Tourism reflects the modern urge to discover authenticity without risk. The desire to travel far from the mundane realities of everyday life, to endure ritualistic struggle and distance from home, to collect tokens of one's journey - these moments represent a sort of pilgrimage. But the pilgrimage is made easier in tourist sites where trinkets are laid out neatly, where maps are posted on convenient websites, where experiences are prepackaged to meet our mediated fantasies. Exploring this notion, students in a Fall 2001 course entitled Communication in the Age of Mobility researched, traveled, photographed, interviewed, and collected artifacts from nearby tourist sites. Along the way, they found a fascinating struggle between the sublime and the merely picturesque, between the reality of their chosen sites and the fantasies they represent.
Shannon Crain Moved Beyond Words: Natural Bridges Park
