ABSTRACT
‘Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures,’ wrote John Urry in the introduction to The Tourist Gaze. As processes of globalisation intensified, Urry’s ideas about mobility developed in tandem with a revolution in digital communications. The rise of the internet and mobile phones during the latter part of the 1990s was to change the way that people sensed places, changing the contours of distance and proximity, thereby reconfiguring the tourist gaze. ‘Distant events, personalities and happenings are mundanely brought into the living room and transform everyday life’. For him, images on screen give rise to what he calls ‘imaginative’ mobilities. Against a sociology focused mainly on propinquity, Urry showed that there are many forms of ‘imagined presence’. Strange new qualities of the co-presence might happen in certain situations.
