October 2001

Tourism with a Twist

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

On the count of three, we can all grumble about how mass media has robbed us of the opportunity to have authentic experiences. But maybe we should stop beating ourselves up about all of this.

For thousands of years, pilgrims have traveled to "fabled" places-that is, places that were the subjects of stories. When in the last two millennia has any visitor had an unmediated experience of the Middle East's "Bible Lands?"

Historians tell us that many of the medieval relics and miracle stories originated as the major cities of Europe competed for visitors. Paul Bunyan turns out to be mostly "fakelore" fabricated by a Minnesota advertising man in 1914 to promote the logging industry and quickly adopted by tourist camps. Still, such stories enriched rather than impoverished our imaginations.

Tourism involves mapping stories onto space. Some of the stories are history, some myth; half the time, we don't care. As a rule, we value older stories over more topical ones. It's okay to stay at Lizzie Borden's house-now a bed and breakfast-but perverse to visit the Columbine massacre site. Dickens tourism is sanctified through print culture, whereas Survivor tourism is tainted by our conflicted feelings about television. But when tourists to Nottingham express disappointment to find that there is not much of a forest there, are their expectations shaped by folktales and ballads, children's book illustrations, Hollywood swashbucklers, or all of the above? Does it matter?

Mass media produces and reproduces stories at an alarming rate. Many of the small hotels and ranches in remote Queensland are trying to sell themselves as gateways to "Survivor Country." We all know this trend will fade in another year. In such a context, our landscape can become overpopulated with competing narrative claims. Consider, for example, the cliff that the Survivor contestants jumped off in one of the series' more memorable moments. On local maps, it is labeled "Butch Cassidy." So as I flew over the gorge, I was a teletourist using my camcorder to record a location that I knew from a television sequence in which contestants enacted a scene they knew from a 1969 Hollywood movie that had taken its imagery from popular pulp magazines' representations of the exploits of Wild West outlaws. Whew!