Assoc. Prof. Viliyan Krastev
From an elitist activity in the past to a mass practice today, tourism inexorably accompanies the behavior of the urban individual, thirsting for fleeting pleasure. Frantically fueling the desire for travel and consumption of millions of people are today's accessible and relatively cheap communications and information multimedia, which, woven into the tourist offer, “iconize“ the tourist image of a number of destinations.
Rome, Paris, Venice, Barcelona… are a small part of those bright spots for tourism, whose impressive images excite the minds of millions of people to go on a trip. This excitement, of course, is subject to today's neoliberal trend in the mass market, mass transport, mass production, mass culture - all reduced to tastes for mass consumption.
Standardized in the organization, especially through the use of digital technologies, tourism is firmly aligned in consumer behavior. Simplified and channeled tourist demand is established as highly dependent on the equally simplified tourist supply in the market matrix. The stereotypical behavior of the mass tourist dulls his mind, degenerating tourism into dullness. The tourist-spectator, subject to mass consumer taste, in most cases is not interested in the history, content or value of what he sees.
Whether it is the Trevi Fountain, the Arc de Triomphe, Piazza San Marco or the Sagrada Familia, it matters only as long as he has "filled" the space on his phone, "charged" his social networks, filled his stomach and bought as a souvenir that tourist deficit (a picture magnet, a key chain or a nail clipper) that an averagely intelligent person who is aware of the value of the presence of the place will not even notice.
In this way, the content of tourism corresponds to a stupidity that finds confirmation in the crowd of amorphous human masses that have drifted around the world in search of mass consumption. Stupidity, possessed by the banal need to consume impressions based on primary instincts dictated by the “values“ of mass culture.
The concentration of mass travel in certain points reveals an even more aggressive face of tourism, systematically destroying the foundations and harmony of the environment from the riches of which it has developed. The tourist invasion saturates its capacity to a limit bordering on idiocy. Subject to mass consumption, tourism from a public good and a desired economic need is transformed into a source of social segregation, “galloping“ inflation, cultural perversion, criminal presence, ecological degradation of the place…
Falling into chronic dependence on their manifestation, many destinations are already in an advanced stage of replacing their identity. From centers of cultural splendor, they are increasingly becoming places for standardized public sleeping and eating, satisfying sexual urges, spreading criminal activity, and rampant filth.
The number of places where the "invisible hand" of the mass tourist market has even led to ethnic segregation of residents is constantly increasing. Millions of immigrants from Asia and Africa are disadvantaged, filling low-paid and unprestigious jobs (cleaners, washermen, servants) in restaurants, hotels, stalls, or as street vendors. They are today's unskilled laborers of European soup kitchens, whose subordinate position degenerates the idiotic face of tourism as responsible for such ethnic catering.
Tourism, bordering on stupidity and idiocy, generates a public reaction - anti-tourism. The latter is already a mass phenomenon directed against tourism, which is radicalized to the point of contempt, intolerance and hatred towards the crowds who have come “hunting for hedonism“. It can be seen in the form of undisguised neglect, sarcasm and attacks by locals; as offensive graffiti on street walls; as protest marches in Rome, Paris, Venice, Barcelona.
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The author is a Doctor of Geography, Associate Professor at the Department of “Economics and Organization of Tourism“ of the University of Economics – Varna