ABSTRACT
What can the study of the media contribute to the study of tourism? On the face of it, electronic media at least (which is what we principally have in mind when we talk in common-sense terms about ‘the media’) change the organisation of space by making available a ‘despatialised’ awareness (Thompson 1993: 187) of other places. Electronic media might seem, therefore, to make actual journeys across space less important. Instead, however, I will be arguing that media representations of the social world make certain places more important, reconfiguring the landscape within which tourism occurs. New ‘compulsions of proximity’ (Boden and Molotch 1994) undermine generalisations about the supposed evacuation of space and place in postmodernity, and media tourist sites are a good example of such compulsion.
