Hotels as Ready-to-Hand Recreation: TripAdvisors Posting Potentiality-for-Being in Play

Abstract

Tourism’s embracing by theory positioned phenomenology as eligible equipment (tool) for conceptualising interpretive processes disclosed in consumers reflecting on themselves as readers. With authoring audiences now emerging in participatory (or social) media, this paper considers if Heideggerian phenomenology – fore-grounding our ‘fore-structuring’ of generic understanding as a process and practicable achievement – can recover the immanent structures of travel writing online. Here this research question is directed at a single species of tourist weblogging, TripAdvisor. Phenomenology explores reflexive understanding, advisors’ views of authoring and accommodation as affordance or tools for tourism. Do writers implicitly, for instance, aim at narratives equipped to resolve audience uncertainty, at evaluating accommodation as (to a greater or lesser degree) ‘ready-to-hand’ generic ‘equipment’ enabling occupants’ ‘potentiality-for-being’ (Heidegger)? Phenomenology in its Heideggerian shaping holds we engage with ‘entities’ not only as (un)predictable, but primarily in terms of practices. Gazing inspects for use.