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mediation between the product and the consumer. Similarly, Expedia is more than just a
booking agent and controls a number of subsidiary companies such as Trip Advisor, which in
turn launched a new feature in 2010 called 'Cities I've Visited' that allows people to view lists
of friends who have visited places on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/CitiesIveVisited). Not
only do we now have more choice, but we also have more information on which to base our
choice, and in the case of travel blogs we see both the intertwining of lived experiences and
the virtual world of the internet now being incorporated into the sphere of tourism
multinationals.
Conclusions: individuation, tourism and space
In this chapter, I have argued that the one of the characteristics of contemporary developed
societies has been the shift from a relatively settled pattern of social roles and responsibilities
organised around the workplace and other modern institutions - which Beck refers to as
tradition - into a situation where the role of the individual assumes greater prominence in
both the public and the private sphere. Such a process of individuation is in part driven by the
global political economy and the tendency evident in consumerism, which is pushing produc-
tion and consumption into more niched and individually tailored products. Such a process is
just as evident in tourism as much as other forms of consumption, with the increasing emphasis
on niched products and consumers creating their own tour packages and itineraries.
I have also argued that digital communication has not only changed the ways in which
tourism is sold, but also the ways in which we conceptualise what is on offer, and that these
forms of communication have also challenged the accepted authority of guidebooks and tour
companies, replacing them with a form of peer review. In terms of thinking about tourism
space, this also opens up new avenues to explore in analytical terms. Tourism space is less
defi ned than it has been previously: the forms of touring and holidaymaking I have described
above and the development of routes which offer a range of possibilities rather than a
prescribed package results in a more diffuse form of tourism than is found in the more tradi-
tional kind of resort destinations. Travel blogs, travel comparison sites and the peer-to-peer
sharing of pictures and other information by e-communication changes the way in which we
conceptualise both social space and tourist space, not as something to be passively consumed
in prescribed packages, but as the raw material, so to speak, that we engage with and use to
form a sense of who we are. Of course there is more to contemporary tourism than the
internet - as the other chapters in this topic demonstrate, the internet is an enabling factor
rather than a causal one - but it has become, I would argue, another form of institutionalised
individualism, where personal friendships, likes and dislikes, experiences and other personal
matters are freely and openly traded under the gaze of a global audience.
 
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