Consuming and Expressing the “Sound of Music” Culture Among Tourists in Salzburg: A Link Between Immediate and Non Immediate Body Experiences

In this paper, I address the theoretical issue on how experiences mediated by “immediate” corporeal sensations and by communication technology are linked. This issue seems to be crucial to current Sociology which, though, often makes a clear theoretical distinction between immediate (and “real”) experiences and virtual (and somehow distorted) experiences. Also, the classical scholarly work, however still tremendously fruitful, as e.g. the work of Erving Goffman to name only but one who has influenced General Sociology and the Sociology of the body at the same time, does not much refer to media technology, of course. My argument is that the interpretation of sensations should not exclude media communication and, also, that the classical scholarly work (Goffman, Alfred Schütz, Georg Simmel) can be adopted toward that argument. After a brief introduction to this theoretical argumentation, I extensively demonstrate the argument by drawing on qualitative, visual data derived from a project on the perception of the Sound of Music Movie. The project is based on interpreting body performances from tourists traveling to Salzburg and engaging themselves in organized Sound of Music Tours. It shows the “body as a vehicle for the expression and consumption" of a particular culture.