‘The locals are friendly!’ An empirical analysis of mobility and mooring in travel blogs

ABSTRACT

While relations of power have been a repeated theme in studies on textual representations of guest–host interaction in travel and tourism, the emerging genre of travel blogs may offer a new perspective. This paper introduces the mobility/mooring paradigm as a framework for examining communications, looking initially at travel blogs. It proposes that bloggers both ‘moor’ their interactions with foreign locals in existing archetypes by representing them in stereotypical or generic terms; and represent them in ‘mobile’ terms, as individuals whose meaning is negotiable rather than fixed. Through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of travel blog posts, it finds that bloggers mostly report local people in positive terms, that these inhabitants written about mostly work in the tourism and service industries, and are mostly reported in ‘mobile’ terms that allows for re-negotiation of their identity through interaction. The implications for research into power in travel texts are discussed, as well as suggestions for future use of the mobilities/mooring paradigm in communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Travel
• tourism
• mobility/mooring
• blogs
• cultural studies

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sophie Mathison and Aiswarya Devi Arivazhagan for their help in conceptualization and analysis for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Duffy is an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include a cultural studies perspective of travel journalism and blogs, the role of smartphones in news production and distribution, and the role conceptualisations of the emerging generation of journalists. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. The term ‘local’ is problematic, redolent of ‘othering’. A thesaurus offers the alternatives of ‘native’ which also has disparaging overtones and ‘aboriginal’ which is ‘often offensive’. In the absence of a neutral term to describe indigenous people, this paper uses ‘local’ with apologies to any who find it offensive. It is, however, the most common term used within blogs.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Nanyang Technological University Start-Up Grant programme.