Critical Digital Tourism Studies

This paper advocates the need for a critical and cross-disciplinary research agenda on the field of digital technologies and tourism. The changing virtual landscape of tourism has received increased attention by tourism scholars. However, contemporary studies on information technologies (IT) are approached mostly from a business administration perspective and informed by conceptual frameworks developed in management and marketing. IT studies in tourism are still at a stage similar to the first advocacy phase of tourism research in general (Jafari, 1990) and are seldom inspired by relevant theoretical advances from other social science disciplines or qualitative methodologies. This has resulted in the dominance of limiting (post)positivistic methodological approaches in articles and textbooks. We advocate that it is time to encourage plural research perspectives and a critical approach to studying digital socio-technical systems and virtual mediation in tourism. Critical Digital Tourism Studies opens a new cross-disciplinary field where the sociality of virtual tourism interactions is examined (entailing the study of structures, social rules, ideologies, power relations, sustainability dimensions, ethics, and cultural values shaping digital tourism). This proposal contributes to increasing research reflexivity in understanding how tourism is enacted through digital worlds and how digital technologies evolve through tourism practices. Critical-thinking and socio-political engagement is applied to examine the development of the Web and contested concepts of human interaction in touristic cyberspaces such as equality, anonymity, transparency, democratization and publicity culture.