Mobile publics and the social life of travel review websites
This paper explores how the user-review sections of travel planning websites constitutes a new space of interaction for mobile publics. As a torsion of virtual and corporeal mobility, this space opens up exciting potentials for understanding new relations that are emerging between mobility, affect and testimony. Taking the Skytrax website as its empirical lure, the aim of the paper is twofold. First, it considers what travel reviews have the capacity to do and how they perform in multiple ways. By moving beyond understandings that prioritise the representational status of travel reviews, the paper considers how these narratives have an even greater capacity to intervene within the affective realm of life. With this in mind, the paper moves forward to consider how these reviews might be imbricated within, and redraw assemblages of politico-economic power that are contingent on these affective relations. Second, the paper considers how these reviews might also reveal something about the body’s capacity to affect and be affected by the physical event of travel. The final part of the paper addresses this issue by considering the relationship between affect and testimony.