http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
We've all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise? The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D'Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity, the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures. D'Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters, from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain, before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the 'UNESCO-cide' of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.
Tourism in a time of cholera -- The leisure revolution -- The world's finest sewer -- Mark Twain's TripAdvisor -- Tourism à la carte -- A brief intrusion by an earthologist friend -- The tourist city -- UNESCO's urbicide -- Lijiang: Inventing authenticity -- Relearning from Las Vegas -- The zoning of the soul -- Long live alienation! Or, peeling the Hegelian Onion -- Yearning for the other -- The world at our disposal -- Life's menu -- Maybe one day -- Postscript: A valediction.
Marco D'Eramo ; translated by Bethan Bowett-Jones and David Broder.
First published: Milano : Feltrinelli, 2017, under title Il selfie del mondo.
Includes bibliographical references and index.