Backpackers as a Community of Strangers: The Interaction Order of an Online Backpacker Notice Board

Barbara Adkins; Eryn Grant

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.10

Authors

Barbara Adkins Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Eryn Grant Queensland University of Technology, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.3.2.10

Keywords:

Backpackers, Interaction Order, Cosmopolitanism, Information and Communication, Technology

Abstract

While commercial images of “backpacking” emphasise adventure, youth and sightseeing, recent ethnographies of backpackers identify other motivations and rationales that accentuate travel experiences as formative of the self and identity. This raises the question of the basis of this apparently common orientation. This paper investigates, through analysis of postings on an electronic backpacker notice board, “backpacker” as a collaboratively constructed category. We propose that the shared understandings of “backpacker” enabled by these notice boards are consistent with cultural orientations captured in notions of cosmopolitanism (Beck 2000) involving a shift to new forms of sociality across borders: a solidarity with strangers.

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Author Biographies

Barbara Adkins, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Barbara Adkins (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is also senior social scientist at the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID). Her current research examines conceptual and methodological approaches to sociocultural aspects of interaction and urban design.

Eryn Grant, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Eryn Grant is in the final stages of completing her doctorate at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She specialises in applying ethnomethodogical approaches to games and persistent worlds online and has worked closely with Dr. Barbara Adkins in conceptualising a methodological matrix for games design at the Australasian Co-operative Research Centre (ACID).

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