**4. Discussion**

The text says: "Yes, rather than Rio or Ipanema… Cesenatico is much better! @On the Beach

The date of the tweet is coincident with the Olympic games in Brazil. The Italian tourist is spending his vacation in Italy, and a comparison between the most famous Brazilian beach and Cesenatico could be quite daring, so the tone is ironic. Anyway, the immediate attention is oriented to leisure time, at least in a satisfactory way and in a domestic destination. No

Even the following tweet displays a typical way and mood of texting: "Water of the pool is

It helps illustrating the ambiguity of texting and the necessity to interpret the mood and the sense of the sentiment. The green color is usually used for labeling good environmental conditions. In this case, the tone is ironic against the quality of water in Cesenatico that shows the same color of the accidentally polluted swimming pools of Rio de Janeiro Olympic

Only a few other tweets talking about the water conditions have been detected. They are mainly referred to Italy using the same ironic tone for describing the bad quality of the sea or

green because I'm actually in Cesenatico. #Rio2016 #RioOlympics2016."

in Cesenatico."

mention of any environmental issue is detectable.

118 Mobilities, Tourism and Travel Behavior - Contexts and Boundaries

games instead of the usual blue.

the general scarce cleaning of places.

**Figure 2.** Screenshot from Twitter. Public user.

The survey on twittering about "sustainable tourism" in the Adriatic-Ionian region put in light some remarkable findings notwithstanding it was explorative and actually having limitations, due to mainly have analyzed only one social media and a few destinations.

The use of Twitter as a source of credible information is confirmed as problematic [31]. It was impossible to avoid disturbances and white noise affecting terms such as "split" and "Riviera delle Palme." This latter is the alternative name both for the beaches of San Benedetto del Tronto in the Marche region and of part of the western coast of Liguria, situated in Northern Italy. Further, the term "sanbendetto," may be referred both to the place in the Marche and to Benedict, a very important and all over Italy venerated saint. Anyway, it is possible to consider both of them as capable of inducing a weak disturbance because the detected quantity was very limited. On the contrary, the search keyword "split" caused the necessity to use the "#split" (with hashtag) in order to avoid confusion with both the English word and the movie *Split* featured in 2016.

The research confirmed some preceding findings on the use of Twitter for scientific purposes [31]. Namely, information retrievable from this kind of new media to be useful should be compared with a solid knowledge of the geographical area and the specific social media topic. Considering all things, the research highlights that tourists have mainly used Twitter as a sort of stage where they can show their presence in a resort to a large audience. They were evidently interested in showing their leisure performances. It appears that the environmental characteristics of places are a tacit and obvious prerequisite for being an attractive seaside resort. Then, they do not make any narrative about them. On the contrary, when tourists perceive a bad environmental condition, they voice opinions by texting, but frequently using an ironic tone. In general, the concept of sustainability is treated in a very cursory way, being very distant from scientific approach and definitions.

In the theoretic section, a particular point was stressed discussing if policy analysts and researchers could assist policymakers extracting useful knowledge from the complexity of real life. In fact, policymakers do need to make governing choices by tempering complex scientific issues with common sense and popular perception of reality. Twitter is a web tool largely used by people for communicating theirideas. Policymakers could use it both for communicating and listening to opinions of people spread through the web. It could be properly and more usefully used even about the delicate but fundamental issue of sustainable tourism. Obviously, political institutions may have used other social media rather than Twitter, and any finding of the research should be tested in alternative contexts. Notwithstanding this limitation, the research did confirm the very substantial problem posed by Derrida [20] on textuality of ideas and concepts.

Even in the narrow analytical space of Twitter texting, a distance between "scientific," "political," and "popular" approach to the definition of sustainable tourism is confirmed.

In its reality, the perception of sustainable tourism may be plural, depending on the language and the grammar of very different discourses. There is a specific discourse for any of different circles, those of researchers, policymakers, and the common people on vacation. These latter speak about environmental problems only when occasionally must face them.

This finding should not be underrated for any future research, ever beyond the strict area of web content analysis.

In responding to the posed research questions, from the case study, it appears that users of tourist services and destinations do tweet for talking about any destination referring to some self-evident qualifications such as being the resort "on the sea" and "having a sunny beach." Detected texts are quite all oriented to narrate the leisure aspects of the singular destinations rather than their environment and sustainability. The fact that environmental features seem to be tacit and given by twittering tourists, should be considered not as a scarce attention to the environment, but in the context of a popular discourse. People are neither scientists nor policymakers but do have cogent opinions. It is important to underline that no differences emerged between the Italian and Croatian coasts.

Then, it is quite evident that public bodies use Twitter neitherto promote theirinstitutional activities nor for web listening to extract useful knowledge, notwithstanding they have social media accounts. In this condition, co-creation seems to be an item far from reality and "sustainable tourism," an expression indicating a per se evident feature, not necessitating a more committed attention. This is not a good thing because co-creation for giving sense to sustainable tourism has the necessity to use a common discourse to be capable of producing an effective behavior.

It should be lastly stressed that the main limit of the research consists in having only Twitter being used and not also Instagram or Facebook, and other social media actually used by companies, tourists, and public bodies for their different purposes.
