Meaning-making in Web 2.0 Tourism Discourse

Since holidays cannot be inspected for purchase beforehand, tourists try to minimize the gap existing between their expectations – constructed on product representation and description – and their experience by seeking as much information as possible (O’Connor et al. 2001: 333). In this quest for information, the Internet has begun to be regarded as a convenient and dynamic source of information by means of which tourists can virtually experience the holiday, thanks to the interactive multimedia sites existing on the Web (Cho/Fesenmaier 2001), characterized by networked interrelations of verbal and iconic components which meet the requirements of today’s tourist. Hence the illusion of feeling the holiday experience, before actually living it, in line with the tourist’s most optimistic expectations. When tourism texts are uploaded on the Net, the potentialities of these multimodal relationships are further augmented. The main feature of web-texts is that their information is selected and designed to attract attention by breaking conventional reading patterns (Crystal 2006: 205), where the traditional textual organization which allows the processing of meaning seems to be lacking and is substituted with texts characterized by abundant visual information, strategically reflecting the communicative choice of the web-designer enhancing the web-user’s illusion of having total control over the verbal component of the text itself. Indeed, Web 2.0 has allowed the potential tourist to take on a central role in the textual meaning-making process: prospective tourists play an active one. They are prosumers, tourist consumers who have become producers: if with Web 1.0 potential tourists sought information about the destination on the web, and were therefore merely network consumers, with Web 2.0, they are the authors, i.e. the producers, of the very same texts they share or actively comment on via the Net. In this presentation, we will see how the tourism industry can create successful text on social networks such as Facebook. Clearly, the interrelation between text and visuals amplifies the meaning of the conveyed message: a text made up of language alone would offer a low-dimensional representation of experience; a text comprising only images would afford a much greater display of the complexity of reality but its meaning might be non-explicit, if not ambiguous, without the verbal elements. When images and text are interwoven their very meaning goes beyond the default conventions of traditional multimodal genres (Lemke 2002: 301). Such interrelation, however, is further emphasised because of the participation of the prospective tourists in the text itself. In other words, not only do prospective clients read such texts cross-modally, as meaning is constructed through traditional reading patterns integrated by semantic associations brought up by the potentialities offered by the Net (Lemke 2002), but they also amplify meaning precisely because they take part in the text construction. Meaning-making in such texts as those analysed in this study is thus a complex process, which results from the overlapping multimodal semiotic strategies employed by prosumers rather than from a single modal reading.