L' immaginario turistico di Napoli su Instagram durante il tempo pandemico

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an economic and communication crisis in the global tourism industry. On the one hand, destination brand managers tried to foster attentiveness to tourism destinations while, on the other hand, consumers were unable to share travel experiences through social media. This affected the narrative production that shapes the imaginaries of tourism destinations. This contribution aims to investigate the visual narrative production of the tourist imaginary of Naples (Italy) on Instagram during the pandemic time. The research contributes to the studies that investigate the changes in communication strategies of tourist destinations on social media caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, few studies in academic literature explored how the users fostered the tourist imaginaries on Instagram during the pandemic time. This work aims to fill this gap. In doing so, the pandemic is framed as a crisis event that triggers a co-dynamic relationship between the process of co-creation/co-destruction of the touristic imaginary. The work is driven by three exploratory research questions: what are the narrative codes of the tourist imaginary of Naples? If and how does the visual narrative of the pandemic colonize this imaginary? Who are the actors who co-create/co-destruct the touristic imaginary of Naples and by what online socio-cultural formation do they characterize themselves? The methodological strategy adopts the digital methods (DM) approach. Three different datasets were collected. All Instagram posts containing the hashtag #Naples (data collected in May 2020) and #Decumani (data collected in May-June 2019 and in May 2020) were collected using the Instagram Scraper script. Each dataset contains 2500 Instagram posts. Two types of analysis were conducted for each dataset: visual network analysis and a content analysis of the top 250 most commented posts (10% of the total sample). The study discusses three conclusions. First, the narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic has not colonized the tourist imaginary of Naples. Second, the visual representation of Naples is configured as a meta-brand during the pandemic time. This allows different types of actors that contribute to the visual narration to singularize their economic activities. Third, there is a shift in the type of online social formation: from brand publics during the pre-pandemic time to networked publics during the pandemic time.