Appified surveillance: TripAdvisor as a site for entextualized surveillant assemblage

Abstract

Locative media in the context of travel apps alter the representations of space. However, locative media technologies, more specifically travel apps, do not neutrally mediate travelscapes. Rather, they produce a complex surveillance apparatus in which users and the interface algorithm interactionally assembled. To this end, the study argues that travel apps stand as assemblage interventions which regulate the accessibility of travelscapes and reconfigure the travel experience of cities. Informed by this, TripAdvisor touristscape is examined and interpreted in the current study as a surveillant assemblage of technology-human entextualization practices. The surveillance system in TripAdvisor draws upon particular dialectic, ordered and operationalized discourses and their entextualized recontextualization/decontextualization in various social contexts. Such de/recontextualization oscillations are accompanied by a process of semiotic change, which in turn, produces dynamically surveilled spaces and regulated travel experiences. The authors outline three surveillance repertoires that are found to be prevalent in their interaction with TripAdvisor: ‘a decorporealized user’, ‘gamifying the travel experience’ and ‘algorithm performative surveillance’. The analytical approach adopted in current study helps in opening discourse studies to the analysis of the travel apps as surveillant apparatus.