Shadowcasting tourism knowledge through media: Self-driving sex cars?

Scott Cohen,Jason Stienmetz,Paul Hanna,Michael Humbracht,Debbie Hopkins

doi:10.1016/j.annals.2020.103061

Scott Cohen, Jason Stienmetz + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.103061

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Abstract

Tourism is central to late-modern life, and tourism research that threatens this centrality is prone to media attention. Framed by sociotechnical transitions theory, we introduce the concept of ‘shadowcasting’ to show how tourism knowledge disseminated through the media, combined with public comments on its reporting, cast shadows that co-constitute imagined futures. We illustrate shadowcasting through a mixed method approach that demonstrates how media reporting and public comments on a recent paper on autonomous vehicles in tourism emerged and diverged from the original paper. Our findings reveal that issues around sex and terrorism were sensationalised, generating diverse public discourses that challenge linear visions of future transport efficiency. Our concluding discussion indicates other tourism research contexts that are most inclined to shadowcasting.

Highlights

It is widely accepted that tourism is a field of study as opposed to a discipline (c.f. Tribe, 1997)
This paper contributed an understanding of the nexus between tourism research and its media dissemination that has been lacking in tourism scholarship
Moving away from the dominant focus on the implications of media reporting for destination image and how the tourism sector is framed, we instead revealed how tourism research itself can be bound up in the act of future-making through media reporting

Summary

Introduction

It is widely accepted that tourism is a field of study as opposed to a discipline (c.f. Tribe, 1997). Tourism is paradoxically a soothing funnel for aspirations and identities in late-modern capitalist life (Gossling et al, 2018), while producing anxieties and insecurities attached to its potential disruption, such as tourism’s vulnerability to terrorism, its contribution to climate change, or its recent suspension due to Covid-19 lockdowns. It is this status as a field of high centrality to late-modern life that can make studies of tourism, ones which expose this paradox and thereby threaten societal perceptions of tourism as a panacea for social ills, prone to media attention, hype and sensationalisation

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