New Media Hype – Just As Silly In Digital Travel Journalism, Travel Industry

As many of you know I write regularly for Jaunted.com, often on the way that social media interacts with the travel industry. The same wishful thinking hype that infects social media research and pop intellectualism generally plays out specifically in the that arena, so there are some implicit overlaps with academic work.

Eg: there’s no theoretical or empirical reason to believe that the weak links formed by social media can coalesce into sustained political change – and it turns out that they don’t. Similarly there’s nothing we know about the travel market that would imply a revolutionary role for social media – and it turns out that there hasn’t been one. And yet celebratory new media hype saturates board rooms, seminars, and even government offices. The sociological difference is that in the travel industry you’re dealing with frat boys turned MBA consultants who flip the risk/reward calculus of middle managers considering change (“you don’t want to get left behind”), while in academia and government it’s that Mashable posts are used interchangeably with scholarship (because computers are hard).

None of which has anything to do with this first video, which is about self-described new media “influencers” and traveling, or with this second video, which a pitch-perfect reenactment of PR/digital newsroom interactions. It’s just kind of aggravating, is all.