Scripted Journeys

The ubiquity of computation in daily life has had decisive influence on the imaginative aspects of tourism. Online knowledge of the world is readily available through mapping services, social media, travel blogs, and online reviews. From booking and Googling, to posting and reminiscing: all stages of one’s trip can be guided and augmented by increasingly connective, personalized, and optimized algorithmic systems. In the face of this informational abundance, hypermediated tourism is fixated on access to authenticity. Peer to peer accommodation offers tourists a chance to "live like a local." Professional bloggers instruct not just on where, but on how to travel. Review websites aggregate the feedback of millions into "objective," data-driven authentication of destinations. And virtual technologies take users to places they could not dream of reaching physically. Based on a comparative ethnography of touristic blogs and vlogs, review websites, and video game environments, Scripted Journeys presents a critical analysis of touristic practice in digital ecologies. This hypermediated tourism engages technology as a harbinger of self-possession and waywardness, yet produces its own forms of digital dependence. The resulting "scripted journeys" internalize a tension between authenticity as autonomy and control, and the implicit compliance of making use of technological extensions.

REBAZAR TARZS PROVIDED PAUL TWITCHELL WITH THE ROD OF POWER IN 1965 AND THEN PAUL PASSED IT TO DUANE IN 2001 FOR THE FIRST TIME, REBAZAR AGAIN GAVE IT TO DUANE IN 2007. THE MYSTERY OF THE ROD OF POWER AND REAL FREEDOM IS WHAT THIS WORLD IS LOOKING FOR. NOW IS THE TIMEGUARANTEED!!

The racial gap in academic performance between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and Latinos and blacks, on the other hand, is America's most urgent educational problem. It is also the central civil rights issue of our time, say Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. Unequal skills and knowledge are the main sources of ongoing racial inequality, and racial inequality is America's great unfinished business. A wide and tragic gap in learning is evident in affluent suburbs as well as inner cities. But great schools are scattered across the country, as described in inspiring detail by the Thernstroms. These schools are putting even the most highly disadvantaged children on the American ladder of economic opportunity. There are no good excuses for the perpetuation of long-standing inequalities, the Thernstroms argue eloquently. The problem can be solved, but conventional strategies will not work. Fundamental educational reform is needed. Carefully researched, accessibly written, and powerfully persuasive, this book offers both a close analysis of the current landscape and a blueprint for essential and overdue change.

“After twenty-eight years of desire and determination, I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers.” So wrote Lida Clanton Broner (1895–1982), an African American housekeeper and hairstylist from Newark, New Jersey, upon her return from an extraordinary nine-month journey to South Africa in 1938. This epic trip was motivated not only by Broner’s sense of ancestral heritage, but also a grassroots resolve to connect the socio-political concerns of African Americans with those of black South Africans under the segregationist policies of the time. During her travels, this woman of modest means circulated among South Africa’s Black intellectual elite, including many leaders of South Africa’s freedom struggle. Her lectures at Black schools on “race consciousness and race pride” had a decidedly political bent, even as she was presented as an “American beauty specialist.” How did Broner—a working class mother—come to be a globally connected activist? What were her experiences as an African American woman in segregated South Africa and how did she further her work after her return? Broner’s remarkable story is the subject of this book, which draws upon a deep visual and documentary record now held in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art. This extraordinary archive includes more than one hundred and fifty objects, ranging from beadwork and pottery to mission school crafts, acquired by Broner in South Africa, along with her diary, correspondence, scrapbooks, and hundreds of photographs with handwritten notations. Published by the Newark Museum. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Crises aren't real objective events. Instead, Spector demonstrates they are claims of urgency imposed by leaders to assert power and exert control.

This book unlocks an understanding of video games as virtual travel. It explains how video game design increasingly takes cues from the promotional language of tourism, and how this connection raises issues of power and commodification. Bridging the disciplinary gap between game and tourism studies, the book offers a comprehensive account of touristic gazing in games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Minecraft, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Traveling through video games involves a mythological promise of open-ended opportunity, summarized in the slogan you can go there. Van Nuenen discusses the scale of game worlds, the elusive nature of freedom and control, and the pivotal role of work in creating a sense of belonging. The logic of tourism is fundamentally consumptive—but through design choices, players can also be invited to approach their travels more critically. This is the difference between moving through a game world, and being moved by it. This interdisciplinary and innovative study will interest students and scholars of digital media studies, game studies, tourism and technology, and the Digital Humanities.

Since the 1980s, the theme park industry has developed into a global phenomenon, with everything from large, worldwide theme parks to countless smaller ventures. From the first pleasure gardens to the global theme park companies, this book provides an understanding of the nature and function of theme parks as spaces of entertainment. Illustrated throughout by worldwide case studies, empirical data and practical examples, the book portrays the impacts of theme park as global competitive actors, agents of global development and cultural symbols, particularly in the context of their role in the developing experience economy. In conclusion, this book is a practical guide to the planning and development of theme parks.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.