Homebodies on vacation-Review

The article analyzes the characteristics of modern travel that have evolved out of the modern technological arena. The modern traveler seeks escape from the fictitious, digital environment to places that connect them to the past and the natural (the real). However, the traveler cannot fully escape the throes of technology and globalization. As the article points out, commodification of vision and experience has permeated the realm of travel. The mechanics of travel have drastically changed since the Renaissance. Where the Renaissance traveler sought out active discourse within their new environments, the modern traveler has evolved into the role of the ‘passive voyeur’, of consumer of their new environments.

Technology and the commodification of vision have permeated our existential behavior to the point where we seek out mediated environments, even when trying to escape them. Travel is in many ways ‘a construction of authenticity’ designed to meet the desires of the traveler seeking out ‘the real’ to escape their otherwise fabricated existence in western society. Within this construct the traveler follows delineated ‘scenic routes’ (those optically engineered postcard views that displace the ‘unsightly views’) seeking out photo-ops as souvenirs, proof of the accountability of their experience. These postcard views then become commodified through tourist consumption which turns the sight into a symbolic representation of its natural state while engineers struggle to maintain the view to meet its ‘expected image’.

Every ‘sight’ a tourist visits is a representation of its own original state mediated through artificial fields of vision (through the car windshield, camera lens, and corded off viewing posts) that objectify the natural world into a ‘possessable artifact’ ready for consumption. From the official sights engineered to reconstruct the historic past to the picture window views from within the ‘vacation home’, the commodification of vision through mediating frameworks has become an industry to meet the desire of a growing leisure oriented society where each person desires to possess a piece of the natural world. The tourist’s consumption of the ‘pre-packaged authentic’ is destroying the very thing they seek to possess.