Risk Tourism Within Viral Society: A Study Using Hybrid Discourse Analysis

Abstract

In recent decades, sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) has been warning about the risk society in which we operate today, which includes risks that are not only conjunctural but essentially structural, such as pollution and global warming. Recently, contemporaneity faces a new serious risk, the pandemic caused by COVID-19, which seems to be transforming our social formations into a viral society. In order to understand these social processes and sociological questions, the present text draws attention to one of the most relevant social and intercultural mediations in the current social framework, the articulation between the coronavirus pandemic and tourist activities. A case study deals here with the discourse produced about such themes by digital social network Wikipedia. This study is contextualized by theoretical and practical reflections from tourism studies and supported by ideas such as “viral risk” and “viral risk tourism”. A sample of content extracted from Wikipedia is analyzed and interpreted through a qualitative and quantitative method developed by the author, named “hybrid discourse analysis”, which uses, among other interpretive tools, the “alphabet of interconceptual relations”.

Keywords

• risk society
• viral society
• viral risk tourism
• hybrid discourse analysis
• alphabet of interconceptual relations