Indonesian travel bloggers : the empowered negotiators

Abstract: Despite aiming for more civic engagement in tourism industry, The Indonesian Tourism Board effort to transform more citizen to become government-version of travel bloggers was faced by a protest since some travel bloggers didn’t feel common values exist. Therefore, this thesis identifies travel blogger’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations by recognizing the transformation process that develops regular bloggers to be travel bloggers in the context of digital participatory culture. This thesis includes travel bloggers who have experienced the transformation until they have become semi-professional and professional travel bloggers who manage to include sponsored contents. Therefore, this thesis critically analyzes the effect of commercialization and the presence of corporate narratives in correlation with travel blogger’s personal storytelling narratives. This thesis manages to find the development of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, the development of challenges to entry and to sustain in the travel blogger’s participatory culture, the enabling factors to be a travel blogger, and sustaining factors to keep on being identified as travel bloggers. Notable finding includes how the commercialization adds financial motivation and competition against new travel bloggers. However, financial issue doesn’t appear as constraining a factor since most travel bloggers have another profession. Taking into account the oligarchic nature of Indonesian digital media industry, this thesis observes how the travel bloggers are able to negotiate the corporate’s interest with their own agenda. Recognizing that this negotiation involves narrative competencies, this thesis includes both written and video elicitation materials to capture the sense of reconfiguration process from the travel bloggers when they are being provided by mainstream tourism narratives. The thesis findings show that travel blogger’s personal storytelling contains authenticity and informal language delivery and is focused on travel and tourism related topic. This storytelling tends to be constructed and planned by the travel bloggers with or without their sponsors.