New tourism and social transformation in postmodernity

This chapter focuses on how tourism became connected to global, disorganised, “liquid” capitalism and describes tourism’s relationship to social and cultural change. It describes tourism’s limited possibility of initiating cultural innovations and, in the end, affecting especially the human sense of solidarity. The chapter attempts to describe background of changes in tourism and to discover whether new tourism goes beyond mass tourism, whether new tourism’s characteristics just follow mass tourism, whether they differ and, if so, how. It examines Daniel J. Boorstin’s pseudo-event theory, which has been the best target for criticism by new tourism theorists, who pit the simple point of view against modern tourists. The chapter depicts typical characteristics of mass tourists acting as travellers who look down on the tourist from a viewpoint opposite MacCannell’s view of a tourist, as compared with Auliana Poon’s (1993) views of new tourism’s characteristics.