Friday, June 22, 2007

Disaster E-Tourism

In On the Beaten Track, Lucy Lippard discusses what she calls "disaster tourism," describing those travels to sites like the nuclear test ranges in the US Southwest and sites of famous fires, earthquakes or other catastrophic incidents - certainly Ground Zero in NYC would fit into her conception.
Browsing through some tourist/travel-blogs today, I came across a post about a horrible accident at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom. That post pointed to a website dedicated to amusement park ride accidents, appropriately called rideaccidents.com. The site bills itself as:
the world's single most comprehensive, detailed, updated, accurate, and complete source of amusement ride accident reports and related news.
This kind of disaster e-tourism could also include the popularity of war-related blogs that serve voyeuristic desires as much as they do the desire for more on-the-ground news. Of course, these simultaneous desires mirror the complexity of desires that play out in conventional forms of tourism, for authenticity and the exotic.

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