The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (JTCC) is a peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary and transnational journal edited by Professor Mike Robinson (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Dr Alison Phipps (University of Glasgow, UK). This new journal focuses on critically examining the relationships, tensions, representations, conflicts and possibilities that exist between tourism/travel and culture/cultures in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex global context. Global capitalism, in its myriad forms engages with multiple 'ways of being', generating new relationships, re-evaluating existing, and challenging ways of knowing and being. Tourists and the tourism industry continue to find inventive ways to commodify, transform, present/re-present and consume "culture". The JTCC seeks to widen and deepen understandings of such changing relationships and stimulate critical debate. The JTCC seeks to address fundamental issues such as

• Local-global connectivity, transculturation and global ideological frameworks;
• The making and re-making of places, identities and pasts;
• The erosion, resistance and survival of traditions and local/ethnic cultural pattern;
• The changing forms of cultural expression in the contexts of the pre- and post- industrial, pre- and post-modern and the post-colonial world.
• The powerful creative dimension to tourism and cultural change that emerges in language and translation through approaches of literature, travel writing, language education, film, art and varieties of performance. For further information about submitting a paper or ordering this journal please contact Mike Robinson or go to the 'journal section' of the Channel View Publications website. via Anthro-L

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Ross Mayfield discusses online-games as social software: "What's interesting about virtual worlds is how when people meet each other in them their real identity is the least explicit of all the models. But gradually as they observe how each other acts in the game and chat, more clues are revealed about who they really are and trust increases. Modes of communication outside the gaming environment are commonly used and occassionally real world relationships are cemented by in-person meeting. Andrew pointed out that the ultimate test of trust is to hand over logins to someone else so they can literally walk in their virtual shoes. Kind of like giving the keys to your car and house in absence of insurance or rule of law." In his story he links to several other resources on the topic, too. via Ross Mayfield's Weblog

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Tiernan Ray has published an interesting article on blogging, called Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World: "Whatever you may think of the publishing revolution known as blogging, the advent of technology for posting "top-of-mind" thoughts to a Web site is an intriguing development in Internet history. Weblogs, or "blogs" for short, dramatically ease the process of uploading simple kinds of content, thus facilitating a loosely organized kind of collaborative publishing. We're at an important moment in the evolution of such publishing, and it is worth pausing to reflect on how things could go terribly wrong. The main virtue of blogging is that it closes the arms gap between informed, individual users and official outlets of information. And it has potential not only in the public world, but also in the corporate sphere. "

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Seemingly the topic-complex of 'real vs. virtual' has spawned another related discussion: Can computergames be art? Matching the topic, ConfigSys.boy! has published a lengthy article called Arts and Electronic Entertainment, which spawned a lot of feedback here and here. (Prematurely jumping into the discussion, I already made a fool of myself over there). The newly published revised and expanded edition of a book by Oliver Grau deals with the same issue:

GRAU, OLIVER. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Rev. and expanded ed.]

"Virtual art is all too often precisely that - almost, but not quite, art. Much of Oliver Grau's book, especially the part dealing with immersive virtual reality environments, is replete with reservations about whether what he is writing about really qualifies as important art, given that it lacks the quality of distance that is essential for critical reflection. When one experiences a totally immersive environment one is in the image, and so one cannot step back to gain an overview, nor is one supposed to be aware of the illusion-creating technology used to produce the image. Moreover, as Grau points out, many examples of virtual art are suffused with mystical or mythological undertones that do not sit easily with the criticality and irony that are the hallmarks of today's art.". (Taken from the review by Michael Gibbs in Art Monthly. Read the complete review here.) Also related is a book by Mark Wolf:

WOLF, MARK J.P. (Ed.). 2002. The medium of the video game. Austin: University of Austin Press.

Wolf wants to get to grips with computergames by means of media sciences: "Currently, they [videogames] are best approached and analyzed using conceptual tools developed in film and television studies. The study of video games overlaps these fields in many theoretical areas, including those of the active spectator, suture, first person narrative, and spatial orientation, point of view, character identification, sound and image relations, and semiotics." Telepolis carries a recent article, called How to read videogames (in german), critically discussing Wolf's book. In there Tilman Baumgärtel writes: "Just recently the analysis of videogames by the humanities has started. In Germany it was not before last year, that two books were published which deal with computergames beyond the ever-resurfacing question 'do they make the youth violent?'." [my translation] Media sciences, the humanities ... but nobody mentions either cultural anthropology or online-communities clustering around games explicitly -- that's where my own project will jump in ;o) via Anthro-L, Telepolis, and ConfigSys.boy!

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