The Network of Interest

The tourism site degenerates into a collection of camera angles and a ritual of recreating canonical photographs, essentially becoming a Facebook torch, and thus adopts a similar spiritual structure. Tourism is always an intensification of reality, and therefore can be used as a seismograph for trends that later dominate reality, and on the other hand, to offer alternatives. For example, travel in the past was much longer and included an inner journey, sometimes with a religious or spiritual component that was not strongly anchored in material but in the spirit and culture of the traveler. Therefore, not all journeys were "performances" of the same tourist route, where, as in a concert, the tourist or traveler is measured by their "performance". In contrast, the traveler is a listener - and precisely because of that, also a composer

Where is Alterman's "Wanderer" and where is today's "Tourist"? The world has become an image, that is, a collection of spiritual possibilities that have been sealed off from us (Source)

Everywhere in the world there are beautiful, interesting sights, but only for certain moments and from certain angles. When there is an accumulation of such moments and angles, sometimes from almost every angle and moment, then you have a tourist site. But that's not enough for modern tourism, which is not a pilgrimage but an accumulation of experiences, because you need an accumulation of several strong tourist sites in one place, that is, heavy vertices connected in a dense network to each other, with distances between them not too great.

There can be an amazing but isolated tourist site that no one will visit, and on the other hand, an accumulation of sites inferior to it individually, but which can all be visited together, will appear on the world tourism map. Therefore, tourism is a network, and those who plan it need to understand this, to strengthen both the connections and the focal points in a network perception. And so it is in other areas of human interest today with network attention - and with the network structure of will and interest and a network perception rather than a linear one of reasoning (not a single rope of classical linear causal sequence that "pushes" it from within, but an attraction that stems from several adhesives binding you and a whole fabric that "catches" you). This situation also affects works of art, for example: scenes in series, catchy musical elements in songs on an album, or pages in books. The structure is the victim of the network, and the whole is less important today than the dense network of strong scenes, and this creates fragmentation even in complex works, because the network does not necessarily have a unifying logic beyond the ease of moving from one thing to another.

Therefore, a newspaper can defeat masterpiece literature in the interest it generates. And therefore, tourism development needs to find several sites that have a story, uniqueness, try to rise above the network, so that there is satisfaction of meaning and not just accumulation of experiences. In Israel: Jerusalem and the three Dead Sea sites. Or alternatively, the Sea of Galilee and the religious Galilee (different for Christians and Jews). This is especially important in Israel because the story behind the sites is impressive, not the sites themselves (this is the essence of Judaism), and people come because of the story. The leading list of places in the world: New York, Paris, London, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Japan. The Middle East could also have the potential to be a leader, but political fragmentation unties the connections in the network.