Feeling the narrative: Emotions of Media Tourists

This book focuses on the emotional aspects of media tourism: the way the media tourist’s emotions change, develop and lead to the actual media tourism event. When a person interacts with a narrative, a desire to visit a related location (that is to perform a media tourism act) may occur. For the purpose of this research project, several semi-structured interviews were conducted with media tourists to find out how their emotions develop before, during and after the media tourism experience. In order to study the dynamics of emotions a model is suggested, where the reading of a book or watching of a movie is taken as the initial point. After that, according to the model, the media tourist experiences a post-reading/post-watching stage where the narrative emotions (feelings one has during the interaction with a narrative) urge him/her to visit the location portrayed in that narrative. The next stage is the media tourism act itself, and finally he/she experiences post-travelling emotions.