The same media that serve and reflect the rise of personal preference—movies, television, photography, music, advertising, art, and others—often produce place images, a subject studied by geographers Brian Godfrey and Leo Zonn, among others. Place, portrayer, and medium interact to produce the image, which, in turn, colors our perception of and beliefs about places and regions we have never visited. The focus on place images highlights the role of the collective imagination in the formation and dissolution of culture regions. It also explores the degree to which the image of a region fits the reality on the ground. That is, in imagining a region or place, often certain regional characteristics are stressed, whereas others are ignored (see Subject to Debate).
The images may be inaccurate or misleading, but they nevertheless create a world in our minds that has an array of unique places and place meanings. Our decisions about tourism and migration can be influenced by these images. For example, through the media, Hawaii has become in the American mind a sort of earthly paradise peopled by scantily clad, eternally happy, invariably good-looking natives who live in a setting of unparalleled natural beauty and idyllic climate. People have always formed images of faraway places. Through the interworkings of popular culture, these images proliferate and become more vivid, if not more accurate.
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