Tourism and symbolic power: Leveraging social media with the stance of disavowal

Abstract

Social media use has become a common feature of contemporary tourism, yet in face-to-face interactions tourists often distance themselves from online engagement. Drawing on interviews collected at a popular tourism site in Myanmar (Burma), tourists are found to recurrently take a stance of disavowal regarding social media use, downplaying and rationalizing their engagement or locating a tourist out-group against which their own behavior can be favorably compared. This case study of stancetaking regarding social media use reveals the dynamics of tourism's longstanding function as a distinction-making practice, with social media use but one of many behaviors that tourists critically evaluate in the pursuit of symbolic capital. As tourism becomes increasingly integral to the global maintenance of class status, focusing on the production of symbolic power in tourism raises critical questions about entanglements with industry and the accumulation of material capital.