This paper investigates Malaysian tourist perceptions about Italy and their crosscultural representations (Hall 2002) through blogs. Bloggers hold a dynamic role in communicating the cultural meanings they build through both tourist texts and images. Therefore, the analysis starts by focusing on the features of blogs as a new digital genre, as they have emerged with the development of the Internet, displaying an intermingling of posts, commentaries and links, thus building a sense of community through interpersonal communication (Garzone 2012). To this purpose, it examines the textual organisation, the participant relationships and the communicative purposes of the tourist blogs taken into account (Orlikowski and Yates 1994;Bhatia 2005;Lemke 2005 and2009). It looks at the language used to portray Italy, together with its semiotic patterns, in order to identify the image of the land, beliefs, ideas and impressions inherent in the relationship between the Malaysian tourist and the destination itself. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of the perception of authenticity.
Over time, multiple semiotic modes have contributed in different ways to the construction and exchange of cultural meanings in Tourism Discourse. This has required the analysis and understanding of the modes employed and the recontextualization and adaptation of texts and images, especially to the new web genres. Nowadays, the tourist experience is mediated by personal, digital, and mobile technologies, which redirect the tourist gaze and become the mediator between the traveler and the tourist destination.
Consequently, the tourism text must be considered as a single unit, where different semiotic resources intermingle to enhance its communicative strength.
The present study will attempt to propose a methodology to read and write tourism texts in a comprehensive and effective way. It will start by focusing on the relationship between text and image to see how they co-exist in the page and in the way the page is arranged. Then, it will apply a functional approach to the analysis of such semiotic units. The result will show how the boundaries between image and text have become blurred, and textuality is built less through verbal syntax and more through rhetorical visual design.
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