In this paper, I discuss the characteristics of tourism during the era of social media, especially “instagenic tourism,” from the perspective of sociological theory.
Instagenic tourism can be explained in part by discussing “porosization,” in that information, as it flows via media, overrides the meaning of space. However, there has been little-to-no discussion of instagenic tourism. In this study, we conducted research to examine instagenic tourism through a theoretical analysis of (1) “involvement” theory in consumer research and (2) “authenticity” in business administration.
As a result, the following knowledge was obtained. First, instagenic tourism is adaptable when consumers with low involvement search for information about symbolic attributes. Furthermore, the authenticity of a tourist spot is created by an interaction between code generated through communication on social media and the materiality of the tourist spot in question.

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This paper uses TripAdvisor as its subject matter and analyzes the photos posted there by travelers. In addition, it considers how the application evokes the imagination of the trip, as well as how it reconstructs the experience of travel.
More specifically, with the TripAdvisor site, along with the smartphone app, we can utilize reviews and price comparisons for hotels, restaurants, and sightseeing information by city, area, and such. For this paper, we focus on the digital photo and analyze two functions related to it: "travel timeline" and "360 degree panoramic photographs". From this, we can achieve not just a "representation of a trip", but a "simulation of a trip", and we can consider expanding it even further by developing a mechanism to make "imagination of travel" possible. In this way, with this study, we aim to use the image data to create a more realistic simulation of the act of traveling, projecting an imagined form of a contemporary trip.

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The development of digital technologies and the spread of digital devices throughout daily life worldwide have affected tourism. As digital devices and digital spaces have become more widespread in tourism, the concepts of tourism and tourist activities have been up for discussion in tourism studies, especially the influence of digital space and the transformation of concepts of tourism.
The spread of digital spaces has also been seen in the Islamic world, as the contents of religious experiences can diversify without geographical and temporal constraints. As a result, a certain public sphere seems to be forming in this cyberspace, promoting new forms of religiosity embedded in digital space.
Although the development of digital spaces builds a huge database of religious experiences in an automatic manner, and diminishes the materiality of tourist practices and communication between actors, this public sphere seems to be producing new forms of religious authenticity and publicity. In fact, the development of digital spaces in Islam expands serious discussions of the public nature and authenticity of religious experiences in the field, and people have begun to search for consensus on permissible religious experiences in using digital spaces.
This paper, therefore, examined the social impact of the spread of digital devices in tourism studies by analyzing the transformation of the authenticity of Islamic religious experiences in digital spaces.
Characteristics of the flow of religious experiences in digital spaces and publicizing religious experiences are examined through empirical case studies. Although the development of digital spaces in the Islamic world has collected and diversified religious experiences, some religious experiences enhance communication between people in digital spaces by applauding, referencing, and imitating, whereas others foster miscommunication by condemning and ignoring them. As a result, preferable religious experiences are accumulated in digital spaces, creating a certain communicative flow that promotes their publicity. During this process, people prefer to imitate a certain rhythm by referring to other religious experiences in digital spaces to bridge their individual sensory experiences and those of the digital spaces in question. These collective practices contribute to accumulation and dispersion in digital spaces, and this tendency reflects the increasing degree of publicity and authenticity of religious experiences.
To conclude, the development of digital spaces in Islam promotes the materiality of physical senses in the non-physical sphere by developing the accumulation and dispersion of religious experiences based on individual analogies of rhythms. Social practices in digital spaces controversially acknowledge materiality based on an individual sense of rhythm and time.

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Tourism studies has generally considered premodern travel and postmodern alternative tourism as good and modern mass tourism as bad. By doing so, tourism studies has failed to analyze mass tourism in depth. Today, most people travel without tour guides; nevertheless, this form of travel is not isolated from sociality. Although tourists may be alone, they are socially organized. How can we consider being alone or being together in tourism? What comprises the sociality and collectiveness of contemporary tourism? Through the sociological research of travel connections, this paper attempts to understand alternative mass tourism beyond the binary opposition of mass tourism versus alternative tourism.

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All "social spaces" where we live with others depend on social backgrounds. Especially in the present age, "social spaces" are strongly affected by social backgrounds in which human beings, material, capital, information, images and ideas is moving and travelling globally beyond borders. These social mobilities have been formed by deep relationships with digital media following "digital revolution". Social mobilities are transforming the ways of platforms in digital media as "social space" where we express our performances, images and ideas, while platforms in digital media are transforming the ways of social mobilities. We can see this reflexive relationship very clearly in tourism. In this paper, with reference to specific cases including travels of stuffed animals, I will discuss how tourism has become closely connected to digital media and is being transformed.

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