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.
Published in Chapter:
Which Sociology of Urban Tourism in the Day After Viral Society?: For an Intercultural, Intermediary, and Inter-Methodological Hybrid and Open Research
Copyright: © 2022
|Pages: 40
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-3369-0.ch001
Abstract
The contemporary pandemic conjuncture may lead to a ‘viral society', an unprecedent social paradigm involving deep economic, political, and cultural transformations. To cope with this globally unstable situation, it is urgent to deconstruct and reconstruct knowledge (e.g., through a social and sociological Encyclopedia of Viral Tourism addressing a particular genealogy of research on tourism studies and to be disseminated via a Virtual Sociological Museum). The author invokes here recent debates and his own personal research. Epistemologically, the pertinence of a hybrid and open research and several theoretical topics and case studies on tourism are discussed, for example, tourism articulated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the encounter of this viral tourism conjuncture with the war in Ukraine, which defines a new breed of war tourism. Regarding methodologies, the author converses on Hybrid Discourse Analysis and Visual, Virtual, and Viral Methods, such as sociological comics, video papers, artistic sociology, and sociological augmented reality.