“晒”与“赞”:微信时代旅游体验的互动建构

Share and Like:Interactive Construction of Tourist Experience in the Era of WeChat

微信作为时下最受国人欢迎的移动社交软件,渐渐成为影响旅游生产与消费的核心要素之一。文章通过问卷调查法、实验法和半结构访谈法,探究微信朋友圈对旅游者的预期体验、场景体验与追忆体验阶段所产生的影响,以及微信时代旅游体验的新变化。研究发现:(1)潜在旅游者被微信朋友圈零碎的信息所裹挟,从而影响其预期的旅游体验;(2)图文表征的重要性与吸引力逐渐上升,旅游者通过分割的场景体验解构与重构了传统的地方整体性旅游体验;(3)旅游者的愉悦体验得以延伸,关注对象由外在走向“自我”的呈现;(4)“晒”与“赞”的互动循环构建了微信时代跨越时空的深层次旅游体验。研究结论在理论层面丰富了旅游体验的内涵,在实践层面亦有助于旅游生产者在微信时代构建符合消费需求的目的地形象,从而实行精准营销。

WeChat is a popular social media App in China.By allowing users to share words and photos in friend circles,WeChat has played an increasingly important role in shaping the production and consumption of tourism.To more and more tourists,sharing destination pictures via WeChat is an essential component of their traveling experiences,if not the only one.There is a need to investigate how WeChat reconfigures tourist experiences in an era of social media.Drawing on questionnaire survey,psychological experiment,and semi-structured interviews,this paper explores how WeChat shapes tourist experiences before,during,and after their trip,and how these experiences are virtually socialized among their friends.It has four major findings.First,potential tourists are surrounded by fragmented information related to destinations and their anticipation is shaped in both negative and positive ways.The words and photos shared through WeChat can expose these potential tourists to destinations,but might reduce their desire for traveling as their curiosity is in jeopardy.Second,the sharing of pictures and words follows the rule by WeChat to orchestrate the way in which tourists actually experience destinations.This sharing also reconstructs and deconstructs the integral nature of traditional tourism production,as photographing a pose between tourists and recognizable symbols remains a primary factor that underpins touristic motivation.Thirdly,tourists extend their experiences from destinations to social media.By doing so,they tend to place the self in the central position and reformulate the relationship between the self and the external world.Through words and photos shared via WeChat,tourists become a producer of tourism knowledge to voluntarily market destinations.To them,the production and dissemination of tourism knowledge is not for profit,but for fun,so that they can display the self in public and accelerate the circuits of tourism.Finally,the interaction of“share”and“like”gives rise to new forms of tourist experiences,which transcend here and there,in situ tourists and their friends elsewhere,and now and future.Accordingly,cell phones are not merely an instrument of photographing,but also become a platform to connect actual destinations and cyber friend circles.The use of cell phones and WeChat synthesizes the existential space where tourists experience destinations and the cyber space where experiences can be instantaneously shared by tourists and commented by their friends.Nevertheless,these experiences remain transient,as they can be replaced by more novel words and images circulating in WeChat,which propels tourists to start a new journey with photo sharing.One theoretical implication of this paper is the cyber socialization of tourist experiences,contributed by social media platforms such as WeChat,Facebook,and Instagram,so that the circuits of tourism have been both accelerated and fragmented.These platforms enable tourists to participate in the process of tourism production and thus promotes a grassroots form of public participation which involves not scattered individuals,but interrelated circles.Nevertheless,tourism firms can harness big data to design customized strategies to target different groups of tourists for the purpose of precision marketing.