Department of Geography
San Diego State University
An Internet Home Page for Catalina Island, California enables interested participants to navigate through detailed and tangential information and images representing the island's cultural history, natural resources, recreational attractions and a developing GIS. The implications of joining GIS and tourism on the Internet are complex. It is possible now to virtually tour Catalina Island without leaving home. Will this virtual experience replace first-hand knowledge? Perhaps, instead, the images will entice more tourists to Catalina Island. Could the Internet be used to educate and help protect natural resources? Could this be considered a new form of conservation? The problem with questions like these is that they do not deal with the fiction that is, and always has been, Catalina Island. A different story emerges when we consider that GIS and virtual tourism may be used to perpetuate a form of place control that began on Catalina Island over one hundred years ago. What the tourist images of Catalina Island mask is an implicit control of space described in an interesting dance of contrast and contradictions between aesthetics and politics.
Changes in resource access and land-use on Catalina Island over the last one hundred years suggests a political ecology which can be interpreted through tourist images, and the most recent gambit in this ongoing demarcation and control of territory is an interactive GIS. The idea of creating virtual tourism is a second important aspect of the Catalina Island Home Page. With this research project, we speculate upon how GIS is used to define natural resources, conservation, and access in the creation of a tourist place. We draw on studies about the creation of postmodern landscapes (Urry 1990), tourism as imperialism (Smith 1989), the development of ecotourism and the creation of "nature" (Whelan 1991), and our own past work on GIS, representation and policy making (Aitken and Rushton 1993; Aitken and Michel 1994). Our intent is to link ideas on tourism, nature, visual aesthetics and the control of images with the policy implications of interactive GIS for tourist destinations such as Catalina Island.
By tracing the political control of representations on Catalina Island and how this relates to land use and development decisions, it is clear that the GIS can maintain precisely the normative ideas on conservation and preservation that Wrigley established when he bought the island in 1919. William Wrigley Jr. of Wrigley's chewing gum, purchased the island site unseen and is attributed with the remark "My goodness, I thought it was flat" when he first sailed into Avalon Harbor. Wrigley proceeded to create a Catalina that matched his vision and his empire, by literally and figuratively molding the landscape into a shape that he could control. The Santa Catalina Island Conservancy continues many aspects of Wrigley's mission. It seems to us that GIS technology is enabling the creation of information and landscapes which conform to certain ideas of how nature is constituted and how tourists and residents, insiders and outsiders, wealthy and poor should relate to nature.
Some of our earlier work noted the complexity within which policy decisions are made, and how GIS technology can contextualise those decisions (Aitken and Rushton 1993). Left unconsidered in that work was the power of representation and modes of visualisation in actually creating places. As John Pickles (1995, 9) points out, the emergence of spatial digital data, computer graphic representations, and virtual reality creates an intertextuality that directs attention to the multiple fragments, multiple views, and layers that are assembled under new laws of ordering and re-ordering. Pickles looks forward to the development of a global village on Internet which supports both the access to information and a format for dialogue so that counter-hegemonic social action is encouraged. Our analysis of the images of Catalina Island and the development of the Conservancy's GIS suggest that the exact opposite could happen. It seems that GIS technology, with its propensity for cyborg (Haraway 1991) and Archimedian (Gregory 1994) views, might enable a particular form of imperialism to be perpetuated whereby the "real" tourist experience is available only for those who can afford it while everyone else (including residents of Catalina Island) must make do with virtual tourism.
As part of this research, we analyzed images and maps of Catalina Island over the last one hundred years. We became involved with the Catalina Conservancy to discuss the possibility of creating new tourist maps and a GIS that incorporated a ground-based insider's view (such as 3-D hiking maps). During this process we realized that a certain image of tourist and 'nature' was conflated with a need, by the Conservancy, to create the 'real' Catalina Island. The mission of the Conservancy is, after all, "... to preserve and restore Catalina to its natural state" (Conservancy Times 1994).
At the same time we were exploring the possibilities of virtual tourism with the Conservancy, the first GIS related map appeared as part of an advertisement for Jeep eco-tours of the island. The images in the advertisement (produced on pulp paper) together form a juxtaposition of the Conservancy map, the notion of ecotourism, and a Jeep cruising through nature. Apparently, behind locked gates lies "an island paradise ... isolated coves and pristine beaches" that are made accessible to anyone who can afford $795 per day. A "naturalist-trained" driver safely transports you to places off the map (hidden behind a password on the GIS?).
Thus far, our project is an analysis of past tourist images of Catalina Island using postmodern and socio-semiotic theory that notes how the developing GIS systems seem to justify the old (imperial) social practices in new ways (cf. Pickles 1995). The project continues with a consideration of how social and spatial justice may change with the development of what Pickles calls "informatics." We are not optimistic that a global information system constituted in the form of the Catalina Island Home Page enables any form of contestation which can produce "counterhegemonic social action." If anything, the Catalina Island example suggests that old imperial codes are patched up and presented in more palatable forms. As we noted in earlier work, if contestation is important within GIS and policy-making, then we must move away from consensus building models such as Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action (Aitken and Michel 1994). What we feel needs to be considered more fully in order to realize Pickles' optimism is a model of justice which accommodates difference with new ideas of how community is constituted. We see some possibilities in Iris Marion Young's (1990) ideas of difference and justice because they make explicit the need for contestation between the public and the private, and through spatial scales.
Aitken, S.C. and S. Michel (1995). Who Contrives the 'Real' in GIS?: Geographic Information, Planning and Critical Theory. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems. 22(1), 17-29.
Aitken, S.C. and G. Rushton (1993). Perceptual and Behavioral Theories in Practice. Progress in Human Geography. 17 (3), 378-88.
Gregory, Derek (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Haraway, Donna (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge
Pickles, John (1995) Conclusion: Towards an Economy of Electronic Representation and the Virtual Sign. In J. Pickles (editor) Ground Truth: The Social Implications of GIS, pp. 223-238. New York: Guilford Press.
Smith, V. (1989) Hosts and Guests. Philadelphia: University of Penn. Press
Urry, Jon (1990). The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage.
Whelan, T. (1991). Nature Tourism. Washington DC: Island Press
Young, Iris Marion (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press.