Promotional tourism communication, which traditionally attempts to persuade, lure and seduce millions of potential clients (Dann 1996), has increasingly been enhanced by online multimodal resources. In particular, textual, linguistic and multimodal features of tourism websites constitute powerful instruments to affect the audience’s reaction to the subject matter they illustrate. Such resources can reach a virtually unlimited audience and offer a wide range of information through invitingly interactive websites which function as hypertexts (Francesconi 2014) with a wide variety of discursive strategies (Fodde, Denti 2008; Maci 2012). For an ideal functioning of advertising communication, verbal texts and images should interact dynamically, since they pragmatically co-determine the meaning of the whole advert (Bateman 2014: 32). A relevant aspect in web advertising is the way in which information is presented, as recent studies in informational architecture (IA), using eye-tracking tools, 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 appealing and exhaustive websites dedicated to Capri, www.capri.net/it/ (available in both Italian and English). In capri.net the ‘enshrinement’ (MacCannell 1976), or ‘framing’, of Capri is mainly displayed through a sequence of iconic images aiming at signaling the eco-aesthetic and historical-cultural features of the Blue Island. We investigated its main lines of appeal (Dyer 1988), i.e. landscape and shore excursions, glamour, (habitué) celebrities and nightlife, cuisine, luxury, shopping, wedding locations, ancient historical places, and the cultural memory (Assman 2008) of the illustrious people who brought the island worldwide fame. Throughout this website’s pages, information and promotion/persuasion are deftly blended, through a carefully constructed hierarchy of presentation/foregrounding, though 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 illustrated in Capri.net: in the easily scrolled curtains of the website, the history of Tiberius, the lives of the famous writers who made the island attractive for intellectuals, and the presence of contemporary trendy celebrities in well-known bars share an undifferentiated dimension. Through Capri.net’s web pages, the ways of seeing of prospective tourists are thus virtually oriented to an everlasting, a-chronically alluring and ‘unique’ Capri-lifestyle dimension.
Tourism Websites: Scrolling and ‘Strolling’ through Capri.net / Cavaliere, Flavia; Abbamonte, Lucia. - (2017), pp. 73-103.
Tourism Websites: Scrolling and ‘Strolling’ through Capri.net
CAVALIERE, Flavia;
2017
Abstract
Promotional tourism communication, which traditionally attempts to persuade, lure and seduce millions of potential clients (Dann 1996), has increasingly been enhanced by online multimodal resources. In particular, textual, linguistic and multimodal features of tourism websites constitute powerful instruments to affect the audience’s reaction to the subject matter they illustrate. Such resources can reach a virtually unlimited audience and offer a wide range of information through invitingly interactive websites which function as hypertexts (Francesconi 2014) with a wide variety of discursive strategies (Fodde, Denti 2008; Maci 2012). For an ideal functioning of advertising communication, verbal texts and images should interact dynamically, since they pragmatically co-determine the meaning of the whole advert (Bateman 2014: 32). A relevant aspect in web advertising is the way in which information is presented, as recent studies in informational architecture (IA), using eye-tracking tools, 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 appealing and exhaustive websites dedicated to Capri, www.capri.net/it/ (available in both Italian and English). In capri.net the ‘enshrinement’ (MacCannell 1976), or ‘framing’, of Capri is mainly displayed through a sequence of iconic images aiming at signaling the eco-aesthetic and historical-cultural features of the Blue Island. We investigated its main lines of appeal (Dyer 1988), i.e. landscape and shore excursions, glamour, (habitué) celebrities and nightlife, cuisine, luxury, shopping, wedding locations, ancient historical places, and the cultural memory (Assman 2008) of the illustrious people who brought the island worldwide fame. Throughout this website’s pages, information and promotion/persuasion are deftly blended, through a carefully constructed hierarchy of presentation/foregrounding, though 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 illustrated in Capri.net: in the easily scrolled curtains of the website, the history of Tiberius, the lives of the famous writers who made the island attractive for intellectuals, and the presence of contemporary trendy celebrities in well-known bars share an undifferentiated dimension. Through Capri.net’s web pages, the ways of seeing of prospective tourists are thus virtually oriented to an everlasting, a-chronically alluring and ‘unique’ Capri-lifestyle dimension.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
