Tourists as meme-seekers: A theoretical approach

Abstract

Tourists seek a variety of experiences and they all participate in tourist mobility in their way. In this study the concept of seeking analysed in the scope of memetics. The tourist meme has identified as a meme that in a close or wide relation with tourist mobility which are carrying information about a place, an era or period of time, a culture, sub-cultures, cultural items, styles, behaviours, individuals themselves, completely imaginary things, a religion or a belief, an event, events or other memes and so on. It is accepted in meme/gene analogy when a meme spread into a brain, it associates with other memes in a kind of package or other words, in a memeplex. For this reason, tourist types accepted as tourist memeplexes and tied theoretically with the concepts of focus and goal. Kanerva’s conception of focus was used to more broadly define what a meme was associated with, as Gabora does. In this statement, memes have accepted in the form of information patterns encoded within the focus indicating the scope and experiential quality of the individual’s awareness. The proposed theoretical model consists of three dimensions. These are tourist memeplex, focus and goal. With this proposal, it is aimed to assess different types of tourist experiences together which were defined by different authors. On the other hand, this model gives a chance to develop a new and complex taxonomy to assess various types of tourist experiences in a single framework.