Overview

We’ve all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise? The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D’Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures. D’Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters – from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain – before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the ‘UNESCO-cide’ of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.

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9781788731072

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A sophisticated, engaging, clever book - Sabine Peters, Berliner Zeitung Provocative and entertaining - Andrea Dernbach, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin A work of intelligence and wit: the history and phenomenology of the tourist, from Hegel to Tripadvisor - La Repubblica Accumulates surprising and unsettling data, interpretations and testimonies, putting certainties we take for granted into crisis: the distinction between material and immaterial values, between commodities and fetishes, between modernity and post-modernity - Giuliano Milani, Internazionale, Rome

Author Information

Marco D’Eramo is an Italian journalist and social theorist. He worked at the newspaper il manifesto for over thirty years. He writes for New Left Review, MicroMega and the Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung. His books include The Pig and the Skyscraper, which has been translated into several languages.

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