Feeling the narrative

This paper focuses on the emotional aspects of media tourism: the way the media tourist’s emotions change, develop and lead to the actual media tourism event. When a person interacts with a narrative, a desire to visit a related location (that is to perform a media tourism act) may occur. For the purpose of this research project, several semi-structured interviews were conducted with media tourists to find out how their emotions develop before, during and after the media tourism experience. In order to study the dynamics of emotions a model is suggested, where the reading of a book or watching of a movie is taken as the initial point. After that, according to the model, the media tourist will experience a post-reading/post-watching stage where the narrative emotions (feelings one has during the interaction with a narrative) urge him/her to visit the location portrayed in that narrative. The next stage is the media tourism act itself, and finally he/she will experience post-travelling emotions. As the study showed, most of the respondents had positive emotions when they were interacting with the initial narratives and likewise during the visit of the media location. Their emotions were mostly of happiness and joy. However the emotions occurred after reading/watching and after travelling were rather weak especially when compared to the sentiments during the actual reading/watching or media tourism experience. In conclusion, there was no constant level of the respondents’ emotions. Emotions that had appeared in the beginning transformed and induced the respondents to become a media tourist. Their feelings then increased, flourished during the period of media tourism and afterwards created new urges when the traveler returned home.