Essay On Modern Tourism

Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, a central element and an important social power in modern societies, with extensive economic, cultural and international significance. Smith (1989: 1) gives the following definition to the tourist:

‘‘…in general, a tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.’’

As it is pointed in Reader 1, one of the characteristics of the social practices described as ‘tourism Urry (1990) states, is that:

‘‘It is a leisure activity which supposes its opposite, the regulated and organised work. This separation of work and leisure is a feature of modern society. Acting as a tourist is the essential characteristic of being modern.’’

During its course, the nature of tourism has gone through a great deal of shifts to get to what it is today. In the past century and a half mass tourism has spread extensively within North America and Europe, undergoing through historical changes and developments. A significant characteristic of modern time’s experiences is to be a tourist. Travel marks a person’s status and it is seen as essential in one’s life and especially health. As pointed in Reader 1, Urry (1990):

‘‘If people do not travel, they lose status: travel is the marker of status. It is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays are necessary. ‘I need a holiday’ is the surest reflection of a modern discourse based on the idea that people’s physical and mental health will be restored if only they can ‘get away’ from time to time. ’’

Before the nineteenth century only a limited number of people of lower classes travelled just for pleasure and with no connection to their work. This does not mean t...

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... tied to commodification, signs and consumerism. While modern tourism is all about the representation of signs being connected to real sites, postmodern tourism is characterized by the simulation of signs, these having no link to reality but to the tourists own interpretation of what is real and what is not.

By analysing tourism in the light of both modernism and postmodernism, we can get more about all the aspects of tourism, as an economic and cultural practice. As, Osborne has stated (in Bonami and Widholm et al., 2005: 107),

‘‘It has become commonplace to assume that whilst modernity is about new forms of experience of time, ‘postmodernity’ marks a revolution in spatial relations. But this is too simple. The two dimensions are inextricably bound together. Changes in the experience of space always also involve changes in the experience of time and vice versa.’’