Redefining the Discourse of Tourism: Global Cities in the Websphere

The Internet has completely changed the tourism industry. Social media, mainly, have changed consumers’ behaviour as well as marketers’ tourist destinations (Morosan and Jeong 2008). Instagram, in particular, has rapidly grown in recent years, and, thanks to the amount of visual materials it can offer, it has become one of the primary promotional sources for tourism market. Following social semiotic studies of social media (Jones 2009; Adami 2014; Zappavigna 2016), this paper aims at investigating how travel influencers portray cities on Instagram as tourist destinations. A sample of posts from some travel instagrammers is investigated from a multimodal perspective. Specifically, the analysis aims to detect the main recurrent discursive strategies used by travel influencers to promote tourist destinations. Nowadays, the monological paradigm of traditional tourist text types has begun to change. Thanks to the development of social media, we can see a shift from monologue to dialogue, or even trialogue (Dann 2012). Consequently, the study also looks at the relationship between the main actors and to what extent this more interactive and egalitarian form of communication can influence a person’s decision to visit cities.