Abstract
This chapter investigates how travellers represent and express their identities in social media posts, with a specific focus on selfies. It defines selfies as being 'characterized by the desire to frame the self in a picture taken to be shared with an online audience'. The chapter suggests that the tourist gaze is increasingly directed away from destinations and attractions and toward the self in the process of producing the ultimate social media image, namely the selfie. The travel selfie is a particular genre of the generic selfie and has to be understood in the broader context of selfie-taking, technological affordances and the creation and posting of user generated contents on social media. A remarkably large number of the travel selfies observed on Instagram are selfies taken 'travelling' to, rather than consuming the destination. Travel selfies also seem to at least partly break traditional hermeneutic circles associated with touristic representations.
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