlands. Eight gave no home country in the ‘about me’ section of their blog. Based on the ages they gave or estimates from their photographs, 19 appeared to be in their 20s, 24 in their 30s, 12 in their 40s and 4 in their 50s. For 20 of them, it was impossible to ascertain their age.

Initially and to look for emerging themes (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2016), the posts were read by two people representing Asian and European backgrounds and different life stages in order to counter issues of analysis being culturally biased. One (the author) is a 50-something, male, former travel magazine editor of European extraction, while the other (a research assistant) is a 20-something, female humanities undergraduate of Indian ethnicity at the researcher’s university. We took a thematic content analysis approach, as ‘this type of qualitative content analysis that connects textual with systemic features will help explain how hegemonic power is performed in discourse’ (Fürsich, 2009: 248). In the first reading for open-coding (Tracy, 2013), four possible forms of authenticity were identified. For secondary coding, these were condensed into three forms – experience, existence and expectation – and the posts were read a second time to observe how these authenticities were used by travel bloggers to reveal structures of privilege and power. These three forms, while distinct, are not mutually exclusive. For example, a blogger may report an encounter with a local inhabitant as authentic because (a) it conforms to their expectations of what local people are like; (b) they believe that they are reporting on the local’s real life; and (c) it is a true representation of that encounter. Similarly, the significance of an authentic experience may be rooted in how much it concurs with expectations. The forms of authenticity are described with examples.

Results and analysis

Experience authenticity

Bloggers report on personal experiences in the destination country as a signifier of authenticity: I did this. Regardless of whether the activity was ‘authentic’ by local standards, or even by traveller standards, what is important is that they did it. They place themselves at the centre of the travel, in what Magasic (2016) has called the ‘selfie gaze’. Doing so privileges their own experience over the experience of the local people. In describing their own travel activity, they frame the destination in traveller terms rather than in terms of the people who live there – they set the agenda for what is authentic experience. These accounts thus ‘reproduce power relations by assigning the host to the periphery’ (Santos, 2006: 637).

Furthermore, the basis of travel writing is that it purports to be true (Campbell, 1988; Ljundberg, 2012). Its value lies first in its truth-claim, and second in the implied transferability of that truth-claim: ‘I did this, and if you go to the same place then you can do something similar’. This has the effect of biasing bloggers towards easily replicable activities. Indeed, one of the earliest conceptualisations of authenticity was that it was the original from which simulacra were created, and back to which they referred, to reproducibility is also linked to authenticity (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]). An authentic activity which is non-transferrable may raise the status of the blogger through its exclusivity but it is less valuable to the reader. As a result, bloggers may prefer to focus on experiences that are easily duplicated: the view across the Grand Canyon, the ascent of the Eiffel Tower and the descent to the Great Barrier Reef are there for anyone with the means and the ability to do them. However, experience authenticity may also illustrate a wider theme so that an encounter with a cheery shopkeeper may not be consistent for all travellers but can indicate a friendly culture that will be. A blogger may have seen George Clooney in Beverly Hills, and although the same good fortune is not guaranteed for every reader, the fact that it could happen is sufficient.

Three themes about experience authenticity were observed in the posts. First, bloggers were pleased with themselves for discovering the unusual, enjoying the privilege of being travellers who are superior to tourists, and of being able to choose what they saw and how they reacted to it: ‘Just as we were leaving it was obvious that the wrist band wearing all-inclusive resort holiday makers were arriving! We smugly drove off knowing we’d seen the place at its best!’ (Anna, British, in Jamaica). Yet she tempers any sense of superiority with irony. The interplay between the mildly disparaging term ‘wrist band wearing all-inclusive resort holiday makers’, the ironically self-critical word ‘smugly’, and the exclamation marks can be interpreted that such denigration of self and other is not to be taken too seriously. This suggests that the blogger aims to balance an awareness of her role as a superior form of traveller with self-deprecation for that role. Her own image is controlled at the same time as defining the place of the ‘lesser’ all-inclusive package tourists.

Bloggers can also assume a position of dominance over the country, which they often conquer in a quasi-heroic way, again, frequently as traveller rather than tourist:

In the following weeks I would enter positions more thrilling than I had planned for: in the path of a knife wielding child, lost at night in the souks surrounded by dead animal heads, haggling with poker-faced rug kings in Fez, stranded in a bus station on the outskirts of Marrakech. (Camille, American, in Morocco)

Here, details are selected to contribute to a narrative of heroism: ‘thrilling’, ‘knife-wielding’, ‘dead’ and ‘stranded’ is the language of adventure fiction, which imagines the destination as rough, untamed and to be survived – which establishes the blogger as a survivor.

Third, bloggers did something distinctive which made them feel privileged, seeing what others did not or accessing a backstage area:

The sound of traditional music was echoing through the cave, so we followed the music and the families . . . The music led us to a small temple in the side of the cave, and we realized that beyond the crowd of locals it appeared that priests were feeding and washing a Hindu idol. We sat back and enjoyed the listening to the music and watching this ceremony take place in front of us. (Josh, American, in Malaysia)

The contrast between the active local people and the passivity of the blogger establishes a form of privilege – to watch without being watched, to judge without being judged. The blogger takes on the role of the audience for whom the local people perform, albeit unwittingly. The activity has value insofar as it contributes to their experience of the place, rather than being described in terms of its value for the people there.

Existence authenticity

This form of authenticity relates to the blogger writing about the life of local people in the destination country. Their existence becomes grist to the blogger’s mill, as the blogger observes them, analyses them and reaches his or her own conclusions about them. This is most esteemed when the local life they see is backstage rather than frontstage, as this suggests they have special access (Goffman, 1959). Bloggers accessed a less-accessible region which is valued because it is scarce for people like them to see; the privilege of inclusion in the local people’s ‘hidden’ life is key, as observed by many scholars (e.g. Chandralal et al., 2015; MacCannell, 1976). Once again, three themes emerged. The first was that it took determination on the part of bloggers to ‘look behind the curtain’, which elevates them as travellers:

As with most homestay experiences, there isn’t much to do except sit back and observe how the locals live . . . We found out that the visitor had made a visit to ask to marry one of the girls! Intrigued, our guide explained that the mother would talk with the visitor to figure out if he was a suitable match. As we delved deeper, the whole process was laid out in front of us, and it was the most fascinating of rituals. This for us was incredible to hear. (Barry and Laura, British, in Morocco)

What matters about the locals’ existence is how incredible/credible it is for the blogger. Their perception of local lives and their reaction to it has greater value than the lives themselves. Others’ existence is reduced to how it plays out according to the bloggers’ own life experience. The lens of self is critical in scrutinising others. The activity is ‘laid out’ for the blogger, who remains a passive spectator or audience while the local people ‘perform’, placing the blogger in a dominant role while life of the local people is reproduced as a show for their edification and education. In Urry’s (1990) oft-cited term, local life is defined by and for the tourist gaze.

Second, bloggers may also attempt to access less-accessible areas by joining in with local people and taking on aspects of their lives. Such cultural immersion is often done either to highlight how interesting the locals are or to demonstrate that the blogger can be as good as them, as seen in this post:

It was a great day and by the end of it Nick was driving like a true Lebanese. They are the worst drivers ever. Nick had to be constantly on the defensive while being aggressive at the same time. There were imaginary 3rd or 4th lanes, driving on the shoulder, cars and trucks slowly creeping into our lane for no reason, no signs anywhere and basically no rules. He was a pro and did an awesome job. It was a miracle the car got back to Beirut without a scratch on it. (Dariece, Canadian, in Lebanon)

The contrast is between ‘bad’ locals and ‘good’ bloggers. The role of the local drivers in the anecdote is to provide a background against which the blogger’s companion looks good. And once again local life is judged – and in this case found wanting – according to the norms of the blogger who sets the terms. Power structures are thus maintained by bloggers’ ‘portrayal of travel as an experience which allows them to challenge the Others’ world and win’ (Santos, 2006: 637).

Third, bloggers sit in judgement over the local people, observing them and drawing conclusions which may or may not be fair. In this way, the bloggers select and create what they consider an authentic existence for local people, as in this post:

Generally, the people in Uganda are super friendly and open. There is not much criminality, not even in Kampala. There is quite a bit of overpopulation, making it pretty hard for everyone to make a living. They mostly have a very small piece of land, especially in the West . . . The main problem is that the men let their women do all the work. You mostly see the women work on the fields, while the men just drink a lot at night. (Aron, Dutch, in Uganda)

While doubtless well intentioned and based on observation and hearsay, this slightly discomfiting post offers a stereotypical account of a nation. More importantly, the blogger does not appear to see it this way. Rather, one imagines that he sees himself as offering a form of expert opinion on Ugandan people’s existence, based on his experience there – an example of how two forms of authenticity can overlap.

Yet, regardless of whether bloggers are there to witness and record, the local people will carry on their lived authenticity of shopping and sharing recipes, childcare and changing light bulbs – but this is not reported. To the traveller, such mundanity can be unexciting, particularly when existence authenticity in the destination is the same as that at home. Oakes (2006) observes that travellers want to discover a sense of self by encountering people who are Other; but if those Others are similar, they do not fulfil that function and so are not considered valuable. As a result, not all authentic existence is valued. The backstage must not only be accessed, it must also be interesting in ways that conform to bloggers’ expectations. Once again, the power to choose what to include and what to exclude, and what in the local people’s lives are worthy of recording according to the blogger’s own values – what Derrida called ‘the violence of the letter’ (Spurr, 1993) and what Shome (1996) called ‘controlling by discourse’ – shifts dominance away from the local people and to the bloggers.

Expectation authenticity

Travellers have expectations of what to see in a destination country, often based on tourism agencies, media representations and anecdotes from friends. These expectations contribute to what is considered authentic; Jenkins (2003) speaks of a hermeneutic circle of representation which perpetuates travellers’ ideas about a destination until, ultimately, what bloggers report about a place is as much based on what they have heard as on what they have seen (Barnes and Duncan, 1992). In extreme cases, a destination country can adapt itself to conform to tourist expectations, even if those expectations are based on a pure fiction (Gothie, 2016). With expectation authenticity, bloggers describe travel in terms that conform to expectations: they are getting the ‘real deal’ because it agrees with expectations shared by the reader. This blog post shows an experience which is valued because it conforms to comfortable preconceptions – verging on cliché – about Jamaica:

Archie, our nine-year-old, is off snorkelling on the coral reef; George, nearly two, is playing with the kids of the friendly beach shack owner. She is feeding us jerk chicken and chilled Red Stripe while we relax under a tree. There’s a game of football going on behind us; reggae music and the delicious smoky aroma of jerked meat are floating on the breeze. The sun is out, the sand is powdery white, the sea that unmistakable Caribbean blue and, contrary to popular belief, no one is trying to sell us ganja. (Gavin, British, in Jamaica)

Certainly, this description corresponds to what was factually there. But in choosing what to include and what to exclude – for example, no mention is made of other particulars which one can imagine were present, such as the colour of a nearby boat, a beep from an ATM machine across the street or a faded licence-sticker on a car windscreen, presumably because these putative details did not contribute to the image of the scene that the blogger wanted to create. Local people and scenes are ‘being reframed as “local color” as providing imagery in the grand spectacle of global tourist desire’ (MacCannell, 2016: 343). Power and privilege lies in the traveller’s assumed ability to know what to expect and then to judge if it conforms to their preconceptions:

The sleepy city, stirred in our wake, we made our way through the empty streets to downtown Beirut, here we would be guaranteed bullet holes and shell holes. We had seen the blown up building from the car, and standing in front of them somehow made them more real and scary, the scars of war, the damage that metal does to concrete, the thoughts of the people who lived here, oh my god, what they must have gone through . . . It made for great photographs. (Marco, Portuguese, in Lebanon)

The blogger chooses the frame through which he sees Beirut – opting for its war-torn history rather than its more sophisticated identity as ‘the Paris of the Middle East’ – selects the details he looks at and finally chooses the mode of representation: the photographs are ‘great’ because they conform to his expectations. As Schäfer (2016) has shown in her study of Hiroshima, a single event can dominate how a place is seen and represented.

Authenticity is a fantasy (Knudsen et al., 2016; Oakes, 2006), and fantasy also has a role in expectation authenticity when it is associated with luxury which is often the lot of the traveller but not the local people, as in this next example. The blogger demonstrates dominance at the first level by staying in a luxury hotel with 24-hour personal staff; at the second level by describing her personal staff member as ‘incredibly sweet’; at the third level by not taking a picture, so Raquel is not shown in the post; and at the fourth level by excusing herself for this omission on the grounds that she did not photograph Raquel on her last day – although this does not explain why no photographs were taken when she had been present:

I was staying at the Dar Al Masyaf in Madinat Jumeirah, a gorgeous resort by the stunning Jumeirah beach which resembles a traditional Arabian town, a super luxurious one, of course! I had a 24 hour butler service in the villa and my butler, Raquel was really friendly and incredibly sweet. Though I was staying all alone (which is why you can’t see me in any of the pictures) she made me feel like I always had a friend around. Sadly, she had a day off on the last day of my stay so I could not click a picture with her! (June, Indian, in UAE)

Expectation authenticity may also give the blogger social capital by having seen what others have also seen, becoming part of a community. They might go to Beijing to see the Forbidden Palace, for example, and consider they had seen an authentic object (Shepherd, 2015). For the independent traveller, by contrast, authenticity may be sought in the existence of the local people. Their trip to Beijing might involve visiting the hutongs, fast-disappearing narrow alleys where residents play out their hidden (from travellers) lives. In terms of social capital, the travellers’ experience cannot achieve pure authenticity, and this is not the point; it merely needs to be more authentic than others have experienced.

While there is some truth that ‘what the tourist’s gaze rests upon is prescribed’ (Bell and Lyall, 2002: 145), authenticity also adds value to the blogger’s experience when it departs from expectation, that is, when the blogger has heard or read one thing about a place but finds something else. So, for example, in the posts analysed, Lash from the United States was surprised to see that local people in Sri Lanka walked, which departed from what she had seen on her previous travels: ‘SE Asians much prefer motorbikes, cars, buses, vans, trains, city rail – anything to avoid walking in the heat . . . watching an entire population using their own legs to get around was quite astonishing’. Daniel from Australia also finds Mexico is better than he had been told: ‘All I knew about Mexico City was that it was one of the largest cities in the world, with a massive pollution problem, having grown too fast during the 1980s. But the pollution wasn’t too bad when we were there, certainly nothing like Indian or Chinese cities’. In both posts, one effect is to establish the blogger as an experienced traveller and show their expertise in seeing beyond the myth. This adds value to their experience authenticity as it counters the expectations created by others.

Discussion and conclusion

The egalitarianising potential of social media, represented here by blogs, is questionable (Peters et al., 2013). Certainly, it opens the discussion about a destination country to non-elite sources; but those sources replicate existing patterns of privilege already observed among travel writers and journalists. Spivak (1988), for example, calls it a form of violence when a writer from one culture speaks for an individual from another. Taking a softer stance, Duncan and Gregory (1999) observe that ‘travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible’ (p. 2). While power in travel is multidirectional with local people in host nations also demonstrating forms of control over incoming travellers – the power to make or mar a visit, for example – travel has long been assessed in terms of privileged travellers viewing less-privileged local people (Cheong and Miller, 2000).

Furthermore, travellers accrue social capital when their trip is associated with authenticity; it is valued, contributing to status (Pearce and Moscardo, 1986). Leisure travel is a privilege and a correlation has been observed between travellers’ enjoyment of authenticity and higher social class (Waller and Lea, 1998). The link between leisure travel and status is a regular theme in scholarship on the subject, for example:

Much of this tourism [for privileged tourists] was constructed on assumptions of cultural superiority on the part of the tourist and highly exoticized imageries of the toured as being simpler, out of touch, quaintly interesting, sometimes suitably subservient, and on some other occasions threatening and dangerous. (Chambers, 2008: 354)

Accordingly, the research question for this article was how do bloggers use authenticity in a manner which reveals a relationship of privilege and power between guest and host, traveller and local, observer and observed? To answer this, I focused on blog posts which describe an encounter with local people as a way to observe hidden or explicit markers of dominance and subordination (Buchmann et al., 2010). Another travel-related social-media phenomenon – the selfie – has also been held up as a mechanism of personal control and disempowerment of others (Kedzior and Allen, 2016; Magasic, 2016). This attitude is also revealed by the blog posts, where a place and its people have meaning only as far as they reflect well or ill on the traveller, who remains at the centre of their own travel experience. This has been described as ‘experientialisation’, ‘the particular ways that individuals collectively interpret the authentic tourist experience with foregrounding individuals’ personal experience’ (Wang and Alasuutari, 2017: 398). The traveller comes before the destination country. The article demonstrates three ways in which blogs reveal underlying structures of power and privilege when travellers assign authenticity to people and places. Based on this, I suggest that focus on the use of authenticity in this context offers two directions to develop theory: how it is used to validate traveller choice and to create traveller identity.

Validating choice

Each form of authenticity observed in the blog posts shifts the focus of interaction away from the local people and towards the blogger. Such narrative self-centredness reflects an ideology which privileges individual experience over social connectedness. This ideology is revealed by the posts analysed, where the Other is valued for their impact on the Self – giving bloggers the privileged position of ‘your role is to define me’. This acts to validate the bloggers’ own choices (Santos, 2006), by demonstrating that they are authentic to their experience, authentic to the lived life of the local people and authentic according to their own expectations – regardless of the effect on the local people whom they thus label. This establishes traveller dominance by assigning meaning to locals’ activities by judging them according to the standards which most give them value in the eyes of the blogger. The posts also present local people as worthy of traveller attention by showing them to be charming and colourful, thereby justifying the decision to look at them. Alternatively, bloggers represent the local people as being there to serve, which validates their own position of privilege as one who receives service. Paradoxically, a narrative about looking at others places the looker at the centre.

Identity creation

Second, these blog posts show how travellers ‘make meaning from their experiences’ and use them to construct their identity based on their own cultural schemata and frames of reference – often in conjunction with identity construction of local people (Bosangit et al., 2009: 62). Once again, the self is at the centre of the encounter, consistent with Pirolli’s (2014) observation that travel blogs are self-centred. Judging local people as authentic also reflects travellers’ desire to be what they themselves are not, to escape from their alienated existence in inauthentic modernity (MacCannell, 1976) by projecting a wished-for identity – separate from their own workaday world – onto the destination country and its inhabitants. Wang (1999) also took a line of ‘existential authenticity’ that the tourists feel more authentic in the presence of authentic artefacts and experiences than they are in everyday life. Yet there is another paradox: on the one hand, travellers seek authenticity in the lives of others as an escape from the alienation of modernity in their own lives, which in themselves could equally be termed authentic (Cohen, 1988; MacCannell, 1973) – but on the other hand, the label of ‘authenticity’ is so rarely self-applied but is given to others instead.

A limitation of this study is that not all forms of travel are subject to such issues of dominance over local people – most notably visiting friends and relatives and business travel, where encounters with local people are scarcely on the agenda (Wang, 1999). This article does not suggest that all forms of travel or of textual travel representation are de facto tied up with power. As the second limitation, my linguistic capabilities meant that only travel blogs written in English were analysed, thus they may conform to paradigms of description set by previous Anglo-centric travel texts, which may suggest a predisposition towards motifs of privilege.

Nevertheless, it is not always so straightforward and while travel bloggers’ ‘narratives of encounter are undeniably dominated by the viewpoint of the mobile culture . . . it is possible to exaggerate the degree of superiority implied’ (Clark, 1999: 5). Given the growth of travel, local people in one country are just as likely to take the role of traveller in another, where they may look at the traveller who had earlier found them worthy of attention. In this study, Spain and the UAE were both ‘mainstream’ destinations, but Spanish and Emirati people are also enthusiastic travellers. A further study of travel blogs in languages other than English may reveal different forms of authenticity and the label being put to different uses – which would in turn reveal the relationships of dominance and privilege (or otherwise) between travellers from previously developing countries visiting developed countries. Analysis of Vietnamese bloggers visiting Paris, for instance, or Brazilian bloggers in Lisbon, would make for a worthwhile study. In either case, to theorise the label of authenticity as a mechanism to create a valid and valued sense of self as a traveller by imposing limitations on the local people to one’s own advantage would offer fresh insights into bloggers’ construction of the reality they experience overseas.

Finally, it is important to recognise that this article may paint a critical picture of travel bloggers by focusing on relations of power. I do not wish to suggest that bloggers ‘lord it over’ the place and the people. In fact, the dominant tone of voice in the texts was delight and excitement at what they saw. This is to be expected for two reasons. First, they have chosen the travelling life and it would be inconsistent to be overly critical, even though one can imagine that such a nomadic life comes with its own challenges. Second, they wish to attract readers who think of travel as exciting and exotic and who would not follow blogs that represent it as otherwise. As a corollary, many of the more successful bloggers also wish to attract commercial support to prolong their travels, which they would not achieve by being overly negative about the countries visited or the act of travelling. The contribution of this article is to note that behind the enthusiasm and the delight in travel lies an unspoken and rarely examined vein of assumed dominance as the bloggers speak for themselves first and the people and the destination a distant second.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Andrew Duffy

Author biography

Andrew Duffy is an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include travel journalism/blogs and critical–cultural studies; mobility and mooring in travel texts; the effect of smartphones on tourist behaviour; role conceptions among the next generation of journalists; and the effects of smartphones on news production. A former journalist and editor in the UK and Singapore, he teaches online journalism and travel journalism.

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