ABSTRACT
Certain dystopian commentators regard contemporary Western, ‘postmodern’ culture as increasingly centred around visual experience in which subjects become lost in a blizzard of signs. Accordingly, this welter of popular signifiers, detached from that which they signify, are simulations of an ungraspable, even chimerical, reality (Cubitt 2001). The profusion of commodity signs, adverts, images of ‘exotic otherness’, filmic and televisual imagery, flow across space, detaching any sense of meaning and belonging to place, flattening localities in an homogenising process which turns all situated cultures into spectacles and simulacra. This sign culture would seem to be nowhere more prevalent than in the tourist industry, depending as it does upon the marketing of distinctive cultural features to attract tourists, often allied with strategies devised to attract inward investment, shoppers and key middle-class professionals through revamping and rebranding places. John Urry has identified tourism as primarily concerned with visual consumption, suggesting that the gaze dominates tourist activity, although it takes different forms. A prevalent mode of tourist gazing is the ‘mediatised gaze’, shaped by rebranded places and re-presentations of heritage which draw upon films and television programmes (2002: 151). Clearly, the simulation thesis appositely identifies expanding commodification in a globalising world and the ways in which this stimulates the rebranding and manufacturing of place-images.
