Virtual Pilgrimage: An Irrealist Approach

In this reflective essay I revise the relationship between travel as an embodied secular journey and pilgrimage as a sacred ritual via examinations of websurfing as a form of virtual pilgrimage. My main premise is that virtual travel facilitated by the internet and through various digital platforms and collaborative social media should be considered as a novel secular form of metamovement we can approach as a pilgrimage. This pilgrimage produces multiple versions of reality ("world versions"), both in collaboration with corporate internet design and independently from it. Because such nonembodied secular engagement with other places and cultures produces online "travel" communities, digital pilgrimage prompts us to revisit John Urry's "tourist gaze" thesis and Keith Hollinshead's "worldmaking authority" in a critical fashion. Critical reconsideration of these two influential theses involves a closer inspection of metamovement for its aesthetic parameters, as well as their affording of creative connections between the mind (internalism) and the world (externalism) as a form of travel. Such connections can also assist in the production of conventional tourism mobilities.