Tilburg University Scripted Journeys van Nuenen, Tom Publication date: 2016 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): van Nuenen, T. (2016). Scripted Journeys: A study on interfaced travel writing. [s.n.]. 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Download date: 25. sep. 2021 Scripted Journeys A Study on Interfaced Travel Writing [T]his desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. C.S. Lewis - The Pilgrims Regress Scripted Journeys A Study on Interfaced Travel Writing PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan Tilburg University op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. E.H.L. Aarts, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties aangewezen commissie in de aula van de Universiteit op woensdag 21 december 2016 om 10.00 uur door Tom van Nuenen geboren op 3 november 1984 te Vessem Promotores: Prof. dr. Odile Heynders Prof. dr. Ruud Welten Copromotor: Dr. Piia Varis Overige leden van de promotiecommissie: Prof. dr. Jan Blommaert Prof. dr. Yra van Dijk Prof. dr. Emiel Krahmer Prof. dr. Karina Oskam-Van Dalen Dr. I. Hermann Cover design by Tom van Nuenen Layout and editing by Karin Berkhout at the Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University Printed by Ridderprint BV, the Netherlands © Tom van Nuenen, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the author. Acknowledgements In Voltaire’s classic satire Candide, the titular hero strays upon the fabled land of El Dorado. Struck by its beauty and peacefulness, Candide remembers the teachings of his mentor, Dr. Pangloss – a parody of Gottfried Leibniz. He taught the rather convenient doctrine that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and accordingly, that the castle he and his student happened to live in was the finest place on earth. Pangloss would have swallowed those words, Candide concludes, had he seen these sights. “Il est certain qu’il faut voyager.” A thesis on travel writing cannot and should not come about from within the confines of an academic office. It was written in an Italian train, an American motel, a Turkish coffee shop, a Norwegian cabin, an Australian beach, and an Indonesian café overlooking the rice fields (the latter cliché being a personal favorite). Let us not become jaded. Travel breeds inspiration. Any critical inquiry needs to be prefaced by that fact. It is not these trips, however, but the stable presence of others that I am most grateful of. I thank my supervisor and mentor, Odile Heynders, who taught me how to look across disciplinary and intellectual borders. I thank my co-supervisors: Piia Varis, who tirelessly read and commented on my work – enhancing the whole of it in the process – and Ruud Welten, for pointing out many routes to think about travel philosophically. I thank my colleagues: Sander Bax, Paul Mutsaers, Suzanne van der Beek, Jan Jaap de Ruiter, Jan Blommaert, Ad Backus, and all at the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, for providing inspiration and warmth in equal parts. I thank Karin Berkhout for editing and creating the layout of this thesis. I thank Paul Arthur and those at the School of Humanities and Communications Arts at Western Sydney University for inviting me as Visiting Fellow during the last year of my PhD. I thank my family: Annemarie, Jack, Marieke, Marlijn, and Harry. I thank Ellis. And finally, I thank Jasper, Nathan, and Robert: you are travelers and friends, and you disprove the myth of sole authorship. Roadmap This dissertation provides an analysis of the procedures, discourses and semiotics of travel in algorithmic culture, and the forms of identity expressed and performed therein. The central concept that will be developed is that of the script: this concept suggests that the moniker of ‘travel writing’ is unfit to describe the computationally sponsored transactions, interactions, and processes of identity that may be traced in the discourses of current-day travel. Scripts arise from the digital mode of relating to the world, in which the conventional authorial subject is fronted through a virtual and representational persona, ideological logic is intertwined with Boolean logic, and natural language is complemented with formal language. These are all algorithmic effects appearing in the field of textual production, meaning-making, and social activity. The notion of the script implies that, within computational ecologies, users may register or subscribe to certain identity templates, formats, or ideal types – and conversely, to cast off their alternatives. Scripts, in other words, are what allow the user to instrumentally compile an identity from the flows of information and capital that we call algorithmic culture. We will see that this compilation not only happens explicitly, through linguistic interaction, but also through the procedural pathways that determine the directions and patterns of interactions. Instead of ‘travel writing’, this dissertation thus engages with the scripted processes of reading, writing, and executing travel. The empirical content of this study is formed by seven published or to-be- published articles in peer-reviewed journals. Each section includes two papers, which are connected in terms of the medium that they focus on – that is, blogs, platforms, and games. As results of scholarly production, the papers are presented in the form in which they were sent to each journal. This means that some overlap and repetition may be found in the overall line of argumentation, and that the layout and referencing styles throughout the papers is not homogeneous. The latter is indicative of the heterogeneity of style in academic research, and serves to underscore the nature of this study: it is a collection, not a monograph. This is also a result of the social reality of acquiring a PhD, which is to an ever-decreasing extent a solitary endeavor: it is typified by a series of connections between colleagues, universities, mailing lists, Facebook and Whatsapp groups, shared Dropbox folders, and so on. These new possibilities often lead to co-authored publications, which can also be found in this dissertation. Bringing other voices into the discussion (in this case, voices from a context of sociolinguistics and of ritual studies) is itself an integral part of doing research in increasingly compact viii Scripted Journeys: A Study on Interfaced Travel Writing humanities faculties and with colleagues sharing an interdisciplinary curiosity. This approach hopefully also shows how different analytical vectors (literary studies, socio- linguistics, ritual studies, game studies and so on) may contribute to understanding an analytical topic in a rich, diverse way. Understanding online phenomena, as a shared and co-authored endeavor, is a matter of adopting different processes in order to try to capture a phenomenon from different angles. The goal is then perhaps not to try and ‘keep up’ with the ephemeral sites we find online. Many scholars have voiced concerns about this ephemerality: as Geert Lovink puts it, “PhD research cannot keep up with the pace of change and condemns itself to capturing vanishing networks and cultural patterns […] society is way ahead of its theorists” (2011: 6, 7). Nicholas Mirzoeff, equally critical, brings in the problem of acquiring and learning the digital tools to understand the digital realm, asking: “How do we write a history of something that changes so fast it can seem like a full-time job keeping up, let alone learning the software?” (2009: 241). But the goal is not to join in with the continuous reshuffling of media, platforms, and interactions that take place there. The goal is to see the structure, the patterns, the underlying tendencies of these seemingly disparate fluctuations, picking a beginning and an end date, and accepting the limitations of such research. We should not strive for a real- time, streaming type of research, but for precisely the opposite: to go against the grain of the hyperactively spinning gears of society, which in so doing cultivate memory loss. With regard to the matter of knowledge dissemination, publishing with authors and in journals from different disciplines, while keeping the same research object in mind, implies that one can reach different audiences, and involve them in the discussion of a single phenomenon. This is one of the central points of this disserta- tion: that the workings of travel writing, traditionally an object of literary studies, may also be disclosed in the fields of symbolic interactionism, digital humanities, game studies, and so on. Further, one journal in which was published, Cogent Social Sciences, adheres to an open source principle, signaling the slow but steady distribution of research sponsored by public funds to that wider public itself.