The thesis discusses the concept of authenticity in tourism, and travel and commercial photography. With the development of new technologies, visuality in tourism has become more important than ever. Faster production and circulation of aesthetic photographs have changed tourists’ opinions of a tourist destination and their decisions connected to it. Simultaneously, the development of social media, which has led to the rise of social media influencers, has also played a part in this shift. These are now seen as the new non-institutional actors in tourism. The object of the thesis was to examine how the online mainstream media values online influencers and travel photographs posted on the social media platform Instagram. The analysis was conducted with the method of framing, which led to the confirmation of two theses—that, in the analyzed articles, the travel industry itself is not problematized but rather individuals and their activities on Instagram, and that, in the analyzed articles, travel photography is seen as artificially produced and inauthentic.
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