Disconnect to reconnect: Digital Detox Holidays around the World

Introduction

The results achieved from the texts analysis highlights the position of the word “detox” in the scatterplot while the ones from Amazon show a huge quantity of self-help books. This is why we decided to analyse Google results for the query “Digital Detox”, where detox stands for the voluntary abstinence, for a certain amount of time from technologies, as an answer to their still presence and overload in everyday life.

After reading the results, we found three main ideologies around the topic: a group in favour of technology detox (whoever uses Internet should take some time off from it and dedicates more to real life rather than the virtual one), a group totally against detox (detox is useless because Internet is already deeply plugged into our lives) and a group which takes a half-way position between the first ones (Internet should be used only when strictly necessary: through detox is possible to keep away from technology due to a better and more balanced use of it, stress-free and more aware, without being dependent, see the image below).

Once read all the results found, we realised the main part of them were referred to digital detox travels or holidays. We then decided to proceed with a more detailed analysis about the packages offered by the technology-free vacations. We searched on Digital Detox Holidays portal, matching and integrating other results found on Tripadvisor.

How to read the visualization

The circles on the map stand for the locations where digital detox vacations take place. They have different colours: pink ones refers to hotels, red ones to unconventional places such as campings, green ones to ecolodges and blue ones to spas and resorts. The dimensions indicates the price of the holiday: the bigger the more expensive the holiday is, the smaller the cheaper. More information about locations and places are available by scrolling down. The see-through areas can be clicked: they highlight a huge concentrations of no-detox places, giving a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.

How it has been done

The visualisation has been realised starting from a dataset where each location considered has its own ID, the link to its website, the link to its logo and picture, latitude and longitude and the tags corresponding to the price for one night per person. The dataset has been imported on TileMill to position the circles and resize them. The final map has been uploaded on Mapbox and then embedded in the website and added some graphics adjustments.

Findings

From the visualisation emerges a huge condensation of places offering no-technology packages in the USA, in central America, on the Indian Ocean costs and Australia. These places are considered as "paradises" and in the collective imaginary link to a peaceful and relaxed ideology. However, they could be quite expensive holiday destinations and not universally affordable (see the image below).

In parallel with the Amazon results previously observed, the ones obtained from Scholar and Scopus, we gained a complete overview about how the Internet Addiction problematic can be solved or cured: on one side the medical and psychological clinics and on the other the do-it-yourself guides which can be followed by everyone and the tech-free holidays in tropical paradises for the rich ones.

Metadata

Timestamp: 11/12/2014 - 19/12/2014

Data source: Digital Detox Holidays, Tripadvisor

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