Pilgrimage in mediaspace: continuities and transformations

The concept of pilgrimage has a contested history, but this article argues that the Turnerian notion of pilgrimage as a compulsory journey to a focus of shared values remains of fundamental relevance, and is directly applicable to the range of journeys people now make to locations associated with media. After introducing the concept of ‘media pilgrimage’, the article discusses various challenges: first, from the argument that relatively banal journeys to media locations cannot possibly be compared to the intensity of religious pilgrimage; second, from the complexities of making the concept of ‘media pilgrimage’ work in transcultural comparison; and thirdly, from the difficulties of understanding what would continue ‘pilgrimage’ in the online environment of digital media. The article concludes the concept of media pilgrimage remains a useful one, even if its future boundaries are right now particularly uncertain.