Turning It Off: Emotions in Digital-Free Travel

Abstract

This article aims to theorize digitally disconnected travel experiences by investigating various emotional responses during the process of withdrawal and regain of technological affordances. The theoretical concepts of affordance and emotional episodes were adopted in this study to create a conceptual framework. Fifteen diaries and 18 interviews were collected from 24 participants’ reflections of their disconnected experiences. This study thus contributes a contextual update of emotional episodes by providing a detailed account of various emotions in the entire disconnecting/reconnecting travel experience. Also, this study contributes to the affordance literature by exploring the fluidity of technology affordances and environmental affordances. This article develops the Disconnected Emotions Model (DEM), a theoretical framework to provide an understanding of the changing relationship between human emotions and material affordances.