Page - 135 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 135–136 Extended Abstract Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0 Portraying Oneself in Reflection Intermedial metaization of travel experiences in blogs Extended Abstract Mirja Riggert Photography has always been an important element in travel writing. As a docu- ment of visual evidence, it has long been considered a signal of factuality. At the same time, many analyses hinted at its potential to distort reality or to inscribe a single view on one specific excerpt of reality. Especially in the cultural encounter it entails the risk to objectify and exoticize alterity and to establish hierarchies of power between traveller and visited culture, spectator and spectated object. Today’s digital forms of travel literature — travel blogs — mostly present a bal- anced composition of textual and visual elements. This intermediality of pictures and texts enables the breaking of one-dimensional perspectives and of fixed posi- tions between narration and reception of the travel experience. With its potency to counteract intermedial or intramedial congruencies (between text and text, between picture and picture or between text and picture), the reciprocal relationship stages a multiperspectivity of any view point on travels. In the ‘About Pages’ of four different travel blogs, the narrators use the platform of self-presentation to construct inherent gaps in their visual and verbal narratives. This happens on the one hand by changing the focus between ‘me’-concentration and ‘you’-appeal. The pictures and texts vary between emphasizing the personal experience and addressing a fictional ‘you’. Sometimes the recipients are the main subject of topic, sometimes they are left out completely. This happens when the blogger shows pictures of herself without directing the gaze towards the observer but the text highlights the inspiration and encouragement of the reader. On the other hand, a similar technique of interrupting the narrative is to be seen in the self-referentiality of the pictures. Many bloggers present themselves with a camera, reflecting on their role as a photographer and on taking pictures as a mode of representation. At the same time, it enables them to place advertising products in their narrative in a subjectified way. Thus, they sublimate the individual experience (with its commercialization) into a narrative of social significance. Besides, they