Critical Review: Homo Touristicus Digitalis & the Philosophical Imagination

‘HOT ISSUE’ PAPER – CRITICAL REVIEW PAPER: EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION In this Critical Review, Richard Ek and Mekonnen Tesfahuney depart from and extend their earlier work on the need to take the tourist seriously as a philosophical figure. Following Peter Sloterdijk’s work, they argue that tourism studies must address the question of what it means to be a tourist in the digital age anew. There is a need for both ontological and epistemological revaluations of the tourist subject’s condition of ‘being in the world’. The Critical Review deliberates on the tourist subject in this new, digital age from two distinctive philosophical directions, each crafting new research trajectories, but both converging on the question of ‘being’, or meaningful existence. It thus moves away from earlier uses of existentialist and phenomenological theory in tourism analysis, which posited embodiment as a precondition for tourism mobility. (Reviews Editor Introduction)