Manuel Au-Yong-Oliveira, Dina Ramos, Rogelio Flores Jr. and Carlos Costa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6000/1929-7092.2019.08.157

Published: 31 December 2019

Abstract: Online social networks are now an essential part of our interconnected lives. Herein, we analyse whether Facebook influences our travel destination choice. Having performed a literature review, we then followed a mixed methodology, analysing 363 responses to a quantitative and qualitative survey. The respondents were from 22 different countries. Our study focused initially on Facebook, however our research revealed that Facebook users are also very active on other social media. We conclude that we are in a new age, where we need to be more suspicious, as never before has information, including fake news, been so readily available. Other patterns in the data include the triumph of images over words in social media, the importance of decisions related to travel, and the superficiality of social media; finally, Big Tech is here to permanently change society. We will have to be able to get outside our digital bubbles – which means we will have to be able to exit our comfort zones. The codes and patterns identified depended on the researchers’ experience and on what they saw in the data, in a creative, non-mechanistic and inductive process. Thus, some subjectivity is seen to exist.

Keywords: Technology, digital bubbles, fake news, Big Tech, new competences, the suspicious mind.

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