The cultured traveller: Three theses on cultural capital and the taste for disconnection in tourism

This chapter starts out from previous research showing that people in possession of greater amounts of cultural capital are more sceptical of new media technology and more inclined than others to withdraw from media in time-spaces of leisure and vacationing. To get at the underlying sociocultural mechanisms behind such f indings, the chapter provides an overview of historical and contemporary patterns pertaining to how cultural capital plays out in relation to tourism and (new) media. Three main theses are presented, linked to representational, connective, and logistical media affordances, respectively. First, I argue that cultural capital generally fosters a predisposition for the “authentic” and thus rejects masscirculated tourism imageries. Second, cultural capital sustains the safeguarding of personal boundaries and thus works against open-ended connectivity and mediated intrusions into the “tourism-world”. Third, cultural capital feeds from a sense of independent navigation in foreign places and thus shuns certain forms of (mediated) guidance. Altogether, the three theses highlight the significance of cultural capital as a counterforce to digitalisation, and as a vector of the disconnection turn.