View Item 

Beyond the blog: The networked self of travel bloggers on Twitter

Access Status
Open access
Authors
Azariah, Deepti
Date
2011
Type
Conference Paper

Metadata
Show full item record
Citation
Azariah, Deepti. 2011. Beyond the blog: The networked self of travel bloggers on Twitter, in Henderson, A. (ed), 2011 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference: Communication on the edge, Jul 6-8 2011. Hamilton, NZ: University of Waikato.
Source Title
Refereed proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference: Communication on the edge. 2011
Source Conference
Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference: Communication on the edge 2011
Additional URLs
ISSN
School
Department of Internet Studies
Remarks

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australian License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/. Please refer to the licence to obtain terms for any further reuse or distribution of this work.

URI
Collection
Abstract

Studies of the use of social media in tourism rarely discuss various tools in conjunction with each other. The growth of Twitter has attracted the attention of tourism researchers interested in the platform as a marketing tool and a source of information about consumers (Claster, Cooper, & Sallis, 2010; Hay, 2010). Similar studies of travel blogs largely focus on what tourists say about destinations and their own experiences (Akehurst, 2009; Bosangit, McCabe, & Hibbert, 2009; Schmallegger &Carson, 2008). Blogs in general, and travel blogs in particular, are widely regarded as providing credible information about their authors. Both the content and formal features of these online narratives shape the self-presentation and positioning of their authors as bloggers. Given that blogs are increasingly “distributed” (Helmond, 2010) and that independent travel bloggers often link to other platforms, it is necessary to consider author-created content beyond the blog to understand the presentation of what Papacharissi (2010) calls a “networked self”. Drawing on the theories of Bakhtin and Goffman, which have informed previous analyses of blogs, and Dann’s (1996) concept of tourist discourse, this paper argues that the Twitter pages of independent travel bloggers extend the self-presentation in their blogs.In particular, it focuses on how travel bloggers use specific conventions, formal features, and narrative techniques of Twitter to express a networked self and reiterate themes of the blog. Through a random selection and textual analysis of various messages it finds that while there is some mention of the travel experience, the various conventions and conversations on Twitter are self-presentational elements that generally strengthen the authors’ position as travel bloggers. The characteristic narrative techniques of Twitter also reveal tensions between the discourses of travel and tourism. The networked self of the independent travel blogger is negotiated in these discursive tensions.