Seite - 15 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert, Sandra Vlasta | Travel Writing 15 live slideshows, a genre that is alive and well in the age of social media, most likely due to the higher degree of ‘authenticity’ that the multi-media genre, which puts the single, still image at the centre, promises its audience. While accounts told in person by the traveller him- or herself still draw audiences, in the last couple of years much storytelling about travels has relocated to social media formats, most notably Instagram.8 On this social media platform the image clearly dominates, and the text, often in the form of hashtags, serves to locate the image and to share the emotions that the location evoked in the traveller. Texts that offer anything beyond these ‘coordinates’ (in the geographical and emotional sense) are rare. Blogs, which are usually characterized by a more balanced relation between text and the visual, are therefore unlikely to disappear in the near future, not least because the endless possibilities they offer when it comes to combining text, images, and other graphic elements (background colours, formats, and so on) allow for much more creativity on the part of the author than the rigid formal structures that define social media platforms. In her contribution, Mirja Riggert focuses on the intermedial reciprocity of visual and ver- bal elements in travel blogs. She examines the ‘About’ pages of four blogs by female travellers and discusses the practice of self-presentation within travel writing by mapping out different levels of inter- and intramedial tensions, which continuously disrupt the ego-concentration. In the blogs in question, self-presentation occurs both via pictures (portraits) and via the accom- panying text. Through narrative disruption, the perspectives on the travellers and their self- presentation is multiplied, and individual experiences of the travellers gain social significance. This makes it easier to include product placements (for instance of cameras) and to insert links. Ultimately, Riggert argues, the breaking of narrative coherence in the ‘About’ pages can be seen as an enhanced performance of the self and serves several commercial purposes. An analysis of the relation between the text and the visual in travel writing also prompts the question of whether there are topics or themes that are more suitable for writing and others that lend themselves more to visual representation. In a letter, for instance, Georg Forster argued that the letters of the alphabet are hardly ever sufficient to describe our visual impressions (see Vlasta’s contribution to this issue: 28). Such a statement clearly favours the visual over the text; at the same time, per definition, travel writing is primarily a written report about a journey. In fact, until the 1770s, the overseas expeditions organized by European nations and scientific societies were mainly documented in writing (see Rees 2015). Only from the late eighteenth cen- tury onwards were visual records used to report the experiences of travellers, as exemplified by James Cook’s second voyage around the world, documented, among others, by Georg Forster’s travelogue (see Vlasta). As the contributions to this issue show, however, the existence of discre- pancies between different means of expression is not just a historical problem. The speed of travel has clearly increased over the course of history; still, with the emergence of the slow travel movement, a reverse trend has also been observed in the past few decades (cf. Ouditt 2019: 229–230). With technological innovations, the speed with which visual impressi- ons can be documented and processed has likewise increased over time, as has the speed with which travel accounts are published: the blog format and social media platforms allow travel 8 Contrary to the early years of Instagram, when only photographs could be uploaded, the platform now features short videos. Nevertheless, the platform is still known primarily as a tool for sharing photographs, and videos remain YouTube’s domain.