This anthropological study of contemporary tourism shows that new realities are no longer sought, but scenarios encoded by different forms of fiction. Reality itself is in danger of disappearing from consciousness.
From Disneyland to Mont-Saint-Michel, from the Egyptian pyramids to the castles of Bavaria, from Venice to Paris to New York, the endless round of tourism never stops never going around. With the eye carefully fixed on the camera's lens, instead of contemplating reality, tourists transform a world into images that is, himself, overrun by images.
What sets so many tourists up and running? Perhaps it is the nostalgia of the "journey of discovery" that we can never do again and that could eventually have opened up the space of encounter, the true spaces of others. But the journey has become the pursuit of experiences of imagined realities previously guaranteed. What the tourist is looking for organized travel is the photo of the catalog or the Internet screen and if the reality he finds is not the "fiancée" is disappointed, he feels lost and unable to make his own experience. The individual and educated tourist is also subjected to the slavery of the images. You can't stop looking for fictional-coded scenarios, places dignified and mythologized by famous previous observers from different cultural discourses. He does not trust his own experience, but will try to adopt the angles of view of them with the pretence of experimenting, understanding or enjoying like them, without taking into account what is in fact around him.
Analyzing the attitudes of visitors to some beaches, landscapes, monuments or emblematic tourist squares, Marc Augé shows not only that most of the mythical and romantic places make us vibrate because they were the settings of great novels or films. Also in those places is made possible to coat them with the symbols and badges sought by tourists. In this way the fiction is redoubled from the observer and the observed, so that reality is in danger of becoming completely inaccessible.
This reflection is an important contribution to one of the most important cultural phenomena today: the possibility and desire of almost all people and social layers to travel and, at the same time, the disappearance of what could give substance to travel.