Mid Sweden University

This thesis investigates the influences of digital technologies on nature-based tourism (NBT) experiences. I acknowledge that the holistic digitalization of human lives increasingly impacts nature-based tourism. Particularly, I argue that it impacts tourists’ experiential valuation of nature, as well as tourists themselves as experiencers of nature in NBT in ways that need to be further understood.Following contemporary consumer-dominant perspectives on tourism experiences, I argue that tourists’ multi-dimensional valuation of experiences depends greatly on ex-situ factors that exist outside service encounters in NBT and within digitally networked lifeworld experienced by tourists, which informs how they value themselves and what they experience. However, such lifeworlds are poorly acknowledged in research on NBT experiences. Building on consumer culture theory, I argue that NBT tourists are cultural agents, and their NBT experiences are highly affected by how their lifeworlds are ingrained in marketplace cultures that discipline what is valuable and experienced in NBT. Such marketplace cultures, which are becoming increasingly digital and technological, can be conceptualized as digital technocultures. More than simply enhancing experiences, as extant literature suggests, digital technology provides lifestyle scripts, ideologies, identity myths, symbolic universes, and stories associated with the everyday, tourism, and consumption of nature. The latter are powerful actors in shaping consumers’ meaning making, sensescapes, emotions, behaviors, and ultimately experience valuations of nature in NBT. Across the four papers and the additional discussion that compose it, this thesis investigates how digital technocultures shape the identity of tourist experiencers in NBT and how they impact the valuation of nature in NBT. The thesis adopts a mix of novel, in-depth, thick, and interpretive methodologies to gain such knowledge. Findings offer thick consumer knowledge and a high-level consumer insight into NBT tourists. In digital technocultures, NBT tourists and their experiences of nature are contested among different digital and disconnected selves. Tourists appropriate digital technocultures and NBT according to identity projects that aim to assemble valued digital “experiencers” and at taking part in valued in e-tribes reflecting them in one’s lifeworld. At the same time, tourists negotiate digital technocultures disciplining their lifeworlds in order to build a valued escapist, liberated and disconnected Self in nature. Moreover, digital technocultures discipline, abstract, and extremify specific aspects of nature. These are sought, desired, imagined, and experienced as digital hyperrealities in NBT. This thesis explores the implications of digital technocultures of experience for NBT, which have so far been insufficiently acknowledged.

Social media and mobile-based applications act as an increasingly critical source of experience value creation in tourism and nature-based tourism, as confirmed by the most recent trends in the industry. Although being one of the most popular mobile-based social media, Instagram is still underrepresented in value creation research, and no study has been conducted specifically in nature-based tourism. Moreover, current research on value lack of interpretive methodologies able to grasp the complexity of experience value creation from a phenomenological point of view. This research aims at tackling these gaps by conducting an in-depth investigation on experience value creation on Instagram in nature-based tourism. A combination of different types of qualitative data, obtained through a participatory netnography, will be collected on Instagram, and consequently triangulated and analyzed by means of grounded theory. While assessing the depth of value creation emerging from personal, elicited tourist narratives, in a way not seen yet in similar studies, the results are argued to expand the theoretical understanding of experience value creation in nature-based tourism and service research.

Recent studies question whether ubiquitous connectivity via mobiles represents an enhancer and facilitator in nature-based tourism experiences or a potential destructor to disconnect from. We argue that extant research approaches cannot fully grasp the complexity of the connectivity-disconnection dilemma, specifically how tourists appropriate, reinterpret, reshape, and negotiate with meanings inscribed in mobiles and how such negotiations link to valuations of nature-based experiences. This research adopts an interpretivist approach and uses actor-network theory to investigate negotiations of connectivity and their experiential meanings through field interviews in Fulufjället National Park, Sweden. Results reveal translations of social connectivity, facilitation of information and orientation as thematic cores of tourists’ embodiments of mobile connectivity. Results also show how the comprehensive tourismscape where such embodiments find meaning contributes to tourists’ definitions of disconnection. Such definitions comprise human and non-human actors on site, off site, and cannot be exhausted by essentialist dualisms between being plugged and unplugged.

The intersection between social media, liminality and nature-based tourism experiences hasn’t been the focus of previous tourism research. Such intersection, on the other hand, is illustrative of how social media relate to the constitution and performance of tourism spatialities, tourist identities, storytelling and place-making, and can lead to relevant theoretical contributes. We aim to investigate how liminality is expressed in relation to nature-based experiences by tourists on social media, and what role social media plays in mediating liminality during nature-based tourism experiences. The analysis is based on a participatory netnography of images and text posts, as well as online interviews with users of the popular social media Instagram. Findings show that the expression of tourism experiences in nature is closely related to specific notions of liminal otherness as opposed to the urban life and the everyday, where nature and wilderness are expressed as related to the genuine, the authentic and a true inner self. Creative combinations of pictures, captions and hashtags make it easier for tourists to express the contrast between the natural landscape and the everyday landscape once they returned home. These combinations also relate closely to performances of resistant and alternative selves and communities. At the same time, such performances are mediated and contested between freedom of self-expression, surveillance and social norms, an aspect that makes their liminal nature ambiguous. 

The purpose of this research is to explore the role of online photography in creating experience value in nature-based tourism, and what types of experience value are conveyed through photography-based user-generated content. The paper draws from existing literature in defining tourism experience value as a subjective, inter-subjective and inter-contextual construct, performed by situated valuation practices. Consequently, the paper presents interpretive and participatory netnography as an effective method to investigate experience value, and identifies online photography on Instagram as both a valuing practice and a valuing place. Results show the capability of online photography-based UGC to create multidimensional values from strategic combinations of textual and visual content. Simultaneously, new dimensions of experience value are introduced, which exist beyond single tourism experiential encounters, but critically contribute to an iterative experience valuation. Finally, Instagram posts introduce valuation timelines that can elude linear models of pre/in-situ/post-experience valuation, and assume subjective and fluid connotations.

Med utställningen Människan i skogen, skogen i människan vill projektet belysa ett antal aktuella och viktiga frågor för vår region och samtid, samlade under ett tema: skog och hållbar utveckling. I utställningen får besökaren möta kunskap och perspektiv från fem forskare och forskargrupper vid Mittuniversitetet. Forskarna är verksamma inom biologi, ekoteknik, historia, litteraturvetenskap respektive turismvetenskap. Forskningens olika perspektiv länkas i utställningen samman genom sina förhållningssätt till tid, såsom avgörande för förståelse, kunskap och handling. De olika forskningsinriktningarna visar också fram spänningar mellan olika synsätt på skog och kan tillsammans ge flera svar och berättelser om skogens värden. En arbetsgrupp vid Universitetsbiblioteket står för gestaltning och produktion av utställningen.