Abstract
ICTs have played a transformative role on the cultural components of all stratums of the society. This role has had a demand as well as supply-oriented reflection on the tourism system. In the scope of this chapter, the role of ICTs in the changing social structure is explained through the lens of acculturation. Beyond this, the acculturative process on the modern community's tourism-oriented reflections caused by ICTs were discussed through nine components (renting over owning, free-of-charge ownership, narcissism, connected loneliness, social capital, multiple realities, new identities, novel values, enculturation), and predictions were made with a futuristic perspective. In this context, it was explicated that the ICT-oriented digital acculturation process would add the concepts alternative tourism types, soft mass tourism, sharing economy-based tourism system, intense offline interactions between host and guests, multicultural destinations, virtual reality-based leisure, sharing as a novel pushing motivation, virtual demonstration effect, and diaspora to the future tourism system.
TopIntroduction
Today, the extent of enhancement for ICTs have tremendous effect on enabling communicating, therefore, exchanging ideas for diverse communities over the world. Nascent social networking sites and apparatus like smart technologies have facilitated this process (Yen & Dey, 2019) and lead cultural transformation process between communities to accelerate (Kizgin et al., 2018). Cultural transformation issue is discussed for centuries, however, its theoretical base has barely passed a century once acculturation theory was put forward (Berry, 1997; Redfield et al., 1936). Yet, conceptual structure is not adequate for explicating role of ICTs as an acculturative agent (Dey et al., 2020) compared to role of international migration (Berry, 1997) or globalisation (Cleveland & Laroche, 2007). Evaluation of ICTs as an acculturation agent has extended the mainstream acculturation perspective and bring multiculturalism in the extant literature (Dey et al., 2019). This extension has lead the more complex acculturation process such as adopting cultural attributes of a digital consumer culture through interacting over online world to be considered (Dey et al., 2019) through concepts such as digital acculturation (Dey et al., 2020), online acculturation (Kizgin et al., 2020) or remote acculturation (Ferguson & Bornstein, 2012). Such that, widely referred acculturation strategies for culture change in offline world (Berry, 1997) were re-evaluated and novel strategies were put forward for online world (Dey et al., 2020). Whatever it is called for, ICTs bring online communication opportunities and social networks into the community life and generate social capital due to the fact that they are conceived as tremendous means for communication and social networking (Sharma et al., 2013) as well as touch upon our values, norms, mind-set and culture in the general sense. Such communication platform has prompted in turn acculturation process to the virtual world. Such that, an individual may experience cultural transformation process without moving out his/her district and construct his/her identity according to the shared contents of online cultural groups (Lindridge et al., 2015). However, despite the tremendous importance of these technologies in context of cultural transformation in modern society structures; it is evident that the interplay between ICTs and cultural transformation concepts were not evaluated sufficiently (Kizgin et al., 2018, 2020; Yen & Dey, 2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Acculturation: Change in the cultural structure or identity of counterparts as a result of unmediated interaction of different cultures.
Remote Acculturation: Cultural process of exchanging cultural components in an interaction process other than face-to-face interaction.
Second Life: A virtual platform offering synchronous or asynchronous virtual leisure experience.
Enculturation: An increase in the level of adoption of one's own ingroup values.
Social Identity: Emotional and evaluative consequences of belonging to a specific group.
Sharing Economy: A system where personal commodities with monetary costs can be rented temporarily through technological platforms.
Social Capital: Summary of actual or virtual resources added to the individual or society through having a solid network.
Connected Loneliness: A term used to delineate individuals who are connected by these communication tools are thought to feel lonelier.