Être influenceur voyage et maintenir l’envie du monde en temps de pandémie

Abstract

Within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, we show how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the social and discursive practices of eight popular travel bloggers. In a context of complete leisure mobility shut down, how have touristic representations been changed? How have authors found a way to maintain in their productions the desire to travel? In this work, we compare textual and semiotic data gathered between March 2020 and January 2021 to the results of a previous study based on these same travel blogs between 2016 and 2019. After having addressed the discursive image of the authors who stand out as travel influencers on social networks, we offer a reminder of the main “imaginaries” that shape positions in the discursive field of tourism. We then describe how bloggers, in this specific study, are reinventing, or not, their publication and fundraising habits to tackle the consequences of the health situation. We end by reporting on the linguistic and visual practices they used to maintain travel rhetoric wonder effects.

Keywords

• travel influencers
• travel blogs
• discourse analysis
• tourism discourses
• pandemic
• Covid-19