Is the history of tourism a form of approaching the changes in the regime of accumulation and consumption that have followed capitalism? For the english sociologists Lash and Urry, this is perfectly possible. To the organised forms of the first stage of capitalism, it corresponded a specific type of leisure. Vacations were taken on clearly stablished and limited periods in time and depended on labor market regulations. The touristic experience, besides, was a sphere clearly separated from quotidian life; the meanings constructed in the trip and leisure differed from the everyday representations of our daily environment.

But for Lash and Urry, the quotidian experience is becoming more esthetic and our consumption is every time more captive of the design of any object. The statement here is that touristic experience is every time less differentiated from the one we have everyday, and this will lead to the death of tourism as a separate sphere of experiences. To make it brief: currently, we are tourists the whole time, and we travel through images in the media and the design of our quotidian experiences. And the growing desregulation of the labor market and the change in consumption patterns can be seen in tourism, under the form of shorter leisure periods but located several times throughout the year, and the decadence of travel packages and other very organised forms of tourism.

My impression is that Larry and Urry take things a little too far. I find temerary to establish that the travel experience does not differ anymore from the one we have every day. As analysts, if we have to start from the social actors’ common sense, we’ll see that they keep separating clearly both types of experiences. That is: the practices they execute in every environment are different, even when we can establish that there are more bridges of communication between them.

Anyways, the hypothesis of the “esthetization of quotidian life” -that Lash and Urry take from Featherstone- is interesting enough to be taken again in further entries. Mostly, since now Featherstone’s book is available in spanish.

Bibliography

Lash, Scott y John Urry (1998) “Movilidad, modernidad y lugar” in Economías de Signos y Espacio. Sobre el capitalismo de la posorganización. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu.

Webloog.com is a new Blogger-style blogs publishing system, that uses Wordpress MU, the multiusers Wordpress system. The particular thing about this is that they’re using WP 1.6 version, so it’s a good chance to try it without having to install try out versions in our server. There are a few changes in the main interface, such as the adding of a WYSIWYG editor -that I have deactivated-, the rearrangement of the interface by Ajax and a color palette now turned blue. Webloog.com is free and the address they provide is the “username.webloog.com” kind. More: themes appear now with a screen capture and there’s a new menu to import contents from another CMS -although, for now, it’s not working in Webloog.com. The bad: the site doesn’t allow the installation of our own plugins -this will create more than one trouble- and we only count on 10 mb to upload images and other materials.

If you want to see how the new WP looks, Webloog is an interesting option (originally seen at Blogpocket).

Communications media journalists, specially graphics media, usually take for granted that they write for a specific target in particular, and that they can assume a certain type of agreement with them. Since, in order to access to newspapers and magazines one has to pay for them, common sense says the reader has a certain degree of agreement with the media, and its editorial line. In Communications Sciences this is called “reading contract”, from the semiologist Eliseo Veron. This “model reader”, by the way, can match the famous marketing “target”, but not necessarily; the importance of the reading contract is rather based on the journalists’ need to take for granted certain readers’ characteristics and to establish a bond with them.

Now well: what happens in the Net with blogs? Unlike many communications media, access to this kind of support is much more diverse. Even when we write with a certain kind of reader in mind, we can get visitors with radically opposite opinions, or who don’t know some basic information from which we start off. Many times we adapt our writing to direct not only to our idea of reader, but also to avoid problems. We use what we could call “the worst reading contract”. To paraphrase Isaac Joseph and his text on Erving Goffman’s microsociologic theory, we assume that “there always exists an interpretation of your texts worse than the one you can imagine”. Even when we think we’ve written in a reflexive enough way as to cover the most usual critics, there will be those who will understand our writing in ways that we didn’t imagine.

And the text published in a blog, submitted to the public scrutiny of anyone who enters from any point of the Internet, is subject to the same rules we used in our everyday life when we face unknown people: “watch what you say, it’s best to know first who are we facing”. With time, we learn that certain topics are hard to handle; that if we criticize an album or a book, no matter how analytical the reading can be, there will always be someone offended. That there will be people who will get mad because we say our sincere opinion on a touristic destination. If we don’t appraise it, we’re being unfair; if we do, we’ve been bought.

As long as the text we publish on blogs are public and widely accesible, readings tend to be quite diverse, and that is part of the best and worst of this media. It’s interesting when it provides access to opinions and points of view that enriches the discussion and help broaden it. But it can also be frustating when an ellaborate text receives insults as a response -hidden under a pseudanonymity which is unusual in face to face environments-, completely aberrant readings or, simply, silence.

Could it be that the famous reading contract, that bond we have with our readers, is built with the pass of the years? If this expectation is reasonable, we may think that in the long run we will take for granted who are we writing for. Or will the idea of having in mind “the worst reading contract” prevail? Will the Net’s diversity make us assume different kinds of readings every time we write a text to be published in our blogs? This point, besides, is interesting to academic blogs, that usually use a very specific terminology, but since they’re read by people that don’t belong to the academic field, they frequently find particular comments from other Net users. This tension between “writing for the academy” and “writing for the widest amount of people”, which of course is not exposed in the protected environment of the university, is part of the problems of academic blogs and their estragies to position themselves as legitimate knowledge builders. A place that, for now, universities occupy without many problems with publications such as books and papers.

I admit it: I’ve been wanting to visit Ushuaia, one of the most popular touristic destinations of my country, Argentina, for a few years. For many reasons, particularly economic but also of personal choices, I ended up heading north rather than south. In these years, Ushuaia has been growing considerably in the number of international tourists that it receives, which has made this expensive city even more to the devaluated local pockets. By reading a note at the newspaper La Nacion (spanish only) I found out about a two hour tour to the Faro del Fin del Mundo (”end of the world lighthouse”) by catamarán (some sort of boat) that costs 60 pesos (about US$20); then, the two hour ride on the “end of the world” train costs 47 pesos (US$16); a city tour on an old bus costs 20 pesos (doesn’t say how long it lasts, although it includes hot cocoa). And I prefer to stop here.

If you realize that to get to this apart location in the south you have to take a plane, and also spend some money in winter clothing, it seems to me that Ushuaia is not located in Argentina; but much further away. God knows when will I be able to go there.

What “power” could blogs have? The first thing that comes to many people minds is the topic of the media. If blogs are important, they would say, it’s because they influence the media. That is, because they manage to coopt their agenda. There is nothing new about this; press agencies, non government organisations or politics have been doing it for quite a long time now.

But what’s the capability of blogs to stop depending on the media and to define their own agendas? At the end, they can reach their public in a more direct way, without having to depend on the journalistic apparatus. But, at least in an impressionist manner, what you currently see is that blogs are rather complementing the media; that is, they provide other points of view over the same agenda of news. Could this change with the consolidation of the so called “citizen journalism”? These kind of practices combine the journalistic method with the collaborative structure of blogs, but for now the topic is not clear enough as to get conclussions.

Do blogs return the power of expression to the public? At simple sight, anyone can start their own blog and write. But to take for granted that this will make them representatives of the “public opinion” (a construction that resembles others such as the “holy ghost”) is quite naive. For months now, public relations agencies and the media are thinking of how to coopt the phenomenom of blogs in their favor. There are huge sites, such as WikiNews, totally written by users. Will it follow the path of the software industry, where one application developed by a company has as many contributions from their paid employees as from the community? Imagine: a newspaper made by paid journalists -few of them- and readers/producers that charge a dime and are many. Media businessmen will begin to rub their hands together…

Rather than “power”, maybe we should be talking about the capability to establish public agendas. I think it’s a little simplist to believe that the influence potential of blogs can directly be related to how easy it is to create and maintain them (and take for granted that, because they’re easy to create, they have an innate democractic potential). Besides, it’s quite obvious that not all blogs are alike. The establishment of even more formalized parameters to distinguish them -pagerank, links, position in search engines- are creating a strong separation between consolidated sites and veterans and newest ones. This gap is going to be harder to break, even when every now and then a new blog manages to quickly attract attention. So, some bloggers will be able to establish and impulse agendas, while others will have to follow them or simply opt to stay out from the the world of the “most cited” blogs.

It’s true that, unlike the media, the capacity to impulse topics in the blogosphere is more disperse, less concentrated. But with the pass of time, we’ll surely have more reference points, rankings and diverse ponderation methods of results obtained in blogs -as the ones Technorati and IceRocket allow. Will these bloggers have a greater power to install topics? If you take into consideration that some of the most popular blogs in the United States already have more readers than some big newspapers, it would be naive to believe that things will continue as it has done so far. The question is, of course, if these successful blogs will end up being integrated to the mediatic system as we know it or if they’ll maintain a clear independence from them.

(Written for the III Carnaval de blogs, spanish only. This week’s topic: Blogs and power).

A few weeks ago I wrote about Schtuff, a free service that allows you to create your own wiki, with a good amount of space and the option to have public and private pages. Since this note appeared at Zirma, the people from Wikispaces left a comment letting me know about their site. Wikispaces is a more traditional approach to the subject: it allows you to create public wikis that use the same structure Wicka or Wacko Wiki does -which I like, of course. As a test, I copied a page I already had at Wikinomade (spanish only), and can be seen here: viajes.wikispaces.org (spanish too). Unlike Schtuff, Wikispaces is much more oriented to collaborative work, with tools meant to be used by users when editing pages in group. Besides, readers can leave messages and discuss the contents of our texts. More? You can upload images and each page has RSS and Atom sindication. One thing: it’s not quite clear to me if there are limits to the number of pages that can be created. In the case of images, it is specified: 2mb max. or 2048×2048 pixels size. As far as I’ve seen, there are very few pages in spanish language.

So, it’s good news: it’s getting easier to create our own wikis in the Net by using free simple tools for non expert users. Let’s hope this tendency continues.

Few speeches have seen so generalized in the latest years as the one that sustains that the physical world is less important, as social and labor relations are delocalizing. The greater presence of the Internet has helped to create this impression, for which the entire world seems to leave behind its historic roots based on the possession of material spaces, to enter an era marked by the domain of the network and the symbolic.

Such appreciations are clearly exaggerated. While many proclaim the decadence of the physical world, there are a series of facts to be considered. I will point them out, in an isolated way. One, a part of the world clearly concentrates the biggest economic income. Two, in almost the whole world, the value of real estate are raising, and at least for two years now people talk about a “real state bubble”. Three, oil reserves are becoming so valuable that many opt to “physically” invade others to maintain its domain on them.

So, where are we then? Is the world becoming symbolic and virtual or is it still as anchored on the possession of material physical assets, as it has been for centuries? More likely, both things are taking place, simultaneously. The economy is increasingly having a bigger weight on the nets of value construction anchored in knowledge and the symbolic -there are the huge numbers of electronic transactions made everyday, or the value of innovation in business processes- but at the same time this “virtualization” is taking place within a process of notorious revaluation of certain “physical” properties, such as real estate, oil reserves, natural resources. And there’s nothing contradictory in it -although it provokes a long series of tensions, of course. Rather, we have a relation between both phenomena, in the same way in which, for example, communications media are fragmenting but at the same time are focusing into property.

The next years will be a sample of particular tendencies. A greater increase in the virtualization of certain social relations -particularly with the growth of teleworking, a phenomenon that presents advantages to the employers and also to the employees- and the growth of the value of scarce physical assets. Don’t be surprised: in a world where in theory everything is becoming “more virtual”, many of us will have as an almost impossible dream buying a house. As Lash and Urry would say, we’re heading towards a real economy of signs and spaces.

Those particular paradox of market economy: the poorest continent of the world, Africa, has been in the latest years the region of the world with the biggest growth in the number of mobile phones. It went from 7.5 millions of mobiles in 1999 to almost 80 millions, today; 1 of every 11 africans has a mobile phone. This represents a 58% annual growth, while Asia had a growth of 34% in the same period.

How can poverty and the demand for new services be combined? Facing the bad infrastructure of fix lines, many people opt to do what in technology studes is known as leap frog: to skip one state of technology installed and to use directly the newest one. In this case, not even install a fix telephone line and head straight to a mobile. It’s paradoxical: despite most of africans live on US$ 2 a day, many of them need to have access to mobile phones to be able to work. Add to this the explosion of economic mobile phones supply, with prepaid plans that allow to control the consumption by charging overpriced on air minutes. This is similar to what is going on in Latin America, by the way. Two interesting pointers. One: the fifth part of the continent’s cell phones are concentrated in South Africa. Two: in 2003, Nigeria’s telcos had to suspend the sale of chips and new devices to renovate the net, which was completely saturated.

The possesion of a mobile phone is a business opportunity in these types of countries. I can only cite one example that I’ve seen several times in Bolivia: people who have several cell phones tied around their waist, that allow people to make phone calls by paying a fix fee, one that’s cheaper for many destinations than the traditional fix network’s. While this is related to how expensive it is to talk on the phone in Bolivia, it’s interesting as an example of survival and finding new opportunities to make money with communications services.

The news can be seen in the Herald Internationl Tribune, and I originally saw it at New Mobilities, at el Cemore’s blog.

Bonus: some info about poverty in Africa

Number of refugees: 15 millions -3.3 millions had to leave their countries for some kind of conflict, and 12 millions had to move to other parts of their country as refugees.

Annual city growth: 3,5%

Percentage of population under 25 years old: 71%

Percentage of population that depends on agriculture to survive: 66%

Taken from Purse Lip Square Jaw.

“The new media are always forced to do, at first, the job of the old media”. This idea belongs to Marshall McLuhan, an author that hasn’t been quite well read from communicacion sciences (at least in my country, Argentina). In the beginning, radio was forced to make some sort of long distance theater. Movies were forced to make like theater, but without the actors -and that’s why in the first movies the camera doesn’t move and the actors are always in scene. And with television the role to be presented was the one of movies; thus, in its beginnings people gathered around the device and the consumption was not individual at all.

And something similar is happening with podcasting: as a format, it’s rather being used as a radio on the Internet. Working as a form of distribution of recorded programs. And what is wrong with that? That the great potential of the Net is not the distribution, but the capacity of collaboration among the users to develop contents. Until we count on tools that allow for podcasts to take advantage of this capacity of collaboration, podcasting will have many difficulties to start off as a massive tool of contents generator. A problem that, of course, has to be added to some others: the technical difficulty to generate good quality podcasts; the high demand of broadband -the in the future, probably won’t be such a problem, thanks to the appearing of free repositories such as Archive.org-; and the difficulty to index the contents of these programs -until we can search in them as we do today with text, a massive use as a reference when creating new contents will be hard.

For now, we still see podcasting a little as a trend, or a ground where many bloggers think they can extend without greater problems. Relevant podcasters will surely appear ahead, taking real advantage of this media. And not necessarily will they be popular bloggers. One thing is to write and another to be able to produce audio contents good enough to attract Internet users, anyways.

By the way, if someone is not quite familiar with the concept of podcasting, you can check its definition at the Wikipedia.

One of the key issues in the backpacker’s trip is the topic of expenses control. To be able to visit places with the least money possible is what distinguishes this type of tourism, and for this matter many destinations usually create a specific supply of hostel and camping accomodations, generally by part of the private sector. But the decision to spend less sometimes generates the appearing of a specific group of backpackers: the extreme backpackers. These ones are not looking to spend less; they, simply, don’t want to spend anything at all. They’re trying all the time to access services without paying a dime; they’d rather sleep on the street or anywhere as long as they don’t have to pay a few bucks for a camping tent or a hotel bed; they don’t use a single bus and are capable of staying on the route for days as they wait for an opportunity to hithchhike. There’s a certain pride in these kind of actions. It’s not strange, when we travel in an environment characterized for the presence of backpackers, that conversations tend to focus on who spent less; sometimes, a few cents define the discussion, and the resulting feeling is that who spend less can travel better.

In many cases, the strict in expenses backpacker trip is not a choice; there’s the willingness to travel and very little money. So, one has to be very disciplined and not spend too much if we want to keep on moving. This implies looking for the cheapest places, where we can cook, if possible; trying to save as much as we can in transportation; and usually looking for economic ways to have fun.

The problem is when many of these backpackers get together, in determined seasons, in rather small destinations, with a small population. Let’s get real: few locals would look friendly at people who want to visit their town but are not willing to spend a dime in it and who have set a goal of getting everything they can for free, when possible. One case: it’s quite common in the north of Argentina to charge for the use of public bathrooms -something usual in Bolivia and the south of Peru, but not so much in many areas of Argentina, particularly in the biggest cities, such as Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Rosario, where most of the argentinean backpackers come from. The result: long discussions between the backpackers that don’t want to pay 25 - 50 cents (US$ 0.08 - 0.16) to use the bathroom and the local people who live from the business exploitation of their town. And this is just one case. I suppose there are similar situations taking place in some other countries, but with other types of services.

When I talk about “realism”, I try to be practical: it’s hard to ask a local population to receive tourists in the best manner, if these don’t bring any benefits or if they just provoke damages. There are, of course, some limits: in many destinations, people want to charge you even just to look at the landscape, and these kind of abuse are not rare. But on the traveller’s side, excess is not unusual either. Travelling cheap does not mean, simply, to consider paying for something a sin. It’s about, above all, economizing in expenses by restricting only to the basics and indispensable. But it’s not realistic to demand the local people to watch the occupation of their public spaces in exchange of nothing.

Part of the ideas of this note came up from the comment Victor left on the article Los otros mochileros (spanish only), about the impact on Iruya, a wonderful location on the north of Salta in Argentina, of the massive arrival of backpackers, particularly during the argentinean summer time. That I disagree with some of Victor’s statements shouldn’t make us lose sight of the fact that there’s a problem to be solved in what he’s pointing. Backpacker travelling is a beautiful experience that has to include respect for local populations; getting to know their ways and habits is a form to observe the huge diversity of Argentina, many times lost under the stories that presents it as a “white and european” country. If local populations start to perceive backpackers more as a disturb than as a pleasant visit, in the long run they’ll do what many destinations that want to take advantage from tourism have done: to close free public spaces, raising the cost of hotel and other services, and delegating the task of removing “unwanted visitors” from the location to the police. The idea: to point only at “profitable tourists”. Let’s not pull the rope: authoritarian solutions are always an option in the minds of many people.