Tourism websites: scrolling and ‘strolling’ through Capri.net - seeing comes before words

Tourism communication has increasingly been enhanced by online multimodal resources, which provide wide range of information through invitingly interactive websites that function as hypertexts (Francesconi 2014, Fodde, Denti 2008; Maci 2012). Verbal texts and images should interact dynamically, since they pragmatically co-determine the meaning of the whole advert (Bateman 2014: 32), as recent studies in informational architecture, based on eye-tracking methods, have shown. From a broad MCDA perspective (Black 2006, Kress 2010, van Leeuwen, 2013), which includes ecolinguistics, this study focused on one of the most engaging and iconic websites dedicated to the Blue Island Capri, www.capri.net/it/. We investigated its main lines of appeal (Dyer 1988), e.g. landscape, celebrities, cuisine, luxury, shopping, ancient historical places, and cultural memory (Assman 2008). Throughout capri.net’s pages, information and persuasion are deftly blended, through a hierarchy of foregrounding, although the interaction between the images and verbal texts is not entirely dynamic, as explained in the discussion. Another major finding of our investigation is the flattening of the diachronicity of the different topics: in capri.net’s easily scrolled curtains, the history of Tiberius, or the lives of famous writers, and the presence of trendy celebrities in well-known bars share an undifferentiated dimension. Thus, the ways of seeing of prospective tourists are virtually oriented to an a-chronically alluring and ‘unique’ Capri-lifestyle dimension.