Abstract
The ethnographic research explores the dynamics of Airbnb Online Experiences, a form of experiential online tourism precipitated by COVID-19 and facilitated by Zoom. Through video calling technology, online experiences feature synchronous and omnidirectional viewing of participants, hosts, and their at-home surroundings, signaling a shift in host/guest dynamics and expanding the scope of tourism experiences. I present the ethnography through a framework I suggest and term, scope, to discuss what is accessibly viewable in online experiences, the context it provides, and the unseen it makes apparent. Scope conceptually refers to the means and the extent of viewing and is accompanied by a paradox: scope provides enlightening, far-reaching, and magnified vision while simultaneously elucidating a curious blindness to that which exists outside of it. Video calling technology as a scopic technology in the case of online experiences enables expanded visuality (exposure to touristic destinations one is not physically located in and simultaneous access into the intimate spaces of both host and guests) while also making apparent the blind elements of the touristic experience’s digital nature. It does so by revealing only that which is visible within the screen’s frames, leaving that which is left unseen, unknown, and unexplored to the imagination. By framing online experiences through an anthropological lens in the context of emergent online tourism developments, the research expands current knowledge of online tourism activities while contributing to existing scholarship that reconfigures conventional tourism paradigms based in rigid dichotomies (corporeal/noncorporeal, uni/bidirectional host/guest gazing, everyday/extraordinary, virtual/actual, etc.).
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Tourism, Leisure and Change: Transforming People and Places
KEYWORDS
Online Tourism, Scope, Gaze, Tourism Technology, Zoom, Host, Guest, Virtual
