Which Sociology of Urban Tourism in the Day After Viral Society?: For an Intercultural, Intermediary, and Inter-Methodological Hybrid and Open Research

Abstract

Key Terms in this Chapter

Tourism: Mode of travel dominant within industrial societies and modernity. Types of tourism include cultural tourism, digital cultural tourism, innovative tourism, mobile locative tourism, Tourism 3.0, viral risk tourism.

Wikipedia: A social semantic Web 3.0 site, in the form of a global digital glossary, where common citizens may define ideas and concepts, even if evaluated by a Wikipedia commission, dedicated to controlling some anti-democratic practices and writings, such as racist postures, fake news, among others.

City 3.0 or Social-Semantic City: Globalized locality and configured in an urban geographic network that includes digital, social, and semantic networks, characteristics of Web 3.0 , particularly in the activities of Tourism 3.0 .

Viral Society: Society paradigm defined by societal processes never seen before, such as viral economies and technologies; viral policies and politicians; viral cultures and cults, viral risk tourism. One of the processes that seek to overcome the viral society is social remobility.

Public Art Publics: Audiences who include specific sociodemographic characteristics and develop particular communication careers, inside or outside their visits to public art sites and events. For example, when these audiences relate, on the one hand, works of public art and the space of the museum or other places of public art exhibition, such as the street, squares and other city locations, with, on the other hand, their own experience of the city, work, family and school. Some main segments of such audiences are these: families; students and teachers at an educational institution; an isolated visitor or groups that aim to carry out continuous training throughout their life; the tourist subscribing to cultural tourism, creative tourism, innovative tourism and communicative tourism. However, other profiles, still marginalized, must be included in artistic audiences and, in particular, in public art publics, such as pensioners, disabled people, immigrants and refugees.

Smart City: City paradigm that favors planning, monitoring and digital technologies to achieve greater predictability in urban restructuring, among other aspects of greater mobility, innovative tourism and security in public space. However, this ubiquitous view of the city and the citizen carries risks, from the intrusion into his private life, through disrespect for human rights, to the naturalization and uncritical acceptance of a generalized panoptism. It differs from city 3.0 as this urban mode is more profoundly connected with Web 3.0 and Tourism 3.0 .

Tourism 3.0: It is defined based on the following traits: greater interest by tourists in intangible heritage; overcoming the dichotomy between high culture and popular culture, a process for example witnessed by the opening of tourists to public art on the street; hybridization between cultural production and consumption; desire for authentic experiences in the tourist trip; such a paradigm of modern tourism is revealed as one of the practical manifestations of city 3.0 , which often allows the use of Culture 3.0 within the public cyberspace of Web 3.0 .

Digital Cultural Tourism: Mode of tourism associated with cyberspace and cybertime, and the mobile culture conveyed by the tourist through the cell phone, for example, as an instrument for linking public arts to cyberculture.

Social-Semantic Website: This type of digital site is closely associated with Web 3.0 . Explicitly presents an explanatory paradigm or sections on its own semantic content (ideas, concepts, facts, events, etc.) and its logical relationships (connections between ideas within the site, or links between pages on the site or between these and places) external to him on the internet).

Creative Tourism: Tourism model related to the creativity of urban communities and small cities, in order to revitalize the economy, society and culture of these localities, through tourist activities combined mainly with small industry, small commerce and handicrafts.

Digital Public Art: Sub-genre of public art, created, operated, and disseminated in cyberspace/cybertime.

Cultural Tourism: Type of tourism that is predominantly interested in cultural aspects of society (arts and their institutions or contexts), for example, a Museum of Public Art or other public cultural spaces, such as the street.

Web 3.0 (or Social-Semantic Web): Paradigm of digital social networks that is based, among other discursive devices, on social-semantic sites. For example, Wikipedia , Freebase, public art communication sites.

Cultural Policy: Strategy developed by the State and cultural institutions in order to promote cultural diplomacy, cultural governance by various social actors, artistic literacy, cultural inclusion, public art, the identities and differences of citizens.

Hybrid Methods/Hibrimedia: Mixture, fusion or hybridization of diverse scientific, technological or artistic methods and media, for example, those that characterize the following modes of knowledge: social sciences (questionnaire, etc.), new technologies (interactive digital devices built in hypermedia) and the arts (object art, procedural art like installation and performance).

Mobile Culture: Way of exercising culture and social life in general, which is partly transformed into a digital life, linked to the rhythms and moving places of everyday urban life, in particular the urban mobility of the city 3.0, the smart city and the creative city, especially through portable devices, such as the laptop and tablet computer, or the iPod and mobile phone.

Research Society: In contemporary times, ordinary citizens can openly search (research) and research (through open research), open information and knowledge, using global tools and devices, such as Google or cell phones, in various social scenes or arenas, including physical or virtual museum spaces, or the street. In doing so, ordinary citizens can construct concepts and definitions, for example, on Wikipedia , and thus, somehow compete with professional scientists and artists, on the production and of information and knowledge and plural, local or global knowledge.

Communicative Tourism: This concept signifies a paradigm of tourist activities centered on the tourism production and dissemination of information and knowledge, targeting three of the main agents of transcultural contemporaneity: citizens, tourists and migrants displaced from peripheral societies into central societies.

Hybridology: It consists of the scientific, technological, and artistic study of the hybrid entities that abound and somehow define our globalized contemporaneity, as in the case of the growing demographic hybridization in European societies, through decades of massive immigration. Other examples are hybrid methods, hybrid discourse analysis and hybrimedia .

Cultural Heritage: It is a collection of archives and memories related to a people, a nation, a country or a community. The material cultural heritage mainly includes physical works, in areas such as architecture, arts, literature, etc. The intangible cultural heritage gathers non-physical works, for example, oral memories, cultural, intercultural and transcultural events, traditions, etc.

Innovative Tourism: Type of tourism linked to social innovation, especially within the urban mobility characteristic of the smart city .

Culture 3.0: In addition to the understanding of culture as a product derived from the industrial economy in the 18th and 20th centuries (Culture 1.0), or the concept of culture as a cultural industry in the 20th century (Culture 2.0), the notion of Culture 3.0, associated with new digital technologies, means that culture is a means of creating identity and values, stimulating social cohesion and encouraging creativity.

Social Inheritance: This idea means a dialectical and not static legacy, subjacent to social formations. A social inheritance includes not just cultural heritages, but also economic, ecologic and political heritages, among other social legacies, that may constitute sufficient pillars for necessary social transformations, within a given historical conjuncture.

Public Art: Artistic manifestation produced, exhibited, perceived, judged, and practiced in the public sphere, e.g., in public urban sites (streets, squares, etc.) and across mass media, such as newspapers, radio and television; and within cyberspace/cybertime.

Viral Risk Tourism: This process is defined as a new mode of traveling that inherits some of the characteristics of viral society , risk society and network society. For example, due to forced confinement, potential tourists increasingly choose to make virtual travels in cyberspace and cybertime rather than physical travel. Another attribute of viral risk tourism is the development of mobile locative tourism , which can become as or more important than presential tourism.

Web 2.0 (or Social Web or Reading/Writing Internet): Type of digital social network that allows an active posture on the part of the user: in addition to reading the information, he can write content such as articles (posts) or comments on a blog and share personal and professional information on digital social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

Social Remobility: It is defined as a posture to combat Viral Society, aiming at overcoming it and the alternative recreation of social mobility processes amid contemporary social and communicative processes, such as communication among citizens, tourists and migrants. In a viral society , social demobility occurs. In other words, the mobile society, in which 'everything is on the move', as John Urry (1990, 2007) puts it, has partially transformed itself into a motionless society. Therefore, it is necessary to de-move it from its i-mobility, through social remobility, among other strategies. Some examples of these social re-mobilization processes are urban public art linked to mobile cultures, such as tourist culture and cultures inherent in digital social networks. Such cultures are founded and merged, today, in virtual-viral communities that circulate in cyberspace and cybertime, which are conflicting digital public spheres where, presently, pre-viral societies deconstruct and gradually reconstruct themselves as post-viral societies.

Mobile Locative Tourism: Configuration of tourism travel in which the information and knowledge about the trip (internet searches about the tourist destination, memories captured during the visit, etc.) are carried out mainly via mobile phone, in person at physical locations or virtually within sites online. The new mobilities characteristic of mobile locative and viral tourism redefine the current social mobilities. That is, they establish processes of remobility, which develop certain regularities already detected in the case of tourism communication via locative media and communicative tourism.

Cultural Citizenship: Social fusion between cultural policies and cultural politics .

Creative City: Model of urban space that brings together culture, creativity, and the transformation of the city. This stance highlights, among other processes and practices, intercultural cities, city psychology, creative bureaucracies, and the measurement of creativity in cities.

Hybrid Discourse Analysis (HAD): Is a critical and hybrid discourse analysis genre that undertakes fusions among the different natures of things while analyzing a given corpus of social data. For example, by hybridizing knowledge types, methodological approaches such as hybrid methods , pre-digital, digital media and hybrimedia , intercultural and interprofessional research teams, among others.

War Tourism: Such phenomenon registers a striking actuality. Conflictual and political phenomena observed by war tourists, includes world wars, civil wars, battles, and battlefields themselves. This is a process that is frequent for many centuries. It balances between a sort of pulsion of death deployed by voyeurs, and a more positive connotation, in the form of projects to remember traumatic periods of war, in order to remember and correct mistakes that shouldn’t have happened and be repeated again, and to construct or reconstruct lost or depleted identities. Some contemporary illustrations are a public exhibition, in Kiev, May 2022, displaying Russian tanks captured by the Ukrainian army; and the named ‘House of Russian War Crimes’, inaugurated at the 2022 World Economic Forum, at Davos.

Tourism Communication: Communicative paradigm around tourism communication founded on three distinct modes of communication, but also hybridized in contemporary times: the pre-modern mode of communication in co-presence (face-to-face conversations, etc.); the mode of mass communication characteristic of modern societies (press, radio, television); and the digital communication mode associated with postmodernity (cyberspace, cybertime).

Cultural Politics: This idea means the daily active, critical, and political participation by citizens in democratic cultural life.