Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
do not rely on vectors to transmit meaning as the conceptual aspect belongs to the culture in
which they are generated, for example the signifi cance of tourism as an activity in contemporary
society. Vectors are established by lines of vision across the screen or image, these vectors connect
the text to the author, and as a consequence, an image can be both a participant and a vector
(Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 59). A vector affords a connection or method of realization
between the consumer and the text, once this connection is made initial interpretation is
achieved. The vector guides the consumer and emphasizes the importance of the representation,
critically, the 'means of realisation produce quite similar semantic relations' (Kress and Van
Leeuwen 2001: 44), whereby, the relationship between the marketing text and the tourist is
supported. Resultantly, enabling the communication of meaning to be identifi ed and espoused
by the consumer in terms of collective hegemonic defi nitions of tourism and destinations
etc. However, not all visual or textual elements on the website maintain universal forms
of interpretation:
Rather, a given culture has a range of general, possible relations which is not tied to
expression in any particular semiotic code . . . This distribution of realisation possibilities
across the semiotic codes is itself determined historically and socially.
(Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001: 44)
Therefore, the representations in the three websites are mediated by a historical and cultural
discourse (see Artbury 2005; O'Connor 2005; O'Gorman 2007), that are contextualized by a
language of tourism. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen, this mediation challenges notions of
reality, as they state:
Pictorial structures do not simply reproduce the structure of reality. On the contrary, they
produce images of reality which are bound up with the interests of the social institutions
within which the pictures are produced, circulated and read. They are ideological.
(Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 45)
Therefore semiotically, destination marketing websites can be seen to have both an objective
and ideological purpose (Ferguson 1998) in that they represent a number of commercial or
capitalist discourses that exclude the negative impacts that tourism has on the environment and
indigenous culture.
The reactional process the tourist enters into when reading tourism marketing texts observes
the actors within the site also becoming reactors, while the goals become phenomena (Kress and
Van Leeuwen 2001: 64). The reactor is the participant who does the looking or gazing while the
phenomenon element is shaped by alternative participants at whom the reactor is looking, or by
a whole visual proposition. Therefore, the images become the actor as they are non-transactional,
while representing a phenomenon of tourism by virtue that it is located or contained for example
in a tourism brochure. While the texts or words that accompany pictures in brochures become a
reactor, a transactional response is then devised by the reader as the 'text directs perception' and
interpretation, through reinforcing 'signposts' of tourism experience. Critically, the written
textual element of the tourism marketing texts guides perception and underlines the signifi cance
of the images used, this results in a conversion activity taking place that is guided by techniques
such as the use of text (Davis 2005), and changes in written context and the represented meaning
of the tourism experience (Marshall 2005). Kress and van Leeuwen (2001: 67) call this process
'participant relay'. This relay demonstrates a text-image association in which text extends or
re-conceptualizes the visual information about the nature of the experience being offered by the
