Introduction

Backpacking is a culture symbolic of the increasingly mobile world. With cultural roots growing from the beatnik and hippie countercultures of the 1950s to the 1970s, backpacking has been a mainstreaming phenomenon in tourism that has evolved and adapted to technological, social, political and economic trends in both the home and destination societies of backpackers. These global trends over the last 50 years have led to a democratization of backpacking to a large, heterogeneous and globally diverse group of people (Paris, 2008). The pillars of ideology of the backpacking subculture (Welk, 2004) have persevered over the last few decades, but the social cohesiveness, imparted early on by the close connection with the social countercultures of the time, arguably, has not. One of the largest constraints to depicting backpacking as a subculture is that it has become so mainstreamed (Scheyvens, 2002; Welk, 2004; O'Reilly, 2006); it is difficult to illustrate clearly the boundaries between the backpacker community and other mainstreamed tourists. Welk (2004) reasoned that since backpacking has lost the countercultural connection of its roots, for today's backpackers, backpacking is just a short-term countercultural experience along a set 'backpacker trail', and that they are re-assimilated into their home society upon returning.

Recent developments in information and communications technology have provided the basis for the backpacker culture to, once more, gain the cohesiveness without the temporal or spatial constraints of the 'backpacker trail'. While the physical mobilities of backpackers are still just as important to the backpacking experience, new virtual moorings (Hannam et al. , 2006; Ateljevic & Hannam, 2008) have developed that allow backpackers to be fully integrated in their multiple networks and maintain a sustained state of co-presence between the backpacker culture and their home culture (Mascheroni, 2007).