The spectacular and the mundane: Chinese tourists’ online representations of an iconic landscape journey

Abstract

Abstract Building on the theory of social representations, and some new lines of work asserting the importance of mundane components of the tourist experience, the aims of the study are to categorise and interpret Chinese tourists’ online visual representations of an Australian iconic landscape: the Great Ocean Road. Over 10,000 pictures posted online were coded using a nine-part scheme developed by the researchers. The work builds an understanding of the content of Chinese tourists’ photographs and highlights a way to uncover the social representations in such material. The study provides evidence that a two-part emancipated social representation characterises the online photographs: one portrays the spectacular physical environmental features of the setting, while the other represents many small-scale and mundane places, contacts and sites. The study articulates a role for mundane authenticity in tourism studies and provides evidence for this emerging perspective through the analysis of the photographs.