Research On The Tourism Gaze Under The Consumer Society

Gaze is a focused way of seeing, Western scholars have been concentrated their attentions on it for a long time.In 1992, the British sociologist John Urry proposed the Tourism Gaze theory, who formally put the behavior of gaze in to the tourism research field.After that, Western scholars continued to enrich the theory. They explore this theory to research the power between tourists and the locals, to discuss the problems of the cultural changeing in tourism destination and the subject of place consume and so on, through which they have gained a lot of good explanations. At the same time, photography has become an important part of tourism activities. On one hand, photography inspires a large number of tourists to go for travelling, on the other hand, tourists also express their desires by taking pictures. Therefore, photographys are not only the solidification and materialized of photography, but also the product of signification. Meanwhile, with the continuous development of society, material life became affluent and local cultual changed. Western scholars call such a people surrounded by materials'social consumer society. In such a society, people consume not for the thing itself but it symbolic significance. So, in this society, the behavior of photography must have new meanings and characteristics.Based on this, the pape from tourists angle, based on interviews and tourists photography content analysis, use the concept of tourism gaze as a theoretical analysis tools, and theories and methods of semiotics, sociology, anthropology, communication and psychology to describe and analyse the tourism gaze behavior. This article focused on three issues:the level of the tourist'gaze; self-identity of tourist gaze in the consumer society; the relationship between tourist gaze and authenticity.There are six chapters in this paper:The first part is the introduction. This section introduce the origin of this study,the significance of the research and the content.The second section is the review the researches about tourism gaze. In this part, firstly, defined the connotation of tourism gaze. And then, reviewed the current situation of tourism gaze research. Base on this point, extended it into the tourist' gaze in the consumer society. Tried to find out the connection between tourism gaze and the consumer society. Finally proposeed the research questions.The third section is the study design. Qualitative research method is used in this part. Interviewing method is the core method and content analysis is assistant, and also get relevant information from the tourist sites, tourists and some photos of the blog after the trip.The fourth and the fifth sections are the main part of this paper. Firstly, gaze is seen as a process, so the paper discussed the two parts of the process:pre-tourism gaze and tourim gaze. Based on this, the author found out that diffirent tourists have diffirent gaze depth, then a tourism gaze depth model constructed. Use this model, the author found that the tourists with diffirent tourism gaze depth were at diffirent self-identification stages. The fifth section fouced on the relationship between tourism gaze and authenticity.The authenticity of photography is a hot topic in academia,so it is also discussed in this paper.The sixth section is the last section of the paper. It pointed out the limitations of the research and the future research directions.