From Traditional Traveler to Blogging Traveler: Are Travel Blogs a New Type of Digital Folklore?

Abstract

Inventions and discoveries directly affect the political, socio-cultural, religious, and economic lives of societies by changing world history and bring cultural change with them. One of the inventions that can beconsidered as a turning point for human history is the internet network, which accelerated globalization and cultural change during the second half of the 20th century. The internet, which has recently become a research area of many disciplines, has started to attract the attention of folklorists after the 1990s and this new field; it has been described with different names such as internet folklore, netlore, digital folklore, digital culture, e-folklore, techno-culture, virtual environment, and second oral culture environment. Internet technology has made the concept of globalization more visible and this new age is denoted as the "Information Age". This study examines travel blogs, which are social networking areas of new media within the scope of digital folklore. Itineraries, which are the sharing of experiences and adventures about places visited and seen by travelers or voyagers, where they give information about the socio-cultural, political, literary, religious, and economic structure of the period in which they were written. In this study, characteristics of the traveler typologies in the travel blogs, which are known as Web 2.0 in new media, are social networking sites where the writer and readers are interactive, were determined, then compared with the traditional traveler, and then it was discussed whether travel blogs constitute a new type of digital folklore. It was concluded that although travel blogs are digital, they are not a new type of folklore and as a result of cultural change; however, they are considered to be the second form of the traditional travel book, which is a product of written culture presented in the oral culture environment. Instead of defining travel blogs as new genres, it was suggested to evaluate them as a product of the information age from a holistic approach which includes the new context of transmission as well as the production and consumption of culture.