Indonesian Online Tourism Promotion: a Rhetorical and Discoursal Look

The new media offer a much wider opportunity for international recognition including the promotion of tourism destination in Indonesia. This study aims at exploring the ways tourist destinations in Central Java, Indonesia are promoted on the website done by five different online promotion developers. There were 20 online promotional texts scrutinized to see their typical characteristics using theories of Critical Discourse Analysis proposed by Dijk (1998) and Kress (2010). The research findings reveal that generally the online promotional texts were constructed as descriptive genres most of which were composed in simple and compound sentences. There were relatively limited numbers of complex sentences employed. The mental model of the texts typically shows a great concern to the history, philosophy, cultural myth and geographical location of the tourist destinations under discussion. Typical use of imperatives commonly found in advertisements seems to be hardly available. Likewise, rhetorical questions that function to engage readers are unlikely existing in the online promotion of tourist destination of Central Java developed by the Indonesian government and other private agents. In contrast, the online promotion of tourist destination of more developed institutions like the Singaporean and Malaysian government makes use of recount genre that functions as a testimony. For a thicker description of findings, in-depth interviews with English speaking tourists were also conducted.