Digital Social Construction of a Tourist Site: Ground Zero

Abstract

Reviews of Ground Zero, New York on TripAdvisor show a diversity of interpretations. Amidst the cacophony of voices, there is communication and a semblance of community. This sense of community—despite the lack of strong coherent and consistent views, a plethora of diverse topics, and heterogeneous perspectives—is brought together and built on chronotopic (time–space) structures. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin’s chronotopes, this chapter shows how spatial and temporal structures are negotiated. The negotiation processes demonstrate that tourists now have a global platform to communicate and are able to stake claims of legitimacy to interpreting foreign heritage. Thus tourists are layering new meanings on historical sites and are contributing to the rewriting of local histories, all as part of glocalization.

Citation

Ooi, C.-S. and Munar, A.M. (2013), "Digital Social Construction of a Tourist Site: Ground Zero", Tourism Social Media: Transformations in Identity, Community and Culture (Tourism Social Science Series, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 159-175. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1571-5043(2013)0000018011