Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The digital revolution of the twenty-first century has transformed the nature of tourism, its relationship with society, as well as the sociological approaches to its analysis and interpretation. While sociological theorizing about tourism during the last quarter of the twentieth century was dominated by questions of relationship between tourism and neo-Western ideas of modernity, there has been a shift in discourse since the last decade towards an understanding of tourists and tourism through digital applications (or “apps”) and web-based platforms. The most encompassing theoretical development in this regard has been the emergence of a “post-disciplinary” domain of “mobilities” studies that include “imaginative travel, movements of images and information, online travel, object travel and corporeal travel.” Within this domain, tourism is seen as part of a sub-set of a vast and heterogeneous complex of global mobilities. Furthermore, and as evident from the tourism literature in past decade, human mobility including tourism is increasingly adopting an Asian face. Asian tourists are increasingly becoming the most significant travellers and the biggest spenders in the tourism industry, both in their own countries and abroad. Contextualizing the above in this paper, we examine and capture the changing experiences of Asian tourists as mobile actors, through the use of a digital application. In particular, we examine visitors’ experience and interaction with tourist sites and the meaning they associate with the sites when experienced with the aid of digital applications such as a tourist app in one Indian state of international historic and tourist importance: Rajasthan.