VAGABONDS AND THE VIRTUAL: IDENTITY, ECONOMICS AND ETHICS IN THE GENRE OF DIGITAL TRAVEL WRITING

Abstract

While the genre of travel writing has been popular with authors and audiences over centuries, developments in new media, social media and public use genres have caused an adaptation of the genre in the digital space. This genre, as it exists, claims two antecedents: first, the traditional and literary version of the genre and second, the blogs that emerged and were popularized in the late twentieth century. In exploring the genre of digital travel writing, hundreds of internet publications were read, reviewed and cataloged. Of these, many began to demonstrate the criteria which would be considered prototypical for the genre. Any publication in the genre demonstrates, in various ways and to varying degrees, the following characteristics: frequent updates, multiple platform-use and multimedia inclusions, discursive constructions of identity, engagement with economies, and entanglements with the ethical concerns proper to both the genre and its situated ideology. In addition to stabilizing this vast archive of open source media as a perceptible genre, this dissertation hints at ways that the literate practices of these authors speaks to a nuanced appreciation of literacy and one that reverses the classical binary privileging reading over writing. Further, some suggestions are made for using open source and new media genres productively in writing classrooms.