‘Look at me! Oh Lord have mercy!’: images of roller-coaster riders and the work of self-recognition

Abstract

The omnipresence of screens in contemporary life presents an unprecedented variety of ways of displaying as well as ways of seeing, reacting to and consuming images. This paper focuses on commercial and mediatised leisure spaces in the shape of theme parks and on on-site procedures of production and display of images of roller-coaster riders. Contemporary roller-coaster machines combine speed with high-resolution photography, to supply an enmeshed, mobile-cum-visual product, and the study asks how the images are displayed – by the corporations who run the theme parks and how they are received – by the consumers. First, the material settings in which images of roller-coaster riders are produced and displayed are explored, and then the ‘work’ that viewers engage in when they see themselves is addressed ethnographically in detail: What discursive actions and reactions are publicly performed when consumers face their images? I conceptualise the activities of viewing, and specifically of viewing images of oneself, as ‘work’, a concept which I borrow from Erving Goffman (as in ‘face-work’) and, more recently, from Mark Andrejevic (‘the work of watching’). By using qualitative and ethnographic methods, the study supplies up-close observations and analyses of the media spaces and logic in contemporary amusement parks, and the ‘work’ that viewers undertake when confronted with their images. This study contributes to our understanding of the proliferation of images of oneself in leisure and tourism, of the mediatisation of consumer publics, and of consumers’ activities of viewing their images and reacting to them when the latter are displayed commercially on public screens.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and thoughtful comments on this paper, which supplied rich soil on which revisions were made. I am also very deeply indebted to Rachel Dubrofsky for her insightful comments, suggestions and discussions with regard to the pervasive capture and circulation of everyday imagery of people.

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Notes on contributors

Chaim Noy

Chaim Noy is Associate Professor in the Tourism Studies Department at the Ashkelon Academic College, Israel. His fields of interest include media and communication studies, tourism studies, and the relations between discourse and visual display and practices. His recent book, Thank You for Dying for Our Country: Commemorative Texts and Performances in Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines visitors’ texts in a visitor book in a national commemoration site in East Jerusalem, and his recent articles (Antipode, 2015) discuss the visual management of Jerusalem.