The World's Most Beatiful Village on the Internet

The article describes the high exposure and coverage of social and mass media in a village of Pariangan in Indonesia. In 2016, an online tourism publication reported the village as one of the most beautiful villages globally. This judgment, re-broadcast by local news websites and social media users, drew the attention of villagers and government officials. The government is making plans for large-scale tourism in Pariangan while many people came to visit the village only to get disappointed because the village had few tourist facilities. We used a qualitative approach to assess whether crowd attraction in news and social media resulted both from coverage of the village and differences in the imagination of tourist areas. While the media framed its beauty, villagers thought that not much had actually changed how the media described it. Likewise, tourists visiting the village find a lack of facilities and the tourist attraction they expect to be extraordinary. We conclude that differences in political and economic interests related to traditional claims and authenticity, regional development, cultural and natural conservation, and national interests produced a diverse imagination for tourism.