From Foreign to Familiar: Interaction Phases and Mutual Impacts Between Digital Nomads and Local Communities

Digital nomadism is growing, and so is the debate about whether it helps or harms the communities that host it. This paper argues that both sides of that debate are right, because they are describing different phases. Drawing on grounded theory approach to analyse secondary online data sources, we identify three phases of interaction between digital nomads and local communities: exploring, connecting, and immersing. Each phase produces distinct patterns across five dimensions: physical space, social space, technology use, impacts on local communities, and impacts on digital nomads. Technology use, in particular, shifts from logistics and navigation in the exploring phase to community engagement in the connecting phase to embedded personal communication in the immersing phase. The findings extend IT-enabled work literature by centering host communities as active stakeholders and offer a phase-aware framework for platform design and destination governance.