Place-Based Travel Apps and the Aspiring Local

• In Event: Conceptualizing and Mediating Space Through Global Communication

Abstract

This paper explores how networked digital media platforms are reshaping travel. Travel has long been a status asset for aspirational middle classes, and the ways in which foreign experiences act as cultural capital have shifted over time. In this context, a growing tech-enabled travel sector now focuses on collapsing the travel genre into the domestic, by connecting tourists to 'local' people and situations (or simulations). Spurred by innovations in the sharing economy, as well as by developments in location technologies connecting networked users to placed-based people and services, many companies targeting today’s international travelers have moved away from a focus on ‘the sites’ and now emphasize immersion into everyday life while abroad. These emerging localization apps promise an opportunity to safely and seamlessly inhabit multiple worlds, to enact the fantasy of the global citizen, and to perform the 'globally networked self'.

Author

• Erika Polson, University of Denver