Gazing at Italy from the east: A multimodal analysis of Malaysian tourist blogs

This paper investigates Malaysian tourist perceptions about Italy and their crosscultural representations (Hall 2002) through blogs. Bloggers hold a dynamic role in communicating the cultural meanings they build through both tourist texts and images. Therefore, the analysis starts by focusing on the features of blogs as a new digital genre, as they have emerged with the development of the Internet, displaying an intermingling of posts, commentaries and links, thus building a sense of community through interpersonal communication (Garzone 2012). To this purpose, it examines the textual organisation, the participant relationships and the communicative purposes of the tourist blogs taken into account (Orlikowski and Yates 1994; Bhatia 2005; Lemke 2005 and 2009). It looks at the language used to portray Italy, together with its semiotic patterns, in order to identify the image of the land, beliefs, ideas and impressions inherent in the relationship between the Malaysian tourist and the destination itself. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of the perception of authenticity.