ABSTRACT
Pseudo-event Daniel Boorstin (1961) attempts to chart the shift from individual traveller to the emergence of mass tourism and tourists. In The Image he argues that contemporary Americans are unable to experience ‘reality’ directly and instead thrive on what he terms ‘pseudoevents’: inauthentic contrived attractions. After a while this pleasure becomes a selfperpetuating system of illusions – an environmental bubble. This concept of tourists being cocooned from reality in a bubble is a widely held idea today. In their famous The Golden Hordes (1975), Turner and Ash follow Boorstin’s lead and place tourists at the centre of a strictly circumscribed world, with travel agents, carriers, hotel managers and so on taking the role of surrogate parents. Analyses of this kind are underlined by issues of class (see Chapter 5).
