Cultural Representations and Experience in Tourism: Two Forms of Mimesis

This paper fills a gap in smart tourism research by investigating the link between online representations and their physical counterparts. This sort of phenomenology visualizes a doubled cultural mimesis that can be described by the story of the ship of Theseus, where the original is replaced by an ongoing process of installing new components. In this sense, social reality is conceptualized as having real cultural events and the production of cultural items as well as having digital reproductions that appear and circulate online. These are accessed by a variety of platforms where reality is simulated onsite through augmented reality technology or remotely through forms of virtual reality. This paper seeks to frame and to present this notion and its potential impacts on destination culture particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea.