From the comfort of the couch: An uneasy epistemic journey into digital travel

Abstract

Can we travel without leaving the couch? In this video essay, I reflect in the first person on the multiplicity of possibilities offered by digital travel through late-night wanderings across Wikipedia and Google Maps. Drawing on concepts such as world-traveling, cyborg embodiment, and glitch feminism, I explore how these virtual journeys allow us to move pseudo-anonymously across geographies, histories, and cultures from the immediacy of a screen. At the same time, I argue that these practices can reproduce colonial patterns of consumption and exoticization, reinforced by these neoliberal infrastructures and the algorithmic curation that organizes — and also limits — our trajectories. I further suggest that the absence of real challenges, along with the lack of vulnerability and accountability that distinguishes these experiences from more embodied forms of travel, hinders the possibility of genuine internal transformation for the traveler. Hope, then, lies in momentary interruptions: in glitches, accidental clicks, and moments of friction and disorientation that unsettle the seamless experience of digital movement. These fissures have the potential to disrupt the logic of consumption and open a space for critical reflection.