Recent advances in information technology, particularly live streaming, have greatly influenced participants’ digital social experiences. Live streaming has been incorporated into tourism services to enable real-time stakeholder interaction. This phenomenon is known as tourism live streaming (TLS). During TLS, viewers can visit destinations virtually and connect with others outside their own social circles. These activities inform viewers’ experiences as well as their intentions to keep using the platform and make future decisions. 

However, relatively little is known about the social experiences that TLS facilitates. Most of the research on media and tourism has addressed real-time product sharing, and promotion from business and marketing angles when investigating travel products online. This transactional stance assumes that viewers participate in TLS predominately for commercial purposes instead of using it as a social space. Some scholars have nonetheless acknowledged TLS’s technological affordances for participants’ social actions. Viewers and live streamers can use TLS’s technological features to interact. Doing so may foster emotional involvement, relationships, parasocial activities, and feelings of community belonging. 

TLS enables a sociotechnical environment that empowers participants’ interactions and experiences. However, few studies have specified the digital use experiences that TLS offers. Use experience is crucial for users’ experiences and digital decision-making processes. Additional investigations are thus needed to determine the digital use experiences in which viewers engage within this innovative synchronous social media setting. The research aims to explore the user experiences enabled by TLS. This study concentrates on TLS’s ability to enable real-time communication. Three sub-questions apply: (1) What do TLS viewers discuss during social interactions? (2) How do viewers’ emotions change when interacting with other TLS participants, and are there specific topics that trigger emotional connections with others? (3) How do TLS viewers interpret their experiences when interacting with live streamers and other viewers?

Several objectives guide this effort: (1) to identify conversational topics presented in TLS; (2) to examine viewers’ emotional contagion patterns along with TLS live streamers and viewer groups and to discern topics that spur emotional contagion in TLS communities; and (3) to explore viewers’ perceived meanings when engaging in real-time interaction. 

This research took critical realism as a paradigm to answer the research questions. A multi-method design comprising three studies was adopted to examine TLS-enabled usage. Study 1 relied on sociomateriality theory to analyze 400 TLS sessions, identifying six topics of conversation in users’ interactions. Different topics explained viewers’ social freedom and situated TLS as a social space for numerous tasks beyond business. Drawing upon interaction ritual theory, Study 2 scrutinized emotional contagion based on viewers’ emotional interactions using SnowNLP and dynamic time warping (DTW) analysis. Viewers, fellow viewers, and live streamers jointly influenced each other’s emotions. Localized DTW and BERTopic were applied in Study 2 to pinpoint emotionally contagious topics that spurred mutual emotional interactions between streamers and viewers. In Study 3, 40 TLS viewers were interviewed to explore viewers’ interpretations of their use experiences. The perceived meanings of TLS-induced use experiences exemplified the diversity, intensity, adjustment, and self-rewarding attributes of these real-time interactions.

Acknowledgement

This research was conducted in fulfillment of the requirements for my Ph.D. degree.