Finding Nemo’s Spaces: Defining and Exploring Transmedia Tourism

This article proposes the concept of transmedia tourism as a term that can account for the ever-increasing intersections between the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 2011), convergence culture (Jenkins 2006) and the tourism sector. Transmedia tourism therefore involves examining the variety of forms of spatialized experiences derived from media properties alongside the myriad ways in which digital media technologies is being incorporated into these practices. The concept arises out of and builds upon critiques of existing terminology for studying media tourism offered by Sue Beeton (2005) and Maria Mansson (2011). Key arguments include exploring the opportunities for world-building offered by different attractions and mapping the intertextual spread of transmedia content into the tourism sector across both virtual and physical spaces and official, unofficial and unsanctioned contexts. These arguments are developed further through a case study of the Disney-Pixar franchise Finding Nemo (Santon and Unkrich, 2003; Stanton, 2016) which addresses how this has spawned spatial experiences and intertextual references across multiple tourism-coded attractions. Arising out of this analysis, suggestions concerning avenues for future research are also identified. These include examining both the relationship between transmedia content flows and mediatization (Couldry 2014) and providing greater discussion of the relationship between copyright negotiation and tourism attractions which make either implicit or explicit references to media iconography. In summary, the article argues that studying transmedia tourism can enable hitherto overlooked issues such as the relationships between world-building, technology, intertextuality and ownership to be better understood in both transmedia and media tourism research