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Tourism in the wake of films, literature, and music is gaining interest among academics and practitioners alike. Despite the significance of converging tourism and media production and popcultural consumption, theorizing in this field is weak. This chapter explores complex relationships among popcultural phenomena, destination image creation, and tourism consumption. By taking a broader social science approach, it revisits and connects research themes, such as symbolic consumption, negotiated representations, fans and fandom, technology mediation, and media convergence. The chapter concludes with an integrative model, or “popcultural placemaking loop,” which is qualified through six propositions.

The majority of scholarly contributions in tourism social media have focused on assisting practitioners to optimize online platforms or to describe the digital behavior of prospective individual tourists. These studies are dominated by mechanistic ontological frameworks, which take little notice of the inherently social nature of tourism consumption. Acknowledging the sociality of Web 2.0 communications, this chapter explores the potentials of an alternative analytical framework informed by symbolic convergence theory. The linkages between tourism social media, virtual communities, and symbolic convergence processes are illustrated by examples of postings taking place on the Facebook fan site of Roskilde festival. These examples highlight the significance of symbolic communities in shaping the visitor experience against the backdrop of contemporary consumer culture.

This chapter analyzes the subject of critical digital tourism studies and envisions an agenda for technology research and education. Inspired by the insights of this book and the work of scholars in digital humanities and communication (Baym, 2010; Hayles, 2012), the study presents “embedded cognition” as a framework to comprehend the interdependencies between people’s actions and discourses, and technological affordances. It introduces the concept of “turistus digitalis,” discusses theories for conceptualizing society and technology relations, and examines the challenges of transdisciplinarity. This investigation contributes to increasing research reflexivity in understanding how tourism is enacted through digital worlds and how digital technologies evolve through tourism practices.