The Internet and the 21st Century Singaporean Traveller

Abstract

Tourism has been changing dramatically in recent years, especially after the introduction of the Internet. Information searching and sharing became readily available online and tourists can now do it while travelling. This has transformed how people organize, plan and carry out their travel, and of course these changes have affected the travel industry. Furthermore, digitalization and the internet has had a dramatic effect on the way people interact with others and share their experiences when they travel. With technological advances, photographs can now be taken by smartphones and shared online immediately. Tourism thus becomes part of the pursuit of the photograph that can be shared immediately to gain ‘likes’ and therefore, recognition, from others, leading to the pursuit of extreme and unique photos when travelling. These changes suggest that tourism has been affected significantly with the development of the Internet. I will be suggesting that these changes might lead to the emergence of a new ‘tourism ordering’ (Franklin 2004). ‘Orderings’ have been suggested as a way to look at relations in society and their effects as processes, and are explored by scholars who utilize the tools and concepts of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In this thesis, I am interested to look at how the organization of tourism has changed for Singaporeans through the use of the ideas of ANT and the notion of tourism ordering, both of which has been used in tourism research to find out how tourism as we know it is shaped and the factors behind it.