Discovering the Already Seen? How TikTok Anticipates and Produces the Desire to Travel to Japan
(2026) MKVM13 20261Media and Communication Studies
Department of Communication and Media
- Abstract (Swedish)
- This thesis examines how TikTok’s continuous circulation of content shapes the way travelers experience, anticipate, and recognize Japan as a tourist destination, and how the platform’s algorithmic curation governs travelers’ relationship with place and time. Existing research on tourism and digital media has extensively documented how platforms inform, inspire, and organize travel, treating technology largely as a support or enrichment of an experience whose authenticity is not otherwise questioned. I argue this perspective is insufficient to account for a more radical possibility raised by
the empirical material examined here: that the mediated image of a destination does not simply support or enrich the physical journey but... (More) - This thesis examines how TikTok’s continuous circulation of content shapes the way travelers experience, anticipate, and recognize Japan as a tourist destination, and how the platform’s algorithmic curation governs travelers’ relationship with place and time. Existing research on tourism and digital media has extensively documented how platforms inform, inspire, and organize travel, treating technology largely as a support or enrichment of an experience whose authenticity is not otherwise questioned. I argue this perspective is insufficient to account for a more radical possibility raised by
the empirical material examined here: that the mediated image of a destination does not simply support or enrich the physical journey but increasingly precedes, scripts, and conditions it, shifting the tourist experience from discovery toward recognition.
Bringing together media, tourism, and sociological studies, this thesis argues that mediation of tourist desire must be understood not only through existing frameworks of the tourist gaze, smart tourism, and instagrammability, but through a combined theoretical apparatus, updating Georg Simmel’s (1950) diagnosis of metropolitan nervous life and the blasé attitude to a digital context, and reading it alongside Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the social production of space, Jean Baudrillard’s (1994)
account of the simulacrum, Umberto Eco’s (1986) notion of the “absolute fake,” and Taina Bucher’s (2018) theory of algorithmic power. This thesis adopts a qualitative case methodology, combining visual analysis, comment analysis, and a two-week autoethnographic fieldwork trip to Japan conducted in April 2026, including field observations and informal interviews. The findings show that TikTok content about Japan is structured around a systematic absence of human presence, which decontextualizes place into a consumable image while simultaneously mobilizing the real crowds and queues this absence conceals, a mechanism I read through Lefebvre and Baudrillard as a productive paradox in which the simulacrum of emptiness generates the real crowd. This condition is compounded by what I term a digital blasé attitude and its counterpart, the
inverted blasé, describing how continuous exposure to mediated stimuli alters travelers’ threshold for novelty and produces a performance of wonder in place of genuine discovery. At the same time, TikTok’s algorithmic curation is shown to govern not only what is seen of Japan but how it is anticipated and revisited, rationalizing desire and time through itineraries, bucket lists, and the recursive logic of the For You Page. Taken together, these findings suggest that TikTok does not merely mediate the desire to travel to Japan but actively participates in producing, scheduling, and shaping. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9248361
- author
- Trombini, Francesca LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- MKVM13 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- TikTok, algorithmic governance, tourist gaze, simulacrum, digital blasé
- language
- English
- id
- 9248361
- date added to LUP
- 2026-09-09 16:33:02
- date last changed
- 2026-09-09 16:33:02
@misc{9248361,
abstract = {{This thesis examines how TikTok’s continuous circulation of content shapes the way travelers experience, anticipate, and recognize Japan as a tourist destination, and how the platform’s algorithmic curation governs travelers’ relationship with place and time. Existing research on tourism and digital media has extensively documented how platforms inform, inspire, and organize travel, treating technology largely as a support or enrichment of an experience whose authenticity is not otherwise questioned. I argue this perspective is insufficient to account for a more radical possibility raised by
the empirical material examined here: that the mediated image of a destination does not simply support or enrich the physical journey but increasingly precedes, scripts, and conditions it, shifting the tourist experience from discovery toward recognition.
Bringing together media, tourism, and sociological studies, this thesis argues that mediation of tourist desire must be understood not only through existing frameworks of the tourist gaze, smart tourism, and instagrammability, but through a combined theoretical apparatus, updating Georg Simmel’s (1950) diagnosis of metropolitan nervous life and the blasé attitude to a digital context, and reading it alongside Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) theory of the social production of space, Jean Baudrillard’s (1994)
account of the simulacrum, Umberto Eco’s (1986) notion of the “absolute fake,” and Taina Bucher’s (2018) theory of algorithmic power. This thesis adopts a qualitative case methodology, combining visual analysis, comment analysis, and a two-week autoethnographic fieldwork trip to Japan conducted in April 2026, including field observations and informal interviews. The findings show that TikTok content about Japan is structured around a systematic absence of human presence, which decontextualizes place into a consumable image while simultaneously mobilizing the real crowds and queues this absence conceals, a mechanism I read through Lefebvre and Baudrillard as a productive paradox in which the simulacrum of emptiness generates the real crowd. This condition is compounded by what I term a digital blasé attitude and its counterpart, the
inverted blasé, describing how continuous exposure to mediated stimuli alters travelers’ threshold for novelty and produces a performance of wonder in place of genuine discovery. At the same time, TikTok’s algorithmic curation is shown to govern not only what is seen of Japan but how it is anticipated and revisited, rationalizing desire and time through itineraries, bucket lists, and the recursive logic of the For You Page. Taken together, these findings suggest that TikTok does not merely mediate the desire to travel to Japan but actively participates in producing, scheduling, and shaping.}},
author = {{Trombini, Francesca}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Discovering the Already Seen? How TikTok Anticipates and Produces the Desire to Travel to Japan}},
year = {{2026}},
}