TikTok, Tourism and the new New Media
Dr. Rahul Dass
Assistant Professor, Bennett University, Greater Noida
The Indian tourism industry seems to be out of breath as it tries to catch up with the emerging trends on the new social media platforms. TikTok, which was born just two years back, has taken the online world by storm, with India alone having an estimated 200 million users, of whom 120 million are said to be active users. Now, juxtapose these gargantuan numbers with the tourism industry’s engagement with this new New Media.
Kerala tourism, which showed the initiative to join TikTok in June this year, has 12.4K followers and has got barely 14 videos. God’s Own Country seems to be languishing. Another popular Indian tourist destination, the state of Rajasthan, which is the land of forts and valor, is yet to get on to TikTok. Common people are there to showcase Rajasthan, but they are not doing well. The tourism of Kashmir, described as heaven on earth, too is missing for all practical purposes from TikTok, which is now the world’s no.1 app. Some efforts to be on the app have fetched zero results.
This paper explores how tourism in the online media has moved away from the professionals, who shot stunning photographs and videos through their expensive cameras and video recorders, to the ordinary people who now shoot what they see on ordinary mobile phones. Communication is now taking place through the hand-held mobile devices and the tourism departments of the different state governments do not seem to be nimble enough to catch up with this new trend.
Keywords: TikTok, User Generated Content, New Media, Tourism.
The above paper is presented at National Media Management Conference on Communicating Tourism: Media, Soft Power, and Management powered by In-Depth Communication.
16 November 2019 | St. Xavier’s College, Kothavara, Vaikom, Kerala
All abstracts have been published in conference souvenir with ISBN 978-1-647337-82-7