Auto-Mobile Ethnography to unveil destination images in tourism live-streaming netnography

In a culture obsessed with nowness, live-streaming is the dominant content format, expected to continue expanding in the upcoming decade (Lin et al., 2022). Particularly, tourism live-streaming, featuring travel live streamers (TLS) creating and sharing real-time destination images while interacting with viewers (Deng et al., 2021), has proven highly successful. Its effectiveness lies in providing extensive and perceived authentic views of destinations (Deng et al., 2021) and in its limited post-transmission availability, encouraging active viewer participation during broadcasts. The success and potential for crafting destination images have fueled the interest of smart tourism research (Zhang et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2022) in exploring the role of tourism live-streaming in the tourist journey. Studies highlight its contribution in the pre-travel phase, as the destination images created in this format inspire viewers to engage in future physical tourism behaviors (Zheng et al., 2022). However, current research lacks an in-depth exploration of the visual and discursive strategies employed to form these inspiring destination images and the specific meanings and motivations they evoke in viewers. This study explores the place-presentation strategies enacted by TLS in constructing destination images in tourism live-streaming and the attached meanings, desires and behaviors elicited in consumers. The researcher conducts a netnography (Kozinets, 2020) in the context of cultural tourism, which extends into an auto-mobile ethnography, as the latter has proven effective for “transient experiences” research (Muskat, 2020). Specifically, she develops real-time investigative and immersive data collection and interaction (Kozinets, 2020). She participates in archeological sites and city tours broadcasted on Twitch (total of 273 hours), engages in messaging with viewers and TLSs, and uses her smartphone to capture screenshots of meaningful moments and comments as they unfold (276.909 comments) and to record audio messages describing her live consumption experience (Muskat, 2020). Preliminary findings reveal that TLS craft destination images through three recursive broadcast segments: (i) the destination’s street-view segment; (ii) the sight-seeing segment; (iii) the dramatization segment. Each segment acts as a trigger of specific meanings and desires. The first nurtures desires for acculturation, the second evokes nostalgia, prompts self-narratives on past travel experiences, and inspires future travels, while the last creates a sense of physical proximity to the TLSs, as if viewers were experiencing the journey alongside them. In this study, the incorporation of auto-mobile ethnography into netnography is pivotal, allowing the integration of the immediate temporality of the lived experience with that of data collection, immersion, and interaction (Kozinets, 2020). This approach enables the researcher to actively participate in the event and crystallize revelatory moments before they dissipate, for subsequent immersion and retrospective analysis. Additionally, it facilitates chronicling these revelatory moments during their fruition, fostering the generation of vivid, clear, detailed, and unfiltered field notes. As a result, this study presents a methodological blueprint, wherein smartphone usage gets integrated in netnography as if it were an intrinsic affordance of the method, to explore nuanced practices and cultural experiences within the evolving landscape of live video formats.