The Gone Tour Guide: Online Performance, Digital Work, and Spatial Negotiation of Travel Live Streamers in the Digital Economy Era

Despite the global recovery of tourism following the pandemic, the tour guide industry continues to face intensified competition, crises, and challenges, particularly the rapid advancements of digital economy and emergent online tour guides. This ethnography investigates travel live streamers who strategically blur their professional identities to orchestrate hybrid digital performances. Through multi-sited participant observation, hybrid ethnography, and interviews with three representative streamers, this paper analyzes their streaming practices, labor motivations, and meaning-making strategies. The findings critically shed light on the theories of ‘digital labor’ and ‘digital work,’ suggesting that the ‘gone tour guides’ not only redefine the tourism service paradigms and enhance destination experiences but also enrich e-commerce ecosystem and construct meanings of place. This study exemplifies the technosocial co-production of digital spaces, a negotiated interplay between algorithmic and symbolic meaning systems that extends the boundaries of cultural mediation.