Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture (PhD)
Administrative Home Department
Department of Humanities
Advisor 1
Stefka Hristova
Committee Member 1
Richard Canevez
Committee Member 2
Jason Archer
Committee Member 3
Soonkwan Hong
Abstract
Digital media, particularly user-generated online review platforms, play a central role in shaping how tourists imagine and experience cultural heritage in themed environments. Scholars have argued that twenty-first-century tourism emphasizes consumerist appeal over cultural or educational value. My inquiry focuses on the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a resort modeled after ancient Egypt, as a paradigmatic case of hyperreality in postmodern tourism. I interrogate how this tourist destination deploys visual, narrative, and architectural cues to evoke a fantasy version of history, and how tourists, through online reviews, reproduce or contest these representations. I employ Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyperreality, Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural representation, and Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism to analyze how history is aestheticized, distorted, and commodified in the global tourism industry.
I employ critical discourse analysis and content analysis to identify the language and power relations embedded in TripAdvisor reviews, and also to show the thematic patterns in tourists’ narratives. I complement this with visual semiotic analysis of Luxor’s promotional imagery and incorporate autoethnographic reflections from my own visit. This allows for the interrogation of both textual and visual dimensions of the Luxor’s representation to capture the multifaceted nature of tourist meaning-making. While inter-rater reliability testing is applied in coding, computational visualization tools are used to map thematic patterns in the data.
The study foregrounds the interplay of spectacle, commodification, and cultural simulation in shaping tourist imaginaries. It finds that Luxor’s hyperreal spectacle commodifies cultural heritage, effectively transforming ancient Egyptian symbols into an idealized, consumable simulation. The resort’s symbolic architecture and digital narratives construct a simulacrum, an experience that detaches Egyptian icons from their original contexts and repackages them as an exotic spectacle for tourist consumption. To emphasize this dynamic, I introduced the Stages of Simulated Fulfillment, which traces how guests shift from recognizing artificiality to emotional investment; and the Orientalism and Cultural Flattening Matrix, which categorizes reactions from exotic enthusiasm to critical detachment. The study demonstrates how TripAdvisor user reviews and digital interfaces reinforce hyperreal expectations while revealing tensions between imagined fantasy and lived experience. Tourists’ narratives simultaneously celebrate Luxor’s grandeur and expose disillusionment when authenticity falters. These highlight the gap between tourist imaginaries and offer broader insights into the nexus of spectacle, media, and cultural representation in modern tourism.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Akinola, Ayodele James, "Built Simulacra: Digital Media and Cultural Representation of Tourist Imaginaries in Online Reviews of Hotels and Casinos in Las Vegas", Open Access Dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2025.