ICT as an Acculturative Agent and Its Role in the Tourism Context

Abstract

ICTs have played a transformative role on the cultural components of all stratums of the society. This role has had a demand as well as supply-oriented reflection on the tourism system. In the scope of this chapter, the role of ICTs in the changing social structure is explained through the lens of acculturation. Beyond this, the acculturative process on the modern community's tourism-oriented reflections caused by ICTs were discussed through nine components (renting over owning, free-of-charge ownership, narcissism, connected loneliness, social capital, multiple realities, new identities, novel values, enculturation), and predictions were made with a futuristic perspective. In this context, it was explicated that the ICT-oriented digital acculturation process would add the concepts alternative tourism types, soft mass tourism, sharing economy-based tourism system, intense offline interactions between host and guests, multicultural destinations, virtual reality-based leisure, sharing as a novel pushing motivation, virtual demonstration effect, and diaspora to the future tourism system.