Lake Turkana. Image via
We have all watched movies and television series such as CSI that are made to associate with a certain country or region. According to a paper by Nikolaos Vagionis and Maria Loumioti (Movies as a tool of modern tourist marketing), the image we construct for a country is often the sentimental image that has been created in our minds from narrations of other persons, from books and, to a large extent, from watching films that have been shot in the country or region. Film tourism has been termed as the tourism that is generated as a result of the appearance of a destination or attraction in the cinema, video or television (Hudson and Ritchie 2006).
It has been suggested that people often choose their tourist destinations depending on what they have seen at popular audio visual means like television and cinema. Butler (1990) suggests that as lately people read less, anything appearing in films and in television penetrates easier into society.
With the onset of the county governments and the need for such to market themselves is the use of county based content a viable solution. This could be used both as a source of local content and a means of marketing so as to attract tourists or gain investment as each county contains their own beauties and attractions.
Issue would be that this would promote a stereotype view of certain regions or people and this might be seen as a negative to the use of such content but it all depends on what side of the coin such content is viewed. It is true that certain regions and people may be associated with certain aspects but this could be seen as a positive and be used to promote the cultures of those regions.
At a meeting to discuss the impact of using ICT, art, culture and sport organized by Tunaweza, the question was passed to the audience as to why we have never exploited having the cradle of mankind in Turkana as a tourist attraction. Is it the work of the county government to promote such existing attractions and gain revenue from it and would county based content be the solution?