Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Digital Travel.

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social NetworkingAhead of Print Free AccessGuest Editorial: Special Issue on Digital TravelJohn A. Waterworth and Ingvar TjostheimJohn A. WaterworthDepartment of Informatics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden.Search for more papers by this author and Ingvar TjostheimHauge School of Management, NLA, Oslo, Norway.Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo, Norway.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:30 Aug 2023https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2023.29291.editorialAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Travel means a lot to a great many people. Over the last half century, there has been a steady growth in the numbers of international travelers, from around 166 million in 1970 to 1.47 billion in 2019. People look forward to and enjoy traveling, especially abroad, for the varied experiences it can bring. Vacations may be seen as relaxing or exciting, comforting or educational, physically engaging and/or artistically stimulating, or just a change from everyday life. The restrictions that came with the COVID-19 pandemic led to a billion fewer people traveling internationally in 2020 compared to 2019.1 There were also noticeable changes in attitudes toward the idea of replacing physical encounters with digital ones, both to visit other places and, especially, for organized meetings between people for specific purposes.2,3Most people have explored distant places by digital means. Many have used Google Maps, Google Street View, or Google Earth to check out various places, such as hotel locations, friends' residences, or routes for possible excursions. Microsoft Flight Simulator allows the whole world to be viewed from the cockpit of a virtual aircraft. With these kinds of applications, one can freely explore almost anywhere in the world—or at least those parts of the world captured by Google cameras or modeled in 3D. But the worlds in these applications are not dynamic, and there are no other people there. A vast number of immersive games (many of which are well known, such as Doom and The Witcher series) provide vivid experiences of other places, actual or fictional, in which players can interact and communicate with others, both actual people and/or active bots. When we interact with others in a digital place, it is as if we are there, with these people, not here in our own room in front of a games console.From a digital tourism perspective, there are many digital places to visit as a pretrial of actual places we are considering, such as hotels, historical sites, beauty spots, museums, and art galleries, before deciding where to travel, stay, and visit. But we can also take “virtual vacations” of varying duration and degrees of sophistication, realism, and cost. For example, there are websites that can reproduce the sights and sounds of walking down a famous street, taking a specific train journey, or flying into a famous city. Most but not all are prerecorded and with limited interactivity. There are also vast numbers of webcams around the world, in famous places and in many other locations. We get a real-time view and can, in some cases, control the distant camera to some extent. Generally, not much of significance is happening, although this can be part of the attraction. Other more eventful real-time video services have attracted quite a lot of interest and, in some cases, revenue. Sports events, plays, and concerts are often offered for free as a basic version with adverts and also as a premium version at a price.Years ago, Meyrowitz4 presciently commented on how modern communication media do not convey a sense of place—one that would frame the social behaviors of the people interacting there. Edward Relph, author of the seminal text Place and Placelessness,5 has more recently highlighted the widespread “digital disorientation” produced networked communication media.6 Virtual visits to museums, concerts, and other distant venues are more common, but the extent to which they produce a real sense of place in visitors is still limited. Using social media or in Zoom meetings, people have what are apparently face-to-face encounters, but the participants are in different physical places and so do not share a realistic experience of being together, in the same place. Social interaction norms are sometimes violated, and often left unsatisfied, by online encounters.7Despite limitations in the way digital travel is currently realized, more and more encounters with other people and, to a lesser but significant extent, other places are already digital. Meeting applications such as Zoom and Teams are the most obvious, albeit that they are very weak examples of digital travel, since almost no sense of traveling is experienced by participants. Many people enjoy computer games that take them to sometimes very realistic 3D places, which may be fictional, fantasy, or actual places. In addition to the public health benefits of reduced physical travel, these changes have had a positive environmental impact by lowering the consumption of fossil fuels, especially by cars and planes. Since the end of pandemic restrictions, there has been a partial “bounce back” in numbers of international tourists. Current forms of digital travel do not fully match the psychosocial appeal of physical travel.8 The key question behind all the papers selected for publication in this special issue is: How can digital travel be improved to meet the psychosocial needs of participants better so that its areas of acceptable and beneficial use are expanded?The first research paper, by Eric Mao et al., examines how the novelty and camera angle of short videos of a travel destination may influence people's intentions to visit that place in the future. It was found that novelty increased positive surprise and, indirectly, intention to visit. A more direct increase in intention to visit was found for the use of first-person versus third-person camera angles, confirming the importance of immersion for the effectiveness of digital travel as a pretaste of future travel.Next, Christopher Ball focuses on nature virtual reality (VR) and was clearly motivated by the potential environmental benefits of digital travel. Nature-based tourism is known to have psychological benefits but is generally damaging for the environment. Nature-based VR tourism is therefore a promising alternative that can also be a vehicle for improving attitudes to nature conservation. Although the difference between VR and less immersive television presentations of nature was not significant, the author found that spatial presence and narrative engagement had a mediating role on the measured environmental outcome variables.The paper by Trey Asbury addresses the key issue of how to meet the needs of mental health clients when in-person counseling and psychotherapy are unavailable or restricted, as was the case during the period of travel restrictions, which we should not forget may well return at times in the future. Replacing physical therapeutic meetings with digital substitutes can provide a satisfactory or even improved service due to increased physical and financial availability of consultations.The final research paper in this special issue, by Ze-Min Liu, is important for considering the roles of both sense of place and presence for emotional improvement during a digital travel experience. The results indicated that the more individuals experienced presence and sense of place during their digital travel, the better was their digital travel experience and greater their emotional improvement.Taken together, these articles make an important contribution to knowledge of the ways in which digital travel can best be designed and applied to enhance the lives and experiences of the “digital travelers” of the future.References1. Statistica, https://www.statista.com/statistics/209334 (accessed July 5, 2023). Google Scholar2. Sarkady D, Neuburger L, Egger R. (2021) Virtual reality as a travel substitution tool during COVID-19. In Wörndl WKoo CStienmetz JL, eds. Information and communication technologies in tourism. Cham: Springer, pp. 452–463. Google Scholar3. Tudor C. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global web and video conferencing SaaS market. Electronics 2022; 11:2633. Crossref, Google Scholar4. Meyrowitz J. (1985) No sense of place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar5. Relph E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion. Google Scholar6. Relph E. Digital disorientation and place. Memory Studies 2021; 14:572–577. Crossref, Google Scholar7. Bailenson JN. Nonverbal overload: a theoretical argument for the causes of Zoom fatigue. Technology, Mind, & Behavior 2021; 2. Google Scholar8. Tjostheim I, Waterworth JA. (2022) The psychosocial reality of digital travel: being in virtual places. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. Crossref, Google ScholarFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 0Issue 0 InformationCopyright 2023, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:John A. Waterworth and Ingvar Tjostheim.Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Digital Travel.Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.ahead of printhttp://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2023.29291.editorialOnline Ahead of Print:August 30, 2023PDF download