Negotiating backpacking experience: The role of digital media in a neoliberalizing world

This thesis is about the relationship between the backpacking experience and digital media in the context of neoliberalism. It investigates those backpackers who reject the working conditions and life style imposed on them by the neoliberal system and become backpackers. It explores the dynamics created by digital media in the backpacking experience. Specifically, it aims to understand how digital media transforms the backpacking experience, what tensions, if any, it creates, how they challenge the ideal backpacker image, and how backpackers negotiate these tensions. A qualitative research design is adopted to explore them, and purposive sampling is applied to investigate the research questions. Participants are self-identified backpackers who resign from work or refuse to start working under neoliberal conditions based on competitive, long working hours and individual interest-based mentality. They aim to travel around the world freely by sharing their memoirs and daily life on their YouTube and Instagram accounts. The findings, obtained from videos, pictures, titles, texts, and cover photos on YouTube and Instagram profiles between 2012 and 2023, are analyzed through thematic analysis. Neoliberalism is used as the analytical lens to interpret the thematized data by focusing on the neoliberal subject. The three pillars of the study can be expressed as 1. the experience of being a backpacker, 2. being a prosumer concerning the working principles of YouTube and Instagram, accepted as a part of personalized media economies, and 3. neoliberalism. As a result of the research, the paradoxes of low-budget backpackers who want to stay away from neoliberal working conditions and neoliberal market conditions have been identified, which are located mainly between their purpose to start the journey as a backpacker and the conditions that arise with the integration of digital media to this experience. Accordingly, the main argument of the thesis is that those backpackers who started their journey as a backpacker to resist the neoliberal system are pulled into it by their interaction with the digital media. In conclusion, digital media transforms the backpacking experience, producing paradoxes.