Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to understand The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Urry & Larsen, 2011) in relation to the "mobility turn" proposed by Urry (2000, 2007) and to evaluate its theoretical contribution to tourism studies.
First, I examine how Urry responds to those who criticized the "tourist gaze" thesis (Urry, 1990) by focusing on his view of "agency". In The Tourist Gaze 3.0, Urry recognizes that tourists or local residents can violate or resist the "tourist gaze" produced by the tourism industry and media organizations. More importantly, he uses Gibson’s concept of "affordance" and recognizes not only human beings but also impersonal-objects (technology, texts, and physical environments) as "agency" that makes performances happen.
Second, I discuss how new technologies canalized our styles of perception, performance, and social relation in history by focusing on railway and automobile transportation each of which was a typical transportation system in "early modern" and "late modern" era (Urry, 2007). Thereby, I will indicate that performances, which seem to be autonomous, are not independent from any physical systems, but are actually afforded by some other systems.
Lastly, I argue that Urry’s theoretical standpoint reflected his severe criticism for the existing sociological analyses that have ignored the "hybridization" of human-object in the modern era and re-produced the false dichotomy of the natural/social or human/object.
