Discourse of Tourism

Not surprisingly, given the spread and rising influence of technology, we find ourselves, some 12 years after Dann’s prediction, exploring this very medium – the language or discourse of tourism on the world wide web. Our initial foray into this area of inquiry began a few years back when Rick began researching a trip to his second ‘home’ to visit his ‘host family’, that is, the family with whom he had lived while he was an English-language teaching fellow in Lithuania in the mid-1990s. Unlike research in the 1990s, which would have been conducted primarily through traditional texts, e.g. printed travel guides and maps, Rick initiated this research by turning to the internet. He didn’t have to go any further than the homepage of the official Lithuanian tourism site to find a ‘rich point’ (Agar, 1996), which has led us into the ‘culture’/‘grammar’ of tourism websites. Here we are, a few years later, still immersed in the investigation of these sites, having traveled to numerous nations and cities, transported not through the planes, trains, buses, cars and legs that move the traditional tourist, but rather through the lexical and visual texts that populate websites and transport the (post-)modern traveler. As Dann explains,