ABSTRACT
Travel and tourism often inspire blogging. The practice of blogging, in its turn, contributes to the promotion of tourism and the dissemination of experiences of travel. The discourses of travel and tourism are interrelated, and each travel blog negotiates the inherent tensions between these discourses differently. Approaching the travel blogs selected for this study as heteroglossic and polyphonic texts, has enabled a better understanding of how this discursive tension informs the presentation of travel experiences, tourist destinations, and the individuals who write about them and about themselves. It has also revealed how this relationship complicates the notion of blogs as personal and social narratives with definitive formal features. This book does not presume to offer a complete picture of how blogs work or indeed predict how these narratives will evolve. However, despite its limitations, this study does reveal something of the lay of the land that is the travel blogosphere and the uncharted territories that lie beyond. First, it has discovered that a travel blog’s negotiation of travel and tourist discourses ultimately indicates the need for a more flexible definition of these texts. Furthermore, technology plays a central role in how tensions between these discourses are set up and play out in the self-presentation of travel bloggers. Finally, there is a growing online relationship between Lonely Planet and individuals who create travel-related content that merits further consideration. Based on these findings, this chapter ultimately presents the conclusions drawn from this study of how travel blogs negotiate the discursive tensions between travel and tourism.
