Shanghai Tourism Image Of The Eyes Of International Tourists Photograph Web2.0 Interactive Platform

Watching is crucial to travel behavior. Tourists get the first impression andinformation about tourism sites by watching during their traveling. For this, Tourismdestination image communication becomes especially important for tourismdestination promotion. Since the development of tourism industry beginning, thestudy on tourism destination image communication has been one of the focuses oftourism study. What’s more, the invention of photographic technology severs animportant role in mass tourism era as well. By using camera, tourists record whatthey saw during their tourism and expression their thoughts about the tourism sites.Photos have been the tool to propagating tourist experience. Because of these,tourism destination image does not just include the image created by destinationmanagement organizations (DMOs), but include tourists’ thoughts about thedestination. The propagation of destination images is the traditional mass media ofDMOs and word of mouth of tourists. Although tourists participate to createdestination image, the information they used to create image was mainly controlledby DMOs. For this reason, the images created by tourists were almost in line with thedesired image DMOs hope they do.With the invention of Web2.0interaction technology, this ideal situation wasgreatly changed. The control of tourism destination image promotion no longerbelongs to DMOs, and dispersed to the ones not related with DMOs. They are mostlytourists. Because of the broader, faster and batter result of publicity and convince ofusage, Web2.0interaction websites replaced traditional tourist experience sharingmethod. More and more tourists use different websites, such as Facebook, Flickr&Twitter, to share the photos they took for tourism destination with friends or users ofthe website, even if they don’t know these people. Web2.0play a critical role as anindependent information source, influencing what people do in the destination andat the same time may also challenging existing images created by DMOs. Traditionally,DMOs controlled the formation and dissemination of desired destination image. Butnow, DMOs have to compete with a wide range of non-commercial materials, especially photos posted by tourists.Yet, relatively little research has examined tourism destination image bystudying photo taking and sharing behavior tourists. Most studies instead have takena cursory interest in this subject or examined it as a tangential aspect of other coreresearch concerns. This paper focuses on the fact that Web2.0is changingfundamentally the tourist information search and destination choice and declaresShanghai international tourist gaze has transferred from tourist sites to cultural&historical elements. Moreover, the study based on tourism photos got from Flickr willshow how Web2.0technology catalysis the transition of tourist gaze by sharingphotography on Internet.