THE MEDIATIZED RESIDENT–TOURIST EXCHANGE: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF RESIDENT PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL-MEDIA-DRIVEN TOURISM IN HUNZA, PAKISTAN

Abstract

Hunza, a high-mountain valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, has become one of South Asia's most visually circulated tourism destinations, its terraced orchards, glacial peaks, and heritage forts propagated less through conventional destination marketing than through an unbroken stream of Instagram reels, YouTube vlogs, and TikTok clips produced by visitors, influencers, and residents alike. A growing body of research treats Hunza as a case of local-economy benefit or environmental strain, and a parallel literature treats social media as a driver of destination image and overtourism elsewhere, yet few studies ask how the residents who live inside this heightened visibility make sense of it themselves. Drawing on social exchange theory, Doxey's Irridex, and the concept of the mediatization of tourism, this qualitative study investigates how Hunza residents perceive, narrate, and respond to social-media-driven tourism growth. Analysis of 27 in-depth interviews and three focus group discussions reveals four themes: (1) the compression of visitation cycles and the emergence of "check-box tourism"; (2) the uneven distribution of economic benefits across differently positioned residents; (3) environmental and cultural costs experienced as a form of dispossession; and (4) residents' ambivalent agency and their expressed desire for locally embedded governance. The findings suggest that social media does not merely add new costs and benefits to the resident–tourist exchange but fundamentally alters the terms of that exchange, producing what this paper terms a mediatized resident–tourist exchange characterised by temporal compression, representational contestation, material consequence, and uneven experience. Implications for sustainable destination governance in Gilgit-Baltistan and comparable "Instagram-famous" destinations are discussed.