Edinburgh has been the birthplace, home, and hangout of several significant literary figures. This literary heritage augments city life materially (in the form of monuments, statues, plaques, museum exhibits, and venues) and intersubjectively (in the shape of perceptions and understandings about it). Since the early 2000s, Edinburgh’s relationship to J.K. Rowling (JKR) — and especially the Harry Potter (HP) book series which she imagined and wrote while residing there — has become an increasingly notable aspect of the city’s cultural landscape.
It becomes apparent when researching Edinburgh online and walking through its streets that this touristic scene has developed in ways which are distinct from the ways that other literary tourisms have materialised and unfolded here. For example, in addition to there being “writing locations” and “places of inspiration”, there are also a few HP-themed shops, bars, comedy performances, and even escape rooms. Additionally, since 2020, when this tourism scene became indirectly implicated in the “culture wars” and feminist politics related to transgender issues due to JKR expressing anti-trans sentiments to her millions of followers on Twitter, organisations operating in this scene have had to grapple with these politics, and in some cases have experienced backlash from “JKR fans” when they have come out against the author’s values and politics.
Based on three years (2018–2021) of digital, ethnographic research conducted in Edinburgh, I suggest that one entry point for understanding how HP tourism (HPT) came to be what it is presently is attending to the ways that its development occurs with the locative platform, TripAdvisor. This genre of digital platform — like travel agencies and guidebooks of previous epochs — creates the conditions in which people can travel, imagine travel, stay in, navigate places, and enjoy the experience. Additionally, and as this article will illustrate, TripAdvisor creates the conditions in which practitioners bring their touristic services into being and make a place for themselves and tourists within landscapes across the world.
To forge an alternative account of touristic development beyond the constructivist accounts which dominate this genre,1Edward H. Huujibens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, “Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities”, Tourist Studies 19,3 (2019): 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797619832307; Adrian Franklin, Tourism: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2003 this article embodies a non-structuralist approach which borrows from the “sociology of orderings.”2Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering (London: Sage Publications, 2001 An orderings approach privileges attention to human interventions, providing an ontology for considering the significance of key individuals and organisations, as well as for beginning to think through the relationality of objects and technologies in this context.3Adrian Franklin, “Tourism as an Ordering: Towards a New Ontology of Tourism”, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 277–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328. “Orderings” can be thought of as attempts at control or management,4Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering (London: Sage Publications, 2001). extending beyond sociality to include “documents, codes, texts, architectures, and physical devices.”5John Law, “Ordering and Obduracy”, Centre for Science Studies Lancaster University (2003): 1–14. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/law-ordering-and-obduracy.pdf. The “ordering activities” of both tourists and cultural-economic actors are essential to understanding how HPT unfolds, but this article will focus on the latter and how TripAdvisor facilitates the development and maintenance of touristic capacities, activities, and possibilities in Edinburgh, and very likely beyond.
Harry Potter Tourism as an “Ordering”
2003-2009: The Laying of the Material & Experiential Foundations
Starting in 2003, several material manifestations of the city’s relationship to the best-selling book series of all time6“Best-Selling Book Series of All Time”, Stacker, accessed June 18, 2022, https://stacker.com/stories/3313/best-selling-book-series-all-time. began emerging on the physical surfaces of the city. These included: the cafe where JKR wrote parts of the third book, which implied it was a writing location via its front window display; a black plaque mounted near another venue claiming otherwise in 2006; a hotel transforming the room where JKR finished writing the series into the “J.K. Rowling Suite” in 2008; and Edinburgh City Council casting and displaying JKR’s handprints in the courtyard of City Chambers months later. Additionally, starting in 2009 a few cafes around the city began “poking fun” at these emergences with signs reading something like “J.K. Rowling never wrote here” or “Harry Potter was not written here”.
Most of these material manifestations appeared after Edinburgh was designated as the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature in 2004 and after Edinburgh Castle hosted Bloomsbury’s highly publicised event for the release of the sixth book in 2005. This first event was significant because it inspired the development of a few literary tours that would help tourists more practically locate and observe these features of the city.
The Edinburgh Castle event marked the first time the city gained considerable attention for being the place where the HP series was written. The media coverage of the book launch represented Edinburgh Castle as visually akin to the magical school described in the books, but notably also used language such as “hometown”7Julie Broadfoot, “Potter Magic at Edinburgh Castle”, BBC News, July 16, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4688383.stm. and “birthplace”8“As the world goes Potter-mad for the sixth time, JK brings magic to Edinburgh Castle Midnight bash begins a weekend of events to launch Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince”, The Herald, July 17, 2005, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12485582.as-the-world-goes-potter-mad-for-the-sixth-time-jk-brings-magic-to-edinburgh-castle-midnight-bash-begins-a-weekend-of-events-to-launch-harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince/. to describe the city’s relationship to the series. The circulation of these media representations piqued the interest of HP’s international audience and contributed to the explosion of “Harry Potter Edinburgh”-related search queries during the month of this event, marking when Edinburgh became more so associated with the series on the world stage. Here, the “birthplace” discourse began to circulate more widely and began developing into a semiotic resource which could be drawn upon in the assemblance of Edinburgh’s identity as a literary city, and by extension within the realm of its associated tourisms. For example, starting in 2007 HP-related venues began using this discourse more explicitly within their promotional materials.
Starting in 2008, these HP-related sites and venues began their internet careers via organisation-generated content (including websites and social media profiles) and tourist-generated content (social media content and TripAdvisor reviews), meaning that these features of the city could now be discovered online and used to inform travel. However, whilst there was certainly a growing awareness about Edinburgh’s connection to the HP series during this time, the resources and services which enable visitors to easily locate and comprehend the significance of these HP features were limited. The absence of such resources meant that the practices that are presently associated with HPT were quite laborious to enact and inaccessible to most tourists.
The further development of Edinburgh as a global literary city, and in particular the emergence of more objects accounting for its literary heritage is what enabled visitors to begin observing, understanding, and exploring the city’s association with HP. In this way, Edinburgh’s HPT ordering is the product of this broader ordering of the city’s global identity and public spaces. The initial practice of a HPT of Edinburgh thus depended on the existence of objects for tourists to attend to, adopt the correct manner before, and take sufficient time to see and read, in order to be attentive towards the landscapes they jointly compose.9Adrian Franklin, Tourism: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2003). These objects thus made a HPT of Edinburgh possible by providing the necessary materials for these touristic practices to be performed and developed – although the unfolding of this type of tourism was organisationally disjointed and remained as such until 2012.
2012: The Emergence of the First HP Literary Tour
The further development of Edinburgh’s HPT ordering began in 2012 with the creation of the first HP-specific literary tour, which was pioneered by an Edinburgh University student studying creative writing at the postgraduate level and working part-time as a ghost tour guide. This individual noted how as a fan of HP, he had already been aware of JKR’s biography and her connection to Edinburgh, but that it was during his time working in this role that he began noticing that there were “a few little facts” within the tours he was performing which were “related to Harry Potter”. Additionally, he started becoming privy to how these “little facts” were not only enthusiastically engaged with by tour-takers, but how they additionally tended to inspire further questions at the end of tours about the relationship between the city and the series. These observations motivated him to develop a HP literary tour and assemble the foundations for what would soon become the Potter Trail tour.10Interview with the author, July 29, 2018.
The founder brought this tour into being as a touristic option through extensive research and completing the necessary paperwork, but additionally by developing a website, crafting business profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and creating a “place page” on TripAdvisor. After ensuring the tour was retrievable on the increasingly mobile internet, he turned his efforts towards “getting people to be interested in it” and to “actually come on the tour”. He did this by “standing on the Royal Mile, handing people flyers, telling them about a free walking tour”. He explained how this stage was the “hardest work” because:
You know when you just start out with a tour, it doesn’t matter how great it is, you are starting completely from scratch. People have never heard of you. They might look on TripAdvisor but will see that nobody has recommended us because there won’t be any reviews. There will be no website, or you could make a website, but the website will not be featuring highly on Google’s algorithms. So, very much, the hardest work in promoting it was right at the very beginning.11Interview with the author, July 29, 2018.
This excerpt is telling as it demonstrates how becoming digitally entangled does not, on its own, do much for new businesses and how other, non-digital efforts are essential to their finding an audience initially. Once the founder got people showing up on the tours though, “giving them the best tour [he] could possibly give them”, he began “at the end encouraging them to do things like follow [them] on Facebook, leave reviews on TripAdvisor”, and in particular “explaining how much this helps [the tour]” to stick around.12Interview with the author, July 29, 2018.
After five months of running the tours on his own, the founder trained a couple of his friends from the university as tour guides. During this time, the earlier kinds of promotional practices used became unnecessary to populate their tours. This was largely due to their gaining prestige on TripAdvisor via receiving consistently high reviews from their tour participants. Their digital prestige here not only rendered them increasingly visible and discoverable on TripAdvisor, but also helped to increase the ranking of their broader digital profile within Google’s search ecosystem. In this way, tourist-generated content as it was measured and circulated via the “performative infrastructures”13David Beer, “Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious”, New Media & Society 11, no. 6 (2009): 985–1002. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809336551. of TripAdvisor, eventually created a situation where this tour group was able to stop promoting the tours in person without sacrificing the number of people on their tours each day.
TripAdvisor made a difference14Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). to the life-worlds of members of the Potter Trail Tour by creating a context where their performing affectively compelling tours gave them potential “networking” and “staying” power. This is because TripAdvisor uses both quantitative and qualitative measures of sentiment of customer reviews to rank (and thus make visible and discoverable) “place pages” in its index according to their “affective claim to attention.”15Kath Bassett, “(Digitally entangled) touristic placemaking: Locative media, algorithmic navigation & affective orderings”, PhD thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 2022). However, their tour performances only gain these powers when these affects are translated onto the platform by tour participants. Once mobilised by face-to-face interaction, their TripAdvisor profile could eventually be relied upon to stand in for them in these types of touristic discovery interactions, and act as a “promotional partner.”16Kath Bassett, “(Digitally entangled) touristic placemaking: Locative media, algorithmic navigation & affective orderings”, PhD thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 2022).
The success and persistence of this first HP tour was therefore intimately entangled with TripAdvisor. As John Law notes: “[l]eft to their own devices human actions and words do not spread very far at all […] [o]ther materials, such as texts and technologies, surely form a crucial part of any ordering.”17John Law, Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994). It was thus only by becoming involved with and mobilising other materials — namely digital ones — that this tour group managed to make a place for itself within Edinburgh’s broader tourism landscape.
This success and persistence didn’t just imply a new ordering of the touristic experience of Edinburgh but is also significant in its ordering of the city’s landscape, and especially its adding new HPT objects to it. This included two tombstones in Greyfriars Kirkyard, two buildings visible from this Kirkyard, one underpass by the University, and a street with a few specialty shops which inspired Diagon Alley. Notably, and due to the local media attention the Potter Trail received early on,18“Grab your wands and take a trip on Edinburgh’s Harry Potter Trail”, The Scotsman, June 10, 2012, https://www.scotsman.com/news/grab-your-wands-and-take-trip-edinburghs-harry-potter-trail-2472891. as well social media posts from tour participants, their tours also played a part in some of these “places of inspiration” becoming significant and locatable beyond the performance of their tours.19Stephen Wilkie, “Harry Potter fans flock to real life grave of evil Lord Voldermort”, Express, August 30, 2013, https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/425689/Harry-Potter-fans-flock-to-real-life-grave-of-evil-Lord-Voldemort; “Harry Potter fans leave graveside notes in Greyfriars Kirkyard to real-life Voldermort”, Daily Record, August 31, 2013, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/weird-news/harry-potter-fans-leave-graveside-2239646; Nina Strochlic, “Welcome to the most haunted graveyard in the world”, The Daily Beast, October 31, 2013, https://www.thedailybeast.com/welcome-to-the-most-haunted-graveyard-in-the-world-safety-not-guaranteed.
The first HP literary tour was thus an important “ordering project” within the development of Edinburgh’s HPT ordering. While the Potter Trail’s initial “ordering attempt” certainly had “blueprint beginnings” and involved “forms of strategic arranging that [were] intentional”, as this ordering project persisted, it took on a more unbounded and open-ended nature “as the people and things so ordered respond, block, enable, modify, reconfigure, spread, and inspire effects”. Touristic “ordering projects” are not necessarily confined to their intended object, might not continue in the form initially conceived, and can have a range of effects (intended and otherwise). Orderings, then, are pure process.20Adrian Franklin, “Tourism as an Ordering: Towards a New Ontology of Tourism”, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 277–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328.
2017: The Development of a Harry Potter Tourism Scene
For five years the Potter Trail was the only HP-specific literary tour of Edinburgh. This all changed in 2017, which saw the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the first HP book with a number of well-publicised events held across the UK,21Laura Harding, “Harry Potter at 20: Fans celebrate two decades of Hogwarts, witchcraft, and wizardry”, The Independent, June 26, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/harry-potter-20th-anniversary-philosopher-s-stone-published-jk-rowling-bloomsbury-a7808031.html. including Edinburgh.22Gurpreet Narwan, “National Library of Scotland to host exhibition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter book”, The Times, June 21, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-library-of-scotland-to-host-exhibition-to-celebrate-the-20th-anniversary-of-the-first-harry-potter-book-l8xpc29qd. These events inspired several high-profile media outlets23See, for example: Hilary Mitchell, “9 magical places all Harry Potter fans must visit in Edinburgh”, Buzzfeed, February 6, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/magical-places-all-harry-potter-fans-must-visit-in-edinburgh; Charlotte Barbour, “The Ultimate Harry Potter tour of Edinburgh”, The Culture Trip, February 10, 2017, https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/scotland/articles/the-top-6-locations-for-harry-potter-fans-in-edinburgh/; Francesca Street, “Harry Potter Guide to Edinburgh – Follow in J.K. Rowling’s footsteps”, CNN, June 23, 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/edinburgh-harry-potter-guide/index.html; “Harry Potter Trip Edinburgh”, Travel and Leisure, June 25, 2017, https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/harry-potter-trip-edinburgh; Stephanie Wu, “For Harry Potter fans the best way to relive the series is in Edinburgh with a side of Scotch”, Mic, July 26, 2017, https://www.mic.com/articles/182853/for-harry-potter-fans-the-best-way-to-relive-the-series-is-in-edinburgh-with-a-side-of-scotch; Julia Rampen, “Edinburgh in the time of Harry Potter – growing up in a city which became famous for a book”, The New Statesman, June 27, 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/06/edinburgh-time-harry-potter-growing-city-became-famous-book; Mary Coleman, “As a lifelong Harry Potter fan I feel at home in Edinburgh”, Irish Times, June 29, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/as-a-lifelong-harry-potter-fan-i-feel-at-home-in-edinburgh-1.3136724; “8 essential Harry Potter sites in Edinburgh”, Rabbies, February 23, 2017, https://www.rabbies.com/en/blog/8-essential-harry-potter-sites-edinburgh. and travel bloggers24Jessica Norah, “Complete guide to top Harry Potter sites in Edinburgh”, Independent Travel Cats, February 8, 2017, https://independenttravelcats.com/guide-top-harry-potter-sites-in-edinburgh-scotland-jk-rowling/. to assemble guides to Edinburgh’s HP features, some of which use the Google Maps API to help individuals locate these features in the city. These types of resources now enable visitors of the city to self-order and participate in HPT practices independently of a tour guide.
2017 was also when Scotland’s national tourism board decided to leverage its HP film and literary associations for the first time ever.25Philip Gates, “VisitScotland eyes tourism boost by unveiling Scotland’s Storybook Trail, Insider, August 10, 2018, https://www.insider.co.uk/news/visitscotland-scotlands-storybook-trail-potter-13056751. This decision came 16 years after the British Tourist Authority controversially left Scotland out26“Harry Potter and the British Tourism Authority”, UK Parliament Early Day Motions, tabled on December 4, 2001, https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/21304#tab-supporters; “Tourism chiefs under fire for Potter gaffe”, BBC News, November 30, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1684840.stm. of its first HP film tourism campaign27“Harry Potter to weave tourism magic”, BBC News, November 19, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1664005.stm. that was mobilised in 2001 (when the first film adaptation was being teased and released). Almost exactly one year after the 2016 vote to leave the EU (“Brexit”), Visit Scotland finally leveraged Scotland’s HP associations by launching an internet-based “Potterhead” travel itinerary and map (33) in collaboration with a HP “superfan”/YouTube influencer.28“Tessa Netting Potterhead dream trip”, VisitScotland, January 5, 2018, https://www.visitscotland.com/holidays-breaks/scotland-life/tessa-netting-potterhead-dream-trip/. This campaign was successful in terms of creating awareness of Scotland’s connection to the HP franchise,29Tessa Netting, “Harry Potter Things To Do in Real Life in Scotland ft. Brizzy Voice (Part I: Edinburgh)”, YouTube, December 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha4cuYU0gvw; Tessa Netting, “Harry Potter Things To Do in Real Life in Scotland ft. Brizzy Voice (Part II: Jacobite Train)”, YouTube, December 9, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BI3OaZFe1c. and in terms of interpellating individuals to visit these sites.30“Why are tourists flocking to Scotland?”, BBC News, March 16, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-43418122; Louise Glen, “Harry Potter works his magic as visitor numbers increase tenfold to Glenfinnan”, Press and Journal, December 29 2018, https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/highlands/1636072/harry-potter-works-his-magic-as-visitor-numbers-increase-tenfold-to-glenfinnan/.
All these twentieth anniversary happenings are notable because they represented an increase in the digital content being produced, broadcast, and circulated about Edinburgh’s connection to the HP book series, and especially its touristic features accounting for this relationship. They inspired a number of local and extra-local entrepreneurs to develop HP-related offerings within Edinburgh, including more HP literary tours, comedy performances, and other types of “themed venues”. The proliferation of these new touristic services not only brought more attention to Edinburgh as a HPT destination but also increased the “net size and scope”31Adrian Franklin, “Tourism as an Ordering: Towards a New Ontology of Tourism”, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 277–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328. of Edinburgh’s HPT ordering and created a context where visitors now had several options at their disposal for observing the relationship between the city and the popular book series. Together these dynamics added ever-new HP objects to Edinburgh’s cultural landscape and marked the development of a HPT “scene”32Will Straw, “Cultural Scenes”, Loisir et Societe / Society and Leisure 27, no. 2 (2004): 411–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2004.10707657. within the city.
The development of a HPT scene marked a moment where TripAdvisor became not only a means of bringing one’s HP-related offering into being as a touristic option (like I described with the Potter Trail), but also a key site of competition, where one’s organisational “place page” became one of the key materials for staking out a place in the city’s touristic landscape. For established organisations like the Potter Trail, their ranking on TripAdvisor became something that they had to work to preserve to maintain their place in Edinburgh’s tourism landscape. For newcomers, the stakes were even higher, and they had to work to develop a ranking and establish a place for themselves on the platform and in the city.
For both pioneers and newcomers, cultivating and/or maintaining TripAdvisor as a “promotional partner” didn’t only require enrolling tour participants and translating tourist-generated content onto the platform via prompting for reviews at the end of service encounters, but also came to involve engaging with this content and the platform as a more serious “reflexive partner.”33Kath Bassett, “(Digitally entangled) touristic placemaking: Locative media, algorithmic navigation & affective orderings”, PhD thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 2022). For example, for the Potter Trail, customer reviews received during this moment of increased demand and competition helped them reflect on their experiences of performing tours and identify and re-theorise the relationship between the various elements which comprise a “good experience”. In particular, their engagement with negative or ambiguous reviews enabled them to develop a sense of what exactly needed to be orchestrated differently to maintain this good experience, positive evaluation, and ultimately the organisation’s privileged ranking on the platform.
While the Potter Trail engaged with TripAdvisor as a “reflexive partner” for honing their service offerings and performances, newcomers to the HPT scene engaged with the platform differently, and more so to develop their services. For example, many owners/managers associated with newcomer organisations spoke about how they would familiarise themselves with the TripAdvisor reviews of their competitors to identify what they were “doing poorly” and to “distinguish” themselves from those services already in existence. In this way, newcomers tended to use the platform firstly as a market research tool. Additionally, newcomers spoke about how engaging with early TripAdvisor reviews which accumulated about their HP-related offering, were integral to the development of and standardisation of their services.
This type of reflexive interrelationship with TripAdvisor – but now also with Google Maps and AirBnb Experiences – continues to be significant and was particularly important in 2020 when these practitioners were adjusting their services and trying to make them work within the parameters set by the UK government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This socio-technological interrelationship enabled them to tune into and gauge the desires and preferences of domestic tourists, and to mobilise appropriate “pivots” to accommodate them in this new setting, while at the same time maintaining their visibility, discoverability, and attractiveness on these platforms.
TripAdvisor as an “ordering resource”
It becomes evident from tracing the historical development of Edinburgh’s HPT scene as it articulates with TripAdvisor, that this platform and others like it, operate as key ordering resources in two key ways. Firstly, as an ordering resource, TripAdvisor has the capacity to shape tourists’ understanding of and engagement with the cultural-economic landscapes of the destinations visited. Locative platforms may not be how tourists tend to learn about the existence of certain touristic features – here traditional and social media tends to be more powerful when it comes to inspiring travel desires and cultivating specific travel intentions. However, locative platforms are certainly drawn upon more practically to mobilise, enact, and improvise travel itineraries in situ. In this context, customer reviews often act as a resource for validating whether certain touristic sites, services, and venues are worthy of one’s limited time and economic resources.34Edward H. Huujibens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, “Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities”, Tourist Studies 19, no. 3 (2019): 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797619832307. In this way, locative platforms are intimately entangled in the travel performances of visitors, due to how they provide them with “a form of secured environment that delineates a horizon of possibility that frames experience”,35Carlos Barreneche, “Governing the geocoded world: Environmentality and the politics of location platforms”, Convergence 18, no. 3 (2012): 331–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856512442764. ordering how they move across and invest their time, economic, and digital-discursive 36Sharon Zukin, Scarlett Lindeman, and Laurie Hurson, “The omnivore’s neighbourhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentrification”, Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 3 (2017): 459–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540515611203. resources within this environment.
Secondly, TripAdvisor and locative platforms like it shape the visibility, discoverability, and attractiveness of touristic organisations within cultural-economic landscapes. How touristic organisations are represented via customer reviews has very real consequences for whether they are visited or passed over, able to turn a profit or lose money, and ultimately whether they persist or are forced to shut down. These capacities make it important that organisations not only have profiles on the platform, but also that they work to maintain and/or improve their ranking on it. As demonstrated above, exercising agency over their representation on TripAdvisor tends to involve prompting for reviews in service encounters (e.g., enrolling customers and translating their affective experiences onto the platform) and using negative or ambiguous reviews to rethink and reorganise the service encounter in an effort to improve the experience of it, preventing similar evaluations from occurring again, and likewise affecting their ranking on the platform. TripAdvisor thus has the capacity to order touristic working practices and how services are developed and honed over time.
These capacities mean that locative platforms like TripAdvisor become ways to monitor and manage touristic services within the ebbs and flows of globalised popularity, demand, and competition; and allow companies to become or remain relevant within different clusters of cultural-economic activity. As a touristic “ordering resource”, then, locative media platforms have the power to facilitate and direct moments of “urban-digital spectacle”37 Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast, and Carwyn Morris, “Wanghong Urbanism: Towards a New Urban-Digital Spectacle”, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 7, no. 4 (2022). on the ground. This makes locative platforms vital to our understanding of how tourism plays out and develops in different locations. It is thus important that our theorisations attend to how things are assigned “creative capacities”,38Edward H. Huujibens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, “Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities”, Tourist Studies 19, no. 3 (2019): 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797619832307. and how it is not only about who, but what plays a role in touristic development. Here, objects and technologies matter because they too have “qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements”39Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–453. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109. and in being so relationally imbued, participate in touristic ordering in the sense that they “intervene actively to push action in unexpected directions.”40Michael Callon and John Law, “After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society”, The Canadian Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (1997):165–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/3341747. In summary, attending to the “social lives” of locative platforms can help us highlight the emergent, multiple, and materially heterogeneous nature of touristic development in the digital age.
Kath Bassett is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. Their research is broadly concerned with mundane forms of governance and is presently focused on social-locative platforms and algorithmic governmentality in the context of cities, cultural-economic development, and tourism. Their research has been published in Feminist Studies, New Media & Society, and Social Science & Medicine.
Notes
| ↑1 | Edward H. Huujibens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, “Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities”, Tourist Studies 19,3 (2019): 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797619832307; Adrian Franklin, Tourism: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2003 |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering (London: Sage Publications, 2001 |
| ↑3, ↑20, ↑31 | Adrian Franklin, “Tourism as an Ordering: Towards a New Ontology of Tourism”, Tourist Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 277–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328. |
| ↑4 | Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering (London: Sage Publications, 2001). |
| ↑5 | John Law, “Ordering and Obduracy”, Centre for Science Studies Lancaster University (2003): 1–14. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/law-ordering-and-obduracy.pdf. |
| ↑6 | “Best-Selling Book Series of All Time”, Stacker, accessed June 18, 2022, https://stacker.com/stories/3313/best-selling-book-series-all-time. |
| ↑7 | Julie Broadfoot, “Potter Magic at Edinburgh Castle”, BBC News, July 16, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4688383.stm. |
| ↑8 | “As the world goes Potter-mad for the sixth time, JK brings magic to Edinburgh Castle Midnight bash begins a weekend of events to launch Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince”, The Herald, July 17, 2005, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12485582.as-the-world-goes-potter-mad-for-the-sixth-time-jk-brings-magic-to-edinburgh-castle-midnight-bash-begins-a-weekend-of-events-to-launch-harry-potter-and-the-half-blood-prince/. |
| ↑9 | Adrian Franklin, Tourism: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 2003). |
| ↑10, ↑11, ↑12 | Interview with the author, July 29, 2018. |
| ↑13 | David Beer, “Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious”, New Media & Society 11, no. 6 (2009): 985–1002. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809336551. |
| ↑14 | Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). |
| ↑15, ↑16, ↑33 | Kath Bassett, “(Digitally entangled) touristic placemaking: Locative media, algorithmic navigation & affective orderings”, PhD thesis, (University of Edinburgh, 2022). |
| ↑17 | John Law, Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994). |
| ↑18 | “Grab your wands and take a trip on Edinburgh’s Harry Potter Trail”, The Scotsman, June 10, 2012, https://www.scotsman.com/news/grab-your-wands-and-take-trip-edinburghs-harry-potter-trail-2472891. |
| ↑19 | Stephen Wilkie, “Harry Potter fans flock to real life grave of evil Lord Voldermort”, Express, August 30, 2013, https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/425689/Harry-Potter-fans-flock-to-real-life-grave-of-evil-Lord-Voldemort; “Harry Potter fans leave graveside notes in Greyfriars Kirkyard to real-life Voldermort”, Daily Record, August 31, 2013, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/weird-news/harry-potter-fans-leave-graveside-2239646; Nina Strochlic, “Welcome to the most haunted graveyard in the world”, The Daily Beast, October 31, 2013, https://www.thedailybeast.com/welcome-to-the-most-haunted-graveyard-in-the-world-safety-not-guaranteed. |
| ↑21 | Laura Harding, “Harry Potter at 20: Fans celebrate two decades of Hogwarts, witchcraft, and wizardry”, The Independent, June 26, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/harry-potter-20th-anniversary-philosopher-s-stone-published-jk-rowling-bloomsbury-a7808031.html. |
| ↑22 | Gurpreet Narwan, “National Library of Scotland to host exhibition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter book”, The Times, June 21, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-library-of-scotland-to-host-exhibition-to-celebrate-the-20th-anniversary-of-the-first-harry-potter-book-l8xpc29qd. |
| ↑23 | See, for example: Hilary Mitchell, “9 magical places all Harry Potter fans must visit in Edinburgh”, Buzzfeed, February 6, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/magical-places-all-harry-potter-fans-must-visit-in-edinburgh; Charlotte Barbour, “The Ultimate Harry Potter tour of Edinburgh”, The Culture Trip, February 10, 2017, https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/scotland/articles/the-top-6-locations-for-harry-potter-fans-in-edinburgh/; Francesca Street, “Harry Potter Guide to Edinburgh – Follow in J.K. Rowling’s footsteps”, CNN, June 23, 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/edinburgh-harry-potter-guide/index.html; “Harry Potter Trip Edinburgh”, Travel and Leisure, June 25, 2017, https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/harry-potter-trip-edinburgh; Stephanie Wu, “For Harry Potter fans the best way to relive the series is in Edinburgh with a side of Scotch”, Mic, July 26, 2017, https://www.mic.com/articles/182853/for-harry-potter-fans-the-best-way-to-relive-the-series-is-in-edinburgh-with-a-side-of-scotch; Julia Rampen, “Edinburgh in the time of Harry Potter – growing up in a city which became famous for a book”, The New Statesman, June 27, 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/06/edinburgh-time-harry-potter-growing-city-became-famous-book; Mary Coleman, “As a lifelong Harry Potter fan I feel at home in Edinburgh”, Irish Times, June 29, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/as-a-lifelong-harry-potter-fan-i-feel-at-home-in-edinburgh-1.3136724; “8 essential Harry Potter sites in Edinburgh”, Rabbies, February 23, 2017, https://www.rabbies.com/en/blog/8-essential-harry-potter-sites-edinburgh. |
| ↑24 | Jessica Norah, “Complete guide to top Harry Potter sites in Edinburgh”, Independent Travel Cats, February 8, 2017, https://independenttravelcats.com/guide-top-harry-potter-sites-in-edinburgh-scotland-jk-rowling/. |
| ↑25 | Philip Gates, “VisitScotland eyes tourism boost by unveiling Scotland’s Storybook Trail, Insider, August 10, 2018, https://www.insider.co.uk/news/visitscotland-scotlands-storybook-trail-potter-13056751. |
| ↑26 | “Harry Potter and the British Tourism Authority”, UK Parliament Early Day Motions, tabled on December 4, 2001, https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/21304#tab-supporters; “Tourism chiefs under fire for Potter gaffe”, BBC News, November 30, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1684840.stm. |
| ↑27 | “Harry Potter to weave tourism magic”, BBC News, November 19, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1664005.stm. |
| ↑28 | “Tessa Netting Potterhead dream trip”, VisitScotland, January 5, 2018, https://www.visitscotland.com/holidays-breaks/scotland-life/tessa-netting-potterhead-dream-trip/. |
| ↑29 | Tessa Netting, “Harry Potter Things To Do in Real Life in Scotland ft. Brizzy Voice (Part I: Edinburgh)”, YouTube, December 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha4cuYU0gvw; Tessa Netting, “Harry Potter Things To Do in Real Life in Scotland ft. Brizzy Voice (Part II: Jacobite Train)”, YouTube, December 9, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BI3OaZFe1c. |
| ↑30 | “Why are tourists flocking to Scotland?”, BBC News, March 16, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-43418122; Louise Glen, “Harry Potter works his magic as visitor numbers increase tenfold to Glenfinnan”, Press and Journal, December 29 2018, https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/highlands/1636072/harry-potter-works-his-magic-as-visitor-numbers-increase-tenfold-to-glenfinnan/. |
| ↑32 | Will Straw, “Cultural Scenes”, Loisir et Societe / Society and Leisure 27, no. 2 (2004): 411–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2004.10707657. |
| ↑34, ↑38 | Edward H. Huujibens and Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, “Tending to destinations: Conceptualising tourism’s transformative capacities”, Tourist Studies 19, no. 3 (2019): 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797619832307. |
| ↑35 | Carlos Barreneche, “Governing the geocoded world: Environmentality and the politics of location platforms”, Convergence 18, no. 3 (2012): 331–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856512442764. |
| ↑36 | Sharon Zukin, Scarlett Lindeman, and Laurie Hurson, “The omnivore’s neighbourhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentrification”, Journal of Consumer Culture 17, no. 3 (2017): 459–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540515611203. |
| ↑37 | Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast, and Carwyn Morris, “Wanghong Urbanism: Towards a New Urban-Digital Spectacle”, Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 7, no. 4 (2022). |
| ↑39 | Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 445–453. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109. |
| ↑40 | Michael Callon and John Law, “After the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society”, The Canadian Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (1997):165–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/3341747. |
