TripAdvisor as a 'geo-pastoral technology'

If you possess a smartphone and use applications that are functionally bound to location, you are familiar with locative media. This genre of digital platform enables navigation and wayfinding, as well as promotes and rewards exploration. Surprisingly, the touristic significance of this has been sel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Tourism geographies 2024-05, Vol.26 (4), p.672-686
Main Author: Bassett, Kath
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
algorithmic governance
environmentality
Exploration
Genealogy
Governance
Governmentality
hospitality work
Location based services
Locative media
Navigation
Navigation behavior
pastoral power
Smartphones
Social life & customs
Spatial analysis
Technology
Tourism
Tourists
TripAdvisor
Wayfinding
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Summary:If you possess a smartphone and use applications that are functionally bound to location, you are familiar with locative media. This genre of digital platform enables navigation and wayfinding, as well as promotes and rewards exploration. Surprisingly, the touristic significance of this has been seldom investigated. This article unpacks the capacity of TripAdvisor to facilitate and limit spatial exploration by analysing its non-digital antecedents, including travel agencies and guidebooks, attending to the dual governance they enact. It is argued that TripAdvisor acts as a geo-pastoral technology which orders the conduct of spatial subjects - both mobile and mapped - and the environments in which they move about and operate. This Foucauldian-Latourian framework is elaborated with findings from an ethnographic project exploring the social life of TripAdvisor within a literary-inspired touristic scene in Edinburgh, Scotland. In doing so, it positions this concept as a tool for analysing how human social actors become involved with locative media platforms in their efforts to navigate environments characterised by the now mundane dynamics associated with algorithmic governmentality. The modes of governance identified through this genealogy have ontological implications for how we research, teach about, and manage hospitality work, tourism services and geographies in the digital age.
ISSN:1461-6688
1470-1340
DOI:10.1080/14616688.2023.2275734