Chapter 2: Tourism Social Media as a Fire Object

Tourism studies have conceptualized social media as artifacts and networks of tangible objects based on neat distinctions and categorizations. These neat ontological distinctions and categorizations have been discussed within the academic field of actor-network theory. Several scholars have most significantly investigated the spatialities of messier ways of conceptualizing and approaching societal objects and the trajectories of societal phenomena. Efforts are being made to widen the ontological register that has traditionally dominated social science research, including tourism studies. The purpose of this chapter is to address and problematize the social media pertaining to tourism, focusing on a research project as analytical and methodological lens.