Abstract

Woljeong was a secluded fishing village on Jeju island before being popularized on social media via aesthetic photographs of the local beach. Turned into a destination where tourists flood to achieve visually captivating photos, this small village has undergone tourism-induced gentrification, displacement, and overdevelopment. Unpacking the processes of Woljeong’s transformation offers insights to grasp the connection between new media and tourism, and between the representation of a place and its physical reconfiguration. Driving new tourism trends, Instagram has emerged as a dominant platform to create, circulate, and consolidate tourism imaginaries. The functional protocols of Instagram—its graphic-oriented nature, ability to promote inter-subjective communication of self-reflexivity, and role as an individual and collective archive of particular place images—construct the place myth centering on aesthetic representational qualities. Such representational practices reshape the material and spatial realities of the place involving property value hikes, construction boom, and land use change. Rapid changes to the area to fulfill tourists’ material and physical demands are contrasted with non-contested aesthetic representations of the beach, which should be visually and photographically preserved to serve tourists’ fantasies. Woljeong’s recent reconfiguration functions as a proxy to contemplate the historical process of Jeju in which tourism, both through the material and representational practices, perpetuates the marginalization of Jeju as an exclusively touristic island.

摘要

月井是济州岛上一个僻静的渔村，之后通过当地海滩的唯美照片在社交媒体上广为流传。这个小村庄变成了游客蜂拥而至拍摄迷人照片的目的地，经历了旅游业引发的高档化、流离失所和过度开发。揭开月井转型的过程，可以提供洞察力来把握新媒体与旅游业之间的联系，以及地方的表现与其物理重构之间的联系。Instagram 推动了新的旅游趋势，已成为创造、传播和巩固旅游想象的主要平台。Instagram 的功能协议——它以图形为导向的性质，促进自我反思的主体间交流的能力，以及作为特定地方图像的个人和集体档案的角色——构建以审美再现品质为中心的地方神话。这种代表性的做法重塑了这个地方的物质和空间现实，涉及财产价值上涨、建筑热潮和土地利用变化。为满足游客的物质和身体需求而对该地区进行的快速变化与海滩无可争议的美学表现形成鲜明对比，海滩应该在视觉和摄影上得到保护，以满足游客的幻想。Woljeong 最近的重新配置起到了思考济州岛历史进程的代理作用，在这个进程中，旅游业通过物质和代表性的实践，使济州岛作为一个专门的旅游岛屿的边缘化长期存在。